Hopefully this is helpful to somebody else here. For those who don’t know, BOINC is a tool that enables you to donate your computer’s spare computational power towards scientific research. Cancer, alzheimers, climate research, you name it, there’s a BOINC project for it. And when your computer is computing, it generates heat. It’s as efficient as using a space heater or any other form of “electric resistive” heating aka anything that’s not a heat pump/reverse ac. 1 watt into your computer = 1 watt of heat, same as any space heater, electric baseboard heater, ceiling heat, etc.
In winter, BOINC and Folding at home make up 100% of my indoor heating, and I wrote a script to tie this all to a thermostat. It will turn BOINC on/off depending on the room temp, and if you have multiple machines you can have each at a separate setpoint to give you slightly more granular control than “off” vs “full blast”. The script can pull in data from a web url (what I use), a command-line command, or a custom python function.
I’m curious what type of house/apartment you live in, and where you live, that you can heat entirely off of pc waste heat! Do you have separate machines in different rooms to provide smart zone heating?
Love the idea though. I don’t know how many thousands of hours I must have sunk into SETI@Home and BOINC back in the '00s.
It’s a 1 bedroom so not particularly big. I have two main “heating zones” which I turn off depending on where I am, but it’s not particularly sophisticated, and air can move between the zones fairly easily. Works just as well as my other electric heat options though so I’m quite happy heating my apt with science :)
