- Why not rig it the other way: pump water past the CPU, then through your coffee grounds?
It probably wouldn't be great for your CPU, because the temperature required to properly brew coffee is hotter than you really want for your CPU. But maybe get the water to 80C, and a secondary heater after that.
- Maybe one wants a mini heat pump between the CPU and the coffee. 50º C is plenty for a heat pump to very efficiently push the temperature on the other side to 98º C or so
- Can this concept be extended to the home in general? Why not pump heat out of computer components and into a general hot water tank for home use? I wonder if anyone's tried it.
- There are a number of pilot projects currently in development to heat entire neighbourhoods using the waste heat from data centers.
Unless you've got a monster ML workstation under your desk or a crypto mining rig in your garage, that surplus heat isn't especially useful and isn't really worth harvesting. A typical desktop PC only dissipates a few tens of watts at idle or a few hundred watts under heavy gaming loads, versus many kilowatts for a typical domestic water heater.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/thousands-of-homes-to-be-...
- I have used a mini home-datacenter to heat my house in winter (very effectively - I used a fan to direct the heat towards the intake for the AC system and ran the AC fan). But I decided against the HW heater version of it from a cost recovery perspective - we just don't use that much hot water and we had a then-new high efficiency gas hot water heater.
However, there's a fairly straightforward way to get halfway there: You can run a standard heat pump hot water heater and put the computers in the same room with it. The computers will heat the air, the heat pump hot water heater will cool the air. Won't be as efficient as a closed loop system directly connecting the computers to the HW heater but you also won't need to worry about whether the heat production and consumption are balanced.
- Heat pump water heaters are a product you can (probably) buy today. They suck ambient heat from the air and stuff it into the water.
I really want to get one and pipe all the exhaust from my homelab to it.
- I’ve long been annoyed in the summer every time I turn on a heat generating appliance (stove, dryer, on-demand hot water) and then think about all the waste heat my air conditioner dumped out the side of the house in the last X hours. It would be amazing to somehow store that heat in a reservoir where it could be later used.
I doubt the extra piping and infrastructure is anywhere near worth it, but I sometimes fantasize about an experimental building that was designed from the get-go with a single integrated heat loop that all the major appliances were plugged into, and how that might look. Seems like the sort of thing that could be tried in a much more confined space such as for an off-grid RV.
- > I doubt the extra piping and infrastructure is anywhere near worth it
I wonder. Infrastructure investments tend to have absurd payoffs. For example, my solar energy equipment has been generating profit for years.
In my country 5 kW electric showers are common every day items and they add up to a huge chunk of household energy consumption. Switching to a more efficient water heating system has been on my mind for years. If I can use my home server as a heating element, so much the better. Could even use free CPU cycles to mine Monero on it. A solar powered cryptocurrency mining home serving water heating computer. Wow.
I also think a lot about the heat my air conditioners constantly pump out of my house. Seems like a waste to just throw it out of the house like that. Ideally it would be stored so that it could be used to heat other things later... To me it seems like it should be possible with enough integration.
- I think it boils down to a) effectively storing heat for later use is extremely difficult to do well, and b) moving heat around properly means 400psi compressor tubes everywhere, and those are a lot more fragile and annoying to work with than regular plumbing, and you need a special gas licence to charge them up afterward.
In contrast to the RV proposal, maybe a better option could be something like a boutique hotel, where you’ve got 100+ showers happening every morning, so having a giant cistern of hot water that you dump all the waste heat from AC, fridges, and freezers into makes a ton of sense.
- "I think it boils down to..."
Nailed it.
- There are heat-pump water heaters, if that fills in a conceptual gap. The main complaint I've seen with them has just been that they're slow, but that's more of a product-design (at a price point) issue than anything fundamental afaict.
- Two issues I see here would be that a) the demand and production of how water and compute power might not align and b) the amount of water heated this way would probably not be nearly enough for most people.
What is probably more feasible is to save on heating costs by heating your apartment partially with your computer.
