I make videos that are usually somewhere between 10-20mins long, and I know that video storage really adds up fast. My worry with things like this is that I basically can’t afford to donate as much as I would be costing. But maybe there’s some kind of relevant info on that somewhere that I just can’t immediately see. Definitely worth an investigate, at least!
There's an About section, saying the instance has just under 1,000 videos, and is using about 250 gigs right now. (If you include federated videos, then it's 63,000 videos though lol.)
I agree with you here, it sure looks like being a new video platform is a very difficult game to play. And asking for people to donate to MakerTube specifically rather than any of the myriad of other peertube platforms seems like a very uphill battle too lol.
I do think that it would be good for all of us to get used to contributing to the operations costs of platforms where the users aren't the product. But yeah, there's definitely going to be growing pains lol.
Absolutely, I already donate to my three most used Lemmy servers and have actually been looking to get into PeerTube so I’d have no problem donating there too. Problem is I just don’t know if my couple of dollars a month would equal a net loss.
Will come back and update this thread once I’ve found out!
So, update. I talked to the MakerTube admin over on Mastodon and they admitted that funding is pretty much always going to be a problem especially if popular creators join and make big videos. But they seem to be giving it their best shot, and I figured, what have I got to lose other than a bit of time and a few dollars in donations? So I’m giving it a whirl.
Just did a write-up of my impressions of the whole thing over at !peertube if you’re at all invested!
I never know whether adding the direct link will just annoy people on different instances, haha, may have a slight overthinking issue there. But thanks for adding it! :D
Yeah, I'm on kbin.social and for some reason we don't accept !community, only @community here. I just always link 'cause it's so hard to find stuff lmao.
One day we'll have truly seamless (non-janky) content conversion.
I run a quite powerful server rack for my business (two servers with 64 core Threadrippers, redundant power supplies, nice SSDs, etc) and it puts out some heat, but not even as much as my gaming PC. The CPUs are usually sitting near 2% utilization, so it’s barely drawing any wattage, and thus, barely putting out heat. So it really depends on how much the server is doing that will determine the heat it outputs. You can build a 1000 watt server, but if it’s only drawing 50 watts, it won’t be generating much heat.
That being said, if the alternative is an electric heater, then using a server for something productive like BOINC or Folding at Home is a better use of your electricity, and may produce the heat you’re looking for. And for your use case, an older (and thus cheaper) CPU would probably suit you, so win-win.
Idk. Yet, I have recently found out that some are able to measure Capacitance. I think those are useful, since many times a repair work is about replacing a fat capacitor. But I am quite a neophyte on regards to electronics… Take this with a grain of salt.
That was LTT youtu.be/wjO6OLmZB9AHe admits that its a dumb idea on the wan show later so take that as you will. While i havent read the other comments yet, i bet at least a couple have recommended heatpumps. They are the best solution here.
But if you want to have some fun, grab a large pump and water cool the server, make sure all your water cooling connections can withstand the pressure your giving them and then run the cooling tubes out to your green house.
At “best”, your server is a resistive heater. Aka “a space heater”. Except that your server also has hardware designed to convert power into negative temperature (you know… fans). So you are at a lower efficiency than the space heater in the corner.
Also? Computers aren’t meant to run all that hot for all that long. Yes, the safe margin for hardware is a lot higher than people would think. But if you want this to make a meaningful difference you are going to be running REAL hot for extended periods of time. Because you don’t need heating when it is warm outside. You need it when it is cold and you are already going to be fighting a low ambient temperature.
The reason this works for larger data centers and specialized installations is that they are designed with this in mind. You generally either have direct water cooling of the racks (plural) or you have “water cooling” of the server room itself. With the water then being recirculated amongst the radiators in the building itself. And… those are quite often borderline “scams” because they don’t actually keep the building all that warm in the winter (as discovered during The Pandemic when the lack of body heat from human beings caused issues for a lot of hybrid office/data centers) and they mean more HVAC costs to keep the building cool during the summer.
Which gets to the other aspect. Are you going to change all your fan and cooling settings on a weekly (or even daily) basis? Because maybe you want to get right up to thermal throttling during the winter because the ambient temperature means that heat will “dissipate” fast. But during the summer or even a warm winter day? You are turning your server room into the kind of inferno that even Tom Cruise has someone else deal with.
Don’t get me wrong. Having a chonky and inefficient PC is great for late night gaming in the winter when you should have gone to sleep hours ago and your zone is already set for the “nobody but the cat is in there” setting. But, even at the datacenter level, it is not a good replacement for HVAC. And, as a lot of us will attest: Summer is when you grab the Steam Deck or go downstairs and use the xbox.
I do this. If you want to actually want to use or donate the processing power, this is kind of a good thing. However, there are a lot of downsides:
Computers are generally much lower power than a heater. This makes them very slow to “react” to heating needs. Heating a small room, even with a 500W PC, could take an hour or maybe more.
Heaters have a thermostat, which computers don’t, so even though they are very laggy, they also don’t stop heating when the temperature is right. This means they can overshoot and make the room uncomfortably hot.
You could set up an external thermostat but then you need a load which can be switched on and off.
I was using folding@home, but the work items take a long time, and switching them on and off will increase the time taken to resolve the work item, which in turn means the system could get annoyed and use someone else’s computer to resolve the work item faster, or worse, blacklist your computer.
Using your PC to generate heat will use up its maximum lifetime. The fans aren’t built to be running at max speed all the time, the CPU & GPU could wear out, and the power systems will also wear as time goes on. You sort of have to align that lifetime against usage. This is likely fine if you see the computation as a donation or if you have important stuff to compute, but it’s probably not worth just wasting the cycles.
I’m just using it as a space heater for my study, which is also where I work from. While using the computer in Winter I just switch on f@h for both CPU and GPU (AMD 5700x and 6700xt), and this heats up the room. It’s a good 300-400W. I have home assistant telling me the temperature in the room and it bugs me to turn it off if it’s too hot. That’s my “temperature control”. I didn’t build anything, the computer is just under my desk and it heats up my room.
Originally my plan was to have F@H automatically turn on and off based on temperature, but it turns out the power is low enough and the lag is high enough that you switch it on in the morning, and then once the room is upto temperature you can just switch it off and the room will stay warm the rest of the day.
I miss the GPU mining days from long ago. Used to have a five old computers with potato GPUs on a time switch to do just this or folding at home as a fun experiment many years ago. It kinda worked in the earliest days but asics killed the income offset after a few months.
The old Core 2 Quad Dell with three dvb-t tuners and a few hard drives still dumps a fair bit of heat into the room.
I have a server running 24/7 in my office, drawing 120 watts average (tested). Office is 10x10. It alone keeps that room 2-5 degrees warmer than the rest of the house. If I turn it off, room equalize to house.
As for comparison, those little square plug in space heaters consume 500 to 1500 watts, and you can see how much th heat.
1 watt = 3.4 btu
Depending on your use case, why not look to reduce power consumption? I’ve replaced that server with one that draws <20w at idle. That’s negligible.
You could probably mod a water cooler system to connect to a water to water heat exchanger like this: www.heata.co
In general, like others have said, lots of humidity is bad for the hardware, you will need to separate this somehow. But heating a small grow-room with an extension of a CPU water cooler might be possible.
As far as heating efficiency goes, servers aren’t really that good. 100% efficiency as all the electricity they use ends up as heat. Compare with heat pumps that can get 300+% efficiency.
What I do is have my server in the same “room” as my water heater (share airspace), and use a heat pump electric water heater.
At least then all the heat my server makes is used for something good, instead of extra AC usage in summer (winter is a wash, as I need the heat in the house anyways)
I wonder how to take on the efficiency question when considering waste heat. Would and older model generating more heat be the better choice? Has anybody started to dig into the complexities of calculating efficiency for circular systems?
There's no real complexity. Computers are first and foremost electric space heaters, a negligible amount of energy is used to perform computation.
If you would be heating a room with resistive electric heating, a computer drawing the same wattage can do the same job while also, in theory, doing some useful work.
If you are just evaluating heating options, heat pumps use less energy to output the same heat.
Humidity in a grow room will be bad for a computer
With modern computers the heat output will in part depend on the workload, so you will need to find a way to make the computer do more work when you want more heat.
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