Here in Norway its now getting cold, and it will stay cold for about 9 months or so. I am therefore trying to put together enough hardware to heat most of the house with BOINC machines. If I don't get close enough I'll have to overclock and overvolt to get as much as I can from the hardware, both in terms of heat and computing. The termostat-controlled normal electrical ovens will make up the small difference between the heat produced by the machines and the heat that escapes the building (more heat will escape the building than what the machines will output, so the temperature would be for example 16-18 degrees C with the machines themselves running, then the termostat ovens make up the difference, that way windows don't have to be opened when temperatures are relatively high outside).

I've contacted a few dozen people who have put up used 280x/7970 cards for sale, and have also contacted a large seller of such hardware (they might have some demo-products and returns etc). And I'm looking for cheap ways to get as many GPUs as possible running within the budget (both money budget and electricity budget, since I don't require 10kw heating, more like 3kw).

I'll update here to let you guys know what happens.

First point, I've found this marvelous thing called "PCI express backplane": http://www.trentonsystems.com/backplanes/bpx6806-pci-express-backplane
4 - x8 PCI Express electrical / x16 mech. connectors
12 – x4 PCI Express electrical / x16 mech. connectors
1 - x4 PCI Express electrical / x16 mech. connectors
1 - x4/x1 PCI Express electrical# / x8 mech. connector
Do you have any idea of how for example 7970/280x would run milkyway@home on such a setup? Its probably enterprise-expensive but if possible it would be nice to just have 1 system to maintain.
Also, do you know of any competitors that make similar products?

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You're not the first person I've heard talking about using BOINC crunchers as a heat source; I would be interested to see some data about costs and efficiency, I doubt it would be very cost effective for the initial purchase or an efficient means of generating heat. I know of some data centers that make use of the "waste heat" from their servers to heat offices and the like, but I think that for a house it would cost more than it's worth given the low power consumption and heat output of just a few machines.

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My Detailed BOINC Stats

I think I was the one talking about it, I have talked about it a while back. But had no space for it.

There's 580gtx and 590gtx and tons more for sale for pennies. I think finding the hardware for cheap enough is not the issue, but actually putting it together in such a way that it don't scream like an airplane is going to be an issue.
When it comes to the business aspect of it, I already have the concept drawings for how it would have to be made and assembled for it to be viable (it can't take more time and effort to install than underfloor heating and wall-mounted heaters). And the owner of the computing hardware would buy it for the purpose of the computing power, then installing it somewhere that requires heaters at no cost for the building owner(s). Then the building owners pay for the electricity for the computing power.

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Update: May have found my future supplier of heatpipe equipment. Didn't find cooling solutions that do what I require them to do, so I'm going to make it myself with heatpipes and other heatpipe parts.
Here's what I have ordered so far: http://www.aavid.com/products/standard/heat-pipe-discovery-kit
Going to underclock a small quad core I have and then put on this to get an idea of how substantial the heatpipe and heatsink has to be to cool something as substantial as multiple GPUs.

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Here in Norway its now getting cold, and it will stay cold for about 9 months or so. I am therefore trying to put together enough hardware to heat most of the house with BOINC machines. If I don't get close enough I'll have to overclock and overvolt to get as much as I can from the hardware, both in terms of heat and computing. The termostat-controlled normal electrical ovens will make up the small difference between the heat produced by the machines and the heat that escapes the building (more heat will escape the building than what the machines will output, so the temperature would be for example 16-18 degrees C with the machines themselves running, then the termostat ovens make up the difference, that way windows don't have to be opened when temperatures are relatively high outside).

I've contacted a few dozen people who have put up used 280x/7970 cards for sale, and have also contacted a large seller of such hardware (they might have some demo-products and returns etc). And I'm looking for cheap ways to get as many GPUs as possible running within the budget (both money budget and electricity budget, since I don't require 10kw heating, more like 3kw).

I'll update here to let you guys know what happens.

First point, I've found this marvelous thing called "PCI express backplane": http://www.trentonsystems.com/backplanes/bpx6806-pci-express-backplane
4 - x8 PCI Express electrical / x16 mech. connectors
12 – x4 PCI Express electrical / x16 mech. connectors
1 - x4 PCI Express electrical / x16 mech. connectors
1 - x4/x1 PCI Express electrical# / x8 mech. connector
Do you have any idea of how for example 7970/280x would run milkyway@home on such a setup? Its probably enterprise-expensive but if possible it would be nice to just have 1 system to maintain.
Also, do you know of any competitors that make similar products?

I don't know if the x8 will bottle neck your cards or not, but if you were to fill every slot, you may run into supported data lanes that the board/chips can support. You would probably be better off buying consumer boards and have a few systems than something like this. Just my opinion.

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Here in St. Louis Missouri and just wanted to say I'm running 5 laptops in the bedroom for winter heating.
My friends laughed but they replaced the electric heater and the 130W power adapters make great foot warmers in a 65F room.

Enjoy your dual purpose heaters!

Somebody should do a comparison, metering the power consumption of a BOINC cluster versus traditional heater/furnace, and tracking room temperature versus outside temp.

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My Detailed BOINC Stats

Looks like someone is working on BOINC-based heating for a small office space over at WCG: https://secure.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/viewthread_thread,37497

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My Detailed BOINC Stats

Hi guys. I'm the chap looking at heating my work space at home. The setup is a converted loft space above an outbuilding, separated to the main house - it's about 4m x 5m aquare, with 40 degree sloping walls on two sides that meet in the centre ridge at a height of about 2.5m. It has 30cm insulation in the floor, and the walls have two types of insulation - standard Kingspan (50mm dense foam boards) and a layer of Triso Super 10, which would have done the job itself, but the UK doesn't recognise it as a viable insulator as no tests had been carried out on it.

I have two 8-core machines and one 4-core in here, and found that the heat given off from them, especially when rendering (I'm a 3D artist), will keep the room toasty. Of course, when I turned them off at night the room would cool down and be freezing in the morning during winter. I took to keeping an oil-filled radiator on a low setting, to keep the room around 5-10C overnight, which is a waste of electric - but the alternative was to wait for the PCs to heat the room up from a cold start, which could take a couple of hours on a cold day, plus what damage was being done to the PCs with the low temperatures?

I found out that when leaving the PCs busy overnight, rendering or with BOINC, that the room stayed warm - at the moment with the outside temperatures around the 10C mark, inside was too warm - even now it's too warm with outside temperature of 8C and two of the PCs calculating (plus my body heat) - it's 25.5C inside. So my thought was to heat the rooms with BOINC, rather than the oil-fired radiator, and at least the electric is doing something useful! I've been doing that for a few months, but I would like to find a way of automating the system, and posted on the WCG forums, where noderaser suggested I pop over here to this thread, and introduced me to Tthrottle.

My main aim is to be able to turn off BOINC automatically once my ideal ambient temperature is reached, without me having to look at a thermometer and physically turning it off.

At the moment, my motherboard has a Core and a GPU sensor, I have no idea if I can attach extra sensors - if I could, it would be great to attach one for the inside ambient and outside ambient. The inside ambient is the one I'd need for my purposes - once it hits a pre-determined value, BOINC would stop. When the ambient temperature dropped below a pre-determined value, it would fire up again. I'm currently doing a test overnight - the ambient temperature is 25.5C, the Core rises to 53 when BOINC is active, and the GPU remains at 31C. I'm going to leave everything going full blast overnight to see how the GPU temperature relates to the ambient room temperature, to see if I can work with that sensor. If so, then great, if not, then I need to find a way to add sensors to the PCs.

That's where I am. If anyone has any ideas I'm all ears :)

PS As I've been typing this up, the ambient room temperature has risen to 26.5C and the GPU has risen to 32C - in step. This will be interesting. if it's going to be that simple then great, but a way of attaching another sensor to the PC, to measure ambient inside temperature, would be best, as it wouldn't rely on one particular PC's internal gubbings to work - it could be added to anyone's setup. Does anyone know if Tthrottle would read data from something like this?

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Powered-Thermometer-Temperature-Sensor-Data/dp/B009RETJIO