- Linus (tech talks) uses it to heat his pool.
- This would be a really cool idea for municipal swimming pools or large residential developments. It blows my mind that people pay to heat up all these data centers and then pay again to get rid of the heat. Data centers could rent space by paying in kWh of heat.
I would set something like this up in my house if there was some kind of decentralized processing company I could register with.
- I remember in a video, Linus measured that the ground absorbs all the heat before it could even reaching the pool.
- His pipes have too much or not enough insulation then.
- I don't know anything about the topic and this made me really curious. Why could too much insulation be a problem?
- The main problems I see are that we don't clean the insides of computer parts and we can drink water with way more calcium in it than is good for high temperature water heaters. Cooling water needs to be treated to not grow algae and bacteria in it, and a lot of times that renders it poisonous to drink. Conversely, drinking water has a lot of minerals still in it and those minerals will deposit and form scale on the insides of your heat transfer surfaces, which will severely impact performance over time. It may not even take that long depending on how hot the surface is and how hard your water is.
- I assume whatever fluids are used for heat transfer would circulate in completely separate circuits from the water used or consumed by humans.
- That is how it works. There is the water which goes outside pumped through pipes on the floor of the pool like in-floor heating.
That is pumped so it cools down the water going through the computers.
It has gone through several revisions plus complications with wanting to heat up solar panels too.
- I'm not expert in CPU water cooling but I'd guess the CPU would have to be way over 100C in order to get the water to 80C quickly.
- You could recirculate water past the CPU via an insulated storage carafe. This would create a fun and exciting gamble wherein you might receive a freshly brewed pot of coffee OR your computer might turn itself off just before the water is hot enough to brew with, and the time it would take would be based on how hard you worked the PC.
- Modern Intel can help.
- Add a heat exchanger.
- Not sure if this is what you mean but an actual heat pump with a compressor could handle this— after all, an air conditioner cools your house to 23C by dumping the waste heat to an environment that can be 40C or more.
- Many years ago we used a hot P4 to heat mulled wine.
https://imgur.com/a/mulled-wine-pc-WW1pW
It could get to 60°C which is a bit low for coffee but was great for mulled wine
- Could use an old P4 Celeron as the secondary heater.
- 80C is about the lowest you would want to use but can definitely get you a good cup of coffee. It will come out a bit lighter but using a finer grind might offset that.
- Use a heat pump to keep the CPU (and GPU as a secondary heat source) at a lower temperature then heat the coffee water with a secondary heat exchanger. Then you can control the temperature of both cooling loops independently.
- This, except when it comes time to actually brew, it goes to a 5.25” slot to heat up, then you can determine the best delivery mechanism for your build. Shot/Kup, drip, pour over, just don’t build a french press PC.
And have a reservoir large enough to replenish the closed loop circuit when you press the button.
- The CD ROM drive should open so you can insert a paper cup and then the coffee dispenses into it.
- Kicking myself for not thinking of this... it's genius
- Let's do cold brew then...
- >The coffee is too cold.
Don't worry, I'll run an Electron app.
- GPUs and alcohol distillation always seemed like a match:
I used to manage a scientific supercluster, heavily laden with GPUs. We were constantly consuming about 60kW of power. These GPUs were happy to run at 85C, which from other interests I knew to be the temperature where alcohol distillation occurred. I always wanted to install a heat exchanger and distill fuel with all of the waste heat.
- I'm glad someone is still building what needs to be built <3
- SGI was ahead of the game: http://mycollins.net/sgicoffee.png
- Excellent find I have never heard of - thank you for sharing
- v0.2a needs to mine crypto to pay for its own coffee beans while peculating the coffee. =3
- I assume you meant "percolating", but you very nearly spelled "speculating", which, given the crypto, seems more appropriate.
- And of course, peculation means misappropriating or embezzling funds. Again, given crypto (and certain notorious crypto exchanges), even more appropriate.
