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Google Cools Data Center With Bathroom Water
judgecorp writes "Google is cooling its data center in Douglas County, Georgia, using 'recycled' water that has been through the bathtubs and toilets of the surrounding community. So called 'grey' water is perfectly adequate for the data center's cooling system which relies on evaporation (the wet T-shirt effect), says Google."
What do they do with the shit and other solid matter like hair plus the corrosive chemicals in urine and other chemicals people flush down the drain?
does not have the electrolytes data centers crave.
I...I am not even sure what say to that...
Palm trees and 8
...be ~higher~ if I was there, expecially after the two-bottle-of-vodka bender that would precede my visit...
No, no sig. Really.
ThePromenader
The pipes that carry the water to the systems that need cooling could get shit-clogged! woah!
(rimshot)
Apparently evaporation is the tendency for young women on spring break to get drunk and engage in civil disobedience of public indecency laws. Somehow, this is related