- Data center waste heat can be repurposed to provide free home heating
- Heata’s British Gas-backed trial will test using server heat for hot water
- The system reduces energy bills by turning data processing heat into savings
Data centers and supercomputers generate a lot of waste heat, and this could be used to heat homes, for free.
The latest innovation is a British Gas-backed trial from Heata which will test how computing server heat can be recycled to provide free hot water to homes in the UK.
The firm’s system channels heat from intensive data processing directly into a home’s hot water cylinder, cutting energy bills and reducing the need for energy-intensive cooling in traditional data centers. A compute unit attaches to the hot water cylinder, forming part of the Heata network – a ‘virtual data center’ that processes cloud computing workloads while providing free hot water. It does mean you will need a hot water cylinder of course – it can’t be used if you have a Combi Boiler.
Saving families money
“Waste heat is a big problem for data centers, leading to significant energy costs for cooling,” noted Chris Jordan, Co-founder of Heata. “Yet heat is valuable. On the other side of the coin, you have an energy crisis and people struggling to heat their homes. Our unique technology brings those two things together. We’ve created a distributed ‘virtual data center’ where the servers are attached to domestic hot water cylinders, enabling the heat generated by the data processing to be reused to provide free hot water in the home.”
Each unit can supply up to 4kWh of hot water daily, potentially saving households up to £340 per year. British Gas has launched a 10-unit trial in employees’ homes, running its own data processing workloads while providing free hot water as a byproduct.
“Innovative projects like this are another example of how the UK is becoming a leader in cutting carbon emissions,” added Paul Lodwidge, Head of Energy Product & Propositions at British Gas.
“Heata is a true pioneer in the way it has developed a solution that can reuse waste heat and deliver significant cost and carbon savings. We’re proud to be able to support them with this latest trial and will work together to share insights and learnings that will enable the business to scale-up its offering.”
It’s an idea we’ve explored in the past – in 2024, we reported how UK researchers were looking to store excess heat generated by the University of Edinburgh’s Advanced Computing Facility (ACF) in disused mine workings, and then distribute this to households via heat pump technology.
More recently we covered some of the many ways that data center waste heat is being used in projects across Europe.