- "Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind." (E. B. White)
¯\_(ツ)_/¯"
- Never, the French Press is superior in every regard. lol =3
- I’d like to see this project extended with AI to work out what drink the user really wants before dispensing a drink almost, but not entirely, unlike tea.
Share and enjoy!
- No worries of HTTP 418 here.
- This is the very best kind of silly project. :) I'm pleased to learn that the coffee is an effective (... sortof) heatsink and not merely part of the case.
- Thank you - I wonder, if in some microscopic way, the coffee is caffeinating the CPU too.
- I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as GE Coffeemattic PC, is in fact, GNU/GE Coffeemattic PC, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus GE coffeemattic. GE Coffeemattic is not a PC unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full PC as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which pumps hot java today is often called "GE Coffeematic PC", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a GE Coffeemattic exists, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. GE Coffeematic is the coffee kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's caffeinated resources to the other the user's physical space. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Coffeemattic is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Coffeemattic added, or GNU/GE Coffeemattic. All the so-called "GE Coffeemattic PC" distributions are really distributions of GNU/GE Coffeemattic PC.
- 100% Java compatible
- It should use the logo: https://mybcagroup.blogspot.com/2016/07/what-is-hot-java-hot...
- I need to make one of my own, when Im done fixing up an old bike for my fish.
- tap->coffeemaker->radiator->pc->cup. ?
really stupid arrangement. slurry from the coffeemaker clogging your rad and cooling block, not to mention corrosion
better would be RO water -> pc -> coffemaker no rad needed
- He's using "Linux Mint" for OS. Should have used "Coffee Linux" instead.
- A key with haptic feedback that when pressed runs the CPU/GPU and as water heats up the button lets you know. Calibrate feedback to temperature and ease off the button when the water is done.
- Was a reference to https://xkcd.com/1172/ intentional here?
- I don’t know what the pipes are made of, but doesn’t look like something I’d like to heat and run my water through it before drinking it
- The tubing and pumps are food safe, however, the radiators and cooling block are not. It's a special tasting cup of coffee best consumed in moderation.
- Usually PVC not dissimilar to your home plumbing; but yes at temperate it can leach.
- This just made me smile
- Means a lot - thank you :)
- Time for you to use my 1080ti with Furmark too cook some eggs and bacon to go with the coffee.
- Damn that's a good idea... orienting the graphics card horizontally would've made a little frying pan.
- Someday this should be upgraded to an 8th or 9th gen core i7. ;)
- It better support RFC 2324.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper_Text_Coffee_Pot_Contro...
- It does, unfortunately there is a bug as every request is returning a 418.
- Finally the Java logo makes sense.
- This is the right kind of absurd for a Friday afternoon
- Now do mayonaise.
- Tread carefully. This is how the Borg started. “Your caffeinated and medicated existence will be added to our own, resistance is futile… pass the creamer.”
- [flagged]
- Absolutely cool project but unfortunately percolating coffee is nowhere near the best way to brew a good cup of coffee.
- This must be a matter of taste because I strongly disagree.
- Glad you like the project. I might have special taste in coffee, this stuff is pretty good, but honestly I like instant too...
- Should probably run cpu benchmarks while slowing water cooling pump + pressurizing cooling system above 9bar and expressing water through carefully tamped specially ground coffee and drip into cup.
or just have a large reservoir, severely overcool the cpu and cold-brew the coffee
- Very little about this project screams "best" or "fully optimised".
Its objectives lie elsewhere.
- Good luck hooking up an espresso machine to a PC though.
- It's not a PC, but SGI made an espresso machine inside an Indigo case as a marketing gag. The "Espressigo".
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:SGI_Espressigo
https://old.reddit.com/r/SiliconGraphics/comments/1eh9puu/sg...
- Excellent find - I haven't heard of this one. The marketing gag approach reminds me of the Zotac Mekspresso build by Ali “THE CRE8OR” Abbas. https://thecre8or.de/mekspresso.htm
- I assume that they're referring to something other than espresso if they're trying to get the best cup.
268 points by dougdude3339 21 hours ago | 83 comments
