‘I heat my Essex home with a data center in the shed’

An Essex couple have become the first people in the country to trial a scheme that allows them to heat their home using a data center in their garden shed.

Terrence and Lesley Bridges have seen their energy bills drop dramatically, from £375 a month to just £40, since swapping their gas boiler for a HeatHub, a small data center containing more than 500 computers.

Data centers are banks of computers that perform digital tasks. As computers process data, they generate a lot of heat, which is captured by the oil and then transferred to the bridges’ hot water system.

Bridges, 76, says keeping his two-bedroom bungalow near Braintree warm was a necessity as his wife has spinal stenosis and is in “a lot of pain” in colder weather.

“It’s truly brilliant,” Mr Bridges continues. “I’m delighted to have been chosen to trial this. You can’t fault the heating system – it’s a 100% improvement on what we had before.”

“You don’t need to go to a sauna after coming here,” adds Mrs Bridges, 75.

HeatHub was developed by Thermify and is part of UK Power Networks’ SHIELD project, which aims to find innovative ways for low-income households to transition to net zero.

Through SHIELD, the Bridges also had solar panels and a battery installed, which has contributed to their savings.

Bridges, a retired RAF sergeant, says that despite turning the “heating up quite high to keep it nice and warm”, his bill has been reduced to between £40 and £60 each month.

“I think it’s great because it’s green,” he continues, “we don’t burn any gas, so it’s green, it’s green.”

Thermify co-founder and CEO Travis Theune says Bridges’ HeatHub will eventually be part of a “remote and distributed” data center, involving many units processing data for customers.

While it’s not designed for the heavy processing that artificial intelligence needs, Theune says the system could run things like applications or analyze large volumes of data.

He says the company wanted to design a system that provided “clean” and “affordable” energy because “finding a way to do both was a difficult problem.”

The project is still in the pilot phase, but in the future, customers will pay Thermify to process their data using HeatHubs.

Theune adds that the system provides “clean, green heat at little or no cost” because “the electricity that generates that heat is paid for by someone else.”

The Bridges’ owner, social housing provider Eastlight Community Homes, is also part of SHIELD.

Daniel Greenwood, head of asset management at Eastlight, says he expects 50 homes to get HeatHubs in the next phase of the project, adding: “We have seen excellent results with the current installation and, although this is the first of its kind, we are looking to roll it out more widely.”

Jack McKellar, innovation program director at UK Power Networks, says: “We don’t want anyone to miss out on the benefits of new and emerging technologies as the UK moves towards a greener future.”

Data centers help manage the modern world. They are estimated to consume around 2.5% of the UK’s electricity and, as more are built, their energy demand could quadruple by 2030.

Thermify is not the only one trying to capture and utilize the heat generated by data centers.

A “digital boiler” the size of a washing machine is heating a swimming pool in Devon.

The company behind that plan is also involved in a proposal to build Melbourn Energy Superloop, a combined solar-powered data center and district heating network in south Cambridgeshire.

Milton Keynes University Hospital was also hoping to be the first place in the city to benefit from £95 million plans to share the heat of a new data centre.

According to the International Energy Agency, data centers use up to 30% of their electricity consumption on cooling.

DSM founder and owner Mike Richardson, 66, says he had tried to incorporate “nature” as much as possible into his data center at a former RAF base just off the A1, near Peterborough.

A 200 kW solar panel array helps power it and a 500 cubic meter artificial lake cools it.

The lake is filled with water collected from the roof of an old aircraft hangar and pumped from two wells.

Four heat exchangers are submerged in the 1.7 meter deep water, which is also home to dozens of koi carp and tench, fish that play their own role in the operation.

“We need to keep the pipes clean as they eat the algae,” Richardson tells the BBC.

With a capacity of 400 kW, the data center is relatively small or “boutique,” according to Richardson.

Hot water is pumped from the data racks to heat exchangers in the lake, then the cooled water is returned inside, in a closed loop.

Traditional cooling systems often rely on the compression of a chemical refrigerant, which can be toxic.

“It’s important for us to stay away from chemicals,” says Richardson.

He adds that since there was no need for compression, the facility used much less electricity for cooling.

Works?

“Yes, it works, it definitely works,” says Richardson.

But he adds that depending on nature brings “challenges” because “nature by default is not something stable.”

“It takes a little management, but it’s all doable,” he continues.

The system, although small scale, can be expanded with a larger body of water, he explains.

“Water is one of the best mediums for heat transfer,” he says.

Microsoft has also experimented with an underwater data center.

Project Natick saw more than 850 servers sunk in a giant metal tube off the coast of Orkney between 2018 and 2020.

There are reports that Chinese companies were also planning to sink data centers into the ocean.