e-heat thread in Frugal Group, winter is coming folks!

[NMDemDist2]

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=353&topic_id=279&mesg_id=279

[IDemo]

1. Not at all impressed

Here is my Epinions review of our experience with these. We got a couple of oil-filled electric radiators instead, one for the bedroom and one for the tv/computer room. Much cheaper, and seem to heat much better as well.

[NMDemDist2]

2. they certainly don't give heat on demand but my experience was quite different

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=353&topic_id=279&mesg_id=1435

and my experience with customer service

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=353&topic_id=279&mesg_id=1071

[Greyskye]

3. Our family (including the cat) loves our eheat units

We have 2 - 1 in an add-on bathroom which did not get any ducting run to it, and one in a larger room which has trouble staying warm in the winter. I use the automated controllers to turn the bathroom one on a couple hours before we get up. It does a great job of taking the chill out of the room.

We love the simplicity and efficiency. Be aware that the efficiency is reduced if you mount the units on outside walls.

[Delphinus]

4. The outside walls are the problem.

I don't have a large house, 852 sq.ft., but the inside walls that these need to be mounted upon are not conducive to having the units upon them. Hard to say - even as I'm writing this, I'm looking around wondering why, but it just won't work.

I'd love for it to be November before I turn on the furnace ... one never knows, though, with Indiana weather (especially in light of Global Climate Change).

[skids]

5. If people are going to heat with electricity...

...it would be real nice if someone would make a product to take old CPU chips and run a distributed computing client on them, so at least the electrons do something useful other than go straight to heat. I always cringe at the prospect of turning high quality energy directly to low quality energy.

If a 400-odd watt unit does the trick for some people, that's only like 16 PIII-500Mhz chips, which are e-trash these days.

[IDemo]

6. That's actually an incredibly good idea

I should have thought of that years ago, since my workplace cubicle is always heated to a toasty 78 degrees or warmer by a large rack of PC's and other equipment.

[skids]

7. Yeah numerous geeks heat with PCs already...

...but for those that don't like the fan noise, some custom mainboard with a bunch of slots for old cpus, wireless/hardwire network if, a hypervisor, and the glue logic to get them to all share a bit of ram and load the ram with an OS, a big TEC to get the heat out into the radiator instead of a fan. I'm sure if the hw was made the folding@home or BOINC folks would write the software.

You could do it with GPUs as well on an old mainboard with tons of PCI slots plus a couple AGPs, but that wouldn't fit into that thin wallmount profile. You might be able to find an old 16x SMP mainboard, assuming they made those, and get into that profile with nothing but a custom profile power supply, if you had ethernet onboard or a really shallow wlan card.

[bananas]

10. What about the power supply?

Most power supplies have a fan, too.

[skids]

11. Not all...

...if you look for fanless power supplies you can find them.

Which makes me wonder whether when they build those do they up the quality of the components to limit waste heat, or just slap on a TEC?

[mopinko]

13. that's a pretty cool idea.

you'd want to shut them down over the summer, tho.

[mopinko]

8. i was wondering about the opposite- not heating up the pc

in the first place- we are looking to put up some pv, and it occurs to me that it is pretty stupid to turn it into ac only to turn it back into dc to run all manor of stuff these days. but especially to put heat stress on a computer with your power supply.
anyone know anything about that?

[IDemo]

9. Here's one possible solution ->

http://www.powerstream.com/DC_PC.htm

There will still be heat losses from the regulation of 24V DC to all of the other voltages found in an ATX supply, but you're still avoiding the losses from DC-AC-DC conversion.

[skids]

12. Well, eventually one would hope...

...that they'd stop trying to sell overpowered CPUs to average joes, and instead write decent software so the PCs could duck under the 14W barrier that stands between them and running off Power Over Ethernet. Then you'd convert to 48-53VDC and run ethernet to various things like PCs, appliances, accent lighting, speakers, etc. Bye bye power cord, hello again wired ethernet. You almost always end up converting, though, because only a few things will take the same voltage of your battery banks, and the solar panels will need to be power-point-tracked and converted to the battery voltage level.

Anyway some of the grid tie/backup systems have DC out. And you can get DC power supplies for PCs, but since the telecom industry uses them they are gouger items. Anything they sell us telecom people gets jacked up in price because they know it's usually bought on a corporate budget.

Which is why ethernet-manageable power strips tend to be pricey, too.