TFA:

To be eligible for the eRadiator, your home has to have... "an external wall" ... and the external wall is needed for venting (if you "turn off" the eRadiator, the servers don't actually turn off; the heat is just pushed outside).

Admittedly, without active refrigeration this is unlikely to work too well when the temperature outside is over 35 C.

EDIT: they don't mention separate electric supplies, so presumably the unit has a way of tracking its power usage and reimbursing the homeowner. Otherwise this is just a scam, because far more efficient electrical [EDIT: thanks 'votingprawn!] heat pumps are available for less initial cost. However, the non-scam scenario seems only to make sense as a business in cold locations.

> because far more efficient electrical heaters

How are you defining efficiency here?

Efficiency is usually defined as (useful power out)/(power in), and basically all the power that goes into a computer comes out again as heat, which in this case is considered useful. Not really convinced you could buy a heater that was measurably more efficient.

ETA: heat pump would do it, didn't spring to mind when I read heater though!

> seems only to make sense as a business in cold locations.

I'd change that to read "in cold or temperate locations."

There are plenty of locations in Europe for example that rarely have days over 30 C yet don't often get below freezing in the winter. Doesn't make sense to describe these places as particularly "cold."

Makes complete sense in Scandinavia, Iceland, Alaska, etc.

Is this a correction? A clarification? Was it insensitive to describe those places as "cold"?

A clarification. For instance, there's plenty of cold in Antarctica, but no fiber and not enought dwellings. In Scandinavia, high fixed broadband penetration is actually combined with cold most of the year. (JFYI, Finnish official definition of summer is temperatures above +10°C for entire 24 hours.)

We just need to roll our own clusters of RPi-s driven off Peltier junctions arctic-silvered to the side, and we can run our own parasitic cloud provider off the waste heat. It's turtles all the way down...

  if you "turn off" the eRadiator, the servers don't actually turn off; the heat is just pushed outside

Same as in a data center, the heat gets pushed outside.

Cloud computing users don't care---modulo network latency and, to some extent, national laws regarding data privacy and seizure of servers---where their servers are physically located. When it's summer in the northern hemisphere, it's winter in the southern; I'm sure they're looking at South America too.

Sure, but I don't think the provider can afford to buy servers and only run them for half the year.

International speeds on a consumer grade line are usually crap, around 10% of declared speed.

This could be a supplement for existing systems, perhaps even a backup or to serve some use spikes. But definitely not a replacement.

This is best suited for async workloads (think EC2 spot instances or cpu intensive distributed computing tasks) where network performance isn't critical.

I assume next versions will have AC?

There are only few days a year when it gets over 30 in Scandinavia & Baltics.

Probably more like a few days a decade when it even approaches that here in Scotland!

It still heats of course. It's free heat.

In the summer, in most locations, you don't want free heat. However, the article states that the unit will vent the heat outside when it isn't desired.

I've heard of summer.