• Deep Green in the UK has a novel solution to dispersing the heat its data centres generate – use that heat to warm swimming pools.
• Exmouth Leisure Center in the UK claims this solution has saved it thousands of pounds in energy costs.
• The solution can be used to heat water for distilleries and even apartment blocks.

Data centres don’t only need a lot of energy to run, they need an ocean of water to cool the hardware inside.

However, UK company Deep Green has had a clever idea in which it proposes using data centres to heat water.

The company offers up hot water heated by its gear for free. The catch is that you need to host Deep Green’s gear. It covers the cost of electricity for its so-called digital boilers up front and property owners end up paying nothing. This solution can reportedly reduce energy bills by 70 percent.

The Exmouth Leisure Center in the UK recently had the solution installed and is able to heat its pool to 30 degrees Celsius 60 percent of the time.

“The partnership has really helped us reduce the costs of what has been astronomical over the last 12 months – our energy prices and gas prices have gone through the roof,” Sean Day who runs the Leisure centre told the BBC.

Deep Green says that this solution is geared toward industries using large volumes of water that need heating. These include distilleries and apartment blocks.

The system in place at Exmouth Leisure Center however, is rather small. It said the system is no bigger than a washing machine. The system itself is submerged in mineral oil and heat is transferred to the water by way of a heat exchanger.

Would this solution work for a larger data centre? That depends on how many pools need heating. According to Dgtl Infra, the average hyperscale data centre needs 1.7 million litres of water per day. The average swimmingly pool can hold 61 200 litres of water. This means that a hyperscale data centre could heat as many as 27 swimming pools, every day.

Unfortunately, unless these swimming pools are built right alongside data centres, it’s not a realistic solution at scale.

That having been said, we wouldn’t be surprised to see some data centre operators exploring solutions like this to make their operations more sustainable. To that end, Africa Data Centers announced today that it had struck an agreement with DPA to make use of 12MW of solar power for its operations.

You can read more about that story here.

[Image – Thom Milkovic on Unsplash]