Ideas Wanted: Creative Heat Recycling from Servers

The University of Notre Dame heats a botanical garden with waste server heat. We're looking for more creative ideas from you on recycling waste server heat.

The botanical garden that is heated by Notre Dame's servers specializes in desert plants and is located in Indiana, well know for its brutal winters. The concept is simple. The waste server heat is pumped into the interior space of the garden to keep the desert-loving plants toasty warm all year long. This simple, creative step is saving the university $100,000 on cooling costs and the owner of the botanical garden, the City of South Bend, Indiana, another $70,000 on heating costs. Not only that, but the atmosphere is spared many thousands of tons of pollution from carbon emissions. That is quite a triple win-win-win arrangement.

This leads me to my challenge to you. Have you ever worked on or heard about creative solutions like this, where waste heat from servers or data centers is recycled (or managed) in a non-traditional way that conserves energy? If so, we'd love to hear about it. We'll discuss your responses in a future edition of my new blog on environmentally friendly computing, The Green Penguin.

To make this more interesting, there are free t-shirts for the most interesting submissions! Send your stories to me, James Gray, Linux Journal Products Editor, at jgray@linuxjournal.com. I look forward to reading them.