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Fight me (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/science_memes@mander.xyz
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[–] 61 points 1 year ago (18 children)

If you want to make heat, start up a gaming PC. At least the energy will go to doing something before it gets turned to heat.

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  • [–] 34 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    I legitimately had to buy a heater after I stopped regularly using my desktop because it was what was keeping my room warm.

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  • [–] 35 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    At that point you might as well run Folding@home on your PC just to act as a heater. It's literally a win-win for you and for society.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    It's always been on my mind to find something for my computer to idle on. Never heard of "Folding@home". Thank you I'll try it out.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    You're welcome! Folding@home is the big one, and the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search is also pretty popular (though IMHO a waste of resources for a relatively useless result). But I just looked into this topic myself after posting that comment, and turns out there's a huge list of such "volunteer computing" projects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volunteer_computing_projects

    So while Folding@home is a great one and medical scientific research, you might pick something else from that list. Perhaps more than one!

    Now the confession: I'm a hypocrite. I never ran any of these volunteer computing projects on my own PCs. But that's partly because I tend to shut them off every night, so a lot of the usable time for it isn't really usable. The other part is basically that I never bothered to do it.

    But I think after this conversation reminded me of it, I might look into installing it on my PC!

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago

    I used to do it for SETI@home (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) and a few other projects. Haven’t in a while now but maybe I will again since my server pc never shuts off anyway.

    Back in the day I used boinc or some such to interface, it sort of looked like a torrent page, with progress bars on the tasks and stuff. It was kinda neat having an impact.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    I literally did that one winter when I lived in a small studio and I had a particularly fancy salvaged HP workstation. It was great!

    (Except I was missing an apparently important fan and most of my RAM went bad, 96G out of 128. Make sure your system cooling works correctly before trying this!)

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    I don't have a source handy, but someone attempted to heat their apartment with computers and ended up spending something like >$1000 in utilities that month.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    Resistive heat is expensive - that's why heat pumps are so good.
    In practice, they would have gotten identical results with any electric resistive heater. Fans, oil filled, ceramic, etc. all largely doesn't matter as it is Wh of electricity to Wh of heat.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    They must have overshot, then. Computers are 100% efficient space heaters that produce math as a byproduct.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    in the uk price per kWh for electricity is over five times cost of natural gas. We all use natural gas boilers to heat water which flows through radiators to warm our rooms. Anybody who heats their house with space heaters is just throwing money away whether it's 100% efficient or not.

    You see more heatpumps these days but that's another thing entirely

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

    Heat pumps cap out at about 250% 400% efficiency, so you'd still be spending more to run them than to burn natural gas at that ratio.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Heat pumps easily exceed 2.5 COP. More like 4 in the UK climate. And gas isn't 100% efficient either. But yeah it's a wash or can be more expensive to heat with heat pumps where electricity is really expensive. It helps if we all conveniently ignore externalities like pollution and carbon too.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Thanks for the correction, edited. How is gas not 100% efficient, though?

    But yeah, heat pumps are definitely more environmentally friendly (unless you're habitually letting the refrigerant out, o guess). The real argument is whether the extra energy is worth it for protein folding (I'd say generally no, but if you don't have a heat pump, might as well).

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