Comment by meatmanek
7 days ago
Depends where your electricity comes from. If you're burning fossil fuels to make electricity, that's only about 40% efficient, so you need to burn 2.5x as much fuel to get the same amount of heat into the house.
7 days ago
Depends where your electricity comes from. If you're burning fossil fuels to make electricity, that's only about 40% efficient, so you need to burn 2.5x as much fuel to get the same amount of heat into the house.
Sure. That has nothing to do with the efficiency of your system though. As far as you are concerned this is about your electricity consumption for the home server vs gas consumption. In that sense resistive heat inside the home is 100% efficient compared to gas furnace; the fuel cost might be lower on the latter.
Sure, it's "equally efficient" if you ignore the inefficient thing that is done outside where you draw the system box, directly in proportion to how much you do it.
Heating my house with a giant diesel-powered radiant heater from across the street is infinitely efficient, too, since I use no power in my house.
If you don’t close the box of the system at some point to isolate the input, efficiency would be meaningless. I think in the context of the original post, suggesting running a server in winter would be a zero-waste endeavor if you need the heat anyway, it is perfectly clear that the input is electricity to your home at a certain $/kWh and gas at a certain $/BTU. Under that premise, it is fair to say that would not be true if you have a heat pump deployed but would be true compared to gas furnace in terms of efficiency (energy consumed for unit of heat), although not necessarily true economically.
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It’d be fun to actually calculate this efficiency. My local power is mostly nuclear so I wonder how that works out.