Home Automation

Hopefully this is helpful to somebody else here. For those who don't know, BOINC is a tool that enables you to donate your computer's spare computational power towards scientific research. Cancer, alzheimers, climate research, you name it, there's a BOINC project for it. And when your computer is computing, it generates heat. It's as efficient as using a space heater or any other form of "electric resistive" heating aka anything that's not a heat pump/reverse ac. 1 watt into your computer = 1 watt of heat, same as any space heater, electric baseboard heater, ceiling heat, etc.

In winter, BOINC and Folding at home make up 100% of my indoor heating, and I wrote a script to tie this all to a thermostat. It will turn BOINC on/off depending on the room temp, and if you have multiple machines you can have each at a separate setpoint to give you slightly more granular control than "off" vs "full blast". The script can pull in data from a web url (what I use), a command-line command, or a custom python function.