"Reusing heat from servers has gained momentum recent years, but UK Power Networks (UKPN) is taking an unusual approach: installing mini datacenters powered by Raspberry Pi hardware in customers homes to provide heating for families struggling with energy costs. UKPN, which manages the "last mile" of cables and substations delivering electricity from the National Grid to customers in the South East of England, is piloting the project as part of its SHIELD (Smart Heat and Intelligent Energy in Low-income Districts) program."
"Thermify told us that the processing power inside each HeatHub is provided by a cluster of 500 Raspberry Pi Compute Modules, either the CM4 or CM5. The whole kit is submerged in oil, and the heat is transferred to the domestic central heating and hot water systems, making it a "plug and play" replacement for a gas boiler. The unit in its video promo is much smaller than the one in the image for this article."
UK Power Networks is piloting the SHIELD program to install domestic low-carbon technologies including solar, batteries, and HeatHub units that replace gas boilers. HeatHub units are compact datacenters roughly the size of a large heat pump, designed and operated by Thermify to process containerized workloads for its distributed cloud customers. Each HeatHub contains a cluster of about 500 Raspberry Pi Compute Modules (CM4 or CM5), submerged in oil to transfer processing heat into central heating and hot water systems. A dedicated network connection is installed at each site to prevent broadband impacts. UKPN plans to scale deployment toward 100,000 systems per year by 2030.
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