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Your laptop generates plenty of excess heat as it sits on your lap, and now, this Dutch startup wants to take that excess energy and have it heat your home.

The notion of waste not, want not has never been quite this high tech.

In an effort to ensure that our future is sustainable, one Dutch company is looking to turn servers into heat sources. Because if youre running laptop is enough to warm your lap on a cold winters day, then shouldnt servers (which emit alotmore energy in the form of heat) be enough to heat your home? Thats certainly the bet thatNerdalize is making. The startup hopes to createfree heat for everyone and make cloudcomputing sustainable and affordable.

Its method? Placing cloud servers in individual homes, and turning them into heating systems. Your house will serve as a data center for companies that depend on cloud computing (which is to say, all companies), and in return, those companies will effectively provide you with heat and hot water.

Its the 21st-century definition of symbiosis.

Nerdalize estimates that by turning common homes into data centers, homeowners can save up to $340 a year, while companies can forego the cost of expensive server centers, saving about 50 percent of their own operational costs. Thisinnovative set-up drastically reduces the households energyconsumption while slashing the energy originally needed for servercooling, Nerdalize claims. Adding up all those free hot showers and avoided cooling, wecan save up to three tons of CO2 per household per year.

The plan is to start installing these servers in Dutch homes in August. 42 households will serve as guinea pigs, and if all goes well, theyll be able to turn corporate data into hot water. Indeed, the company says, demand appears to be quite high for this innovative technology, as more than 3,500 people have signed up and expressed interest in a server heater.

The company has already hit 130 percent of its 250,000-euro ($282,000) funding goal, so if youre looking for an alternative heat source, you may just want to look toward a server.

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Your next heat source could come from a server, if Nerdalize has its way - Digital Trends