I have seen a few articles, about how many large IT companies, such as Facebook, that need massive server farms to keep their "product" available to everyone all the time, have started building quite a few of these sever farms far far north in which the weather almost year round acts as natural cooling for the servers, while the heat from is used to heat the offices of the workers in those facilities. Now that it is starting to get cold in Michigan I am really starting to understand, believe,and embrace that idea.
While when I started running the tower in the middle of the summer, when my electicity bill nearly doubled. Though sadly there only seems to be 12 months of usage history on the utility companies website, so I only know it is double what my electric usage was in the spring, fall and winter months, and I can not compare it to the previous year when I would have been running the AC consistently. But now that it is mid to late fall, even with a few rather cold days, I have yet to notice my heater running once even though my Thermostat has been set to heat for the past 3 weeks.
While based on last night, I am sure my furnace will run when winter fully sets in as yesterday with a High of 47F and a night time low of 33F even with the technology running all night long in my little BOINC farm. And this morning my place was quite cold, but still not quite cold enough to prompt the furnace to kick on, I have hopes that while the electricity usage will remain up, the gas use which often cost the most will be down, and down considerable.
So oddly enough it may seem that the extra electricity costs may help me save money on natural gas costs this winter. That is very good news. Now if only I could move to a place where its 40s-60s year round, and get lots of machines.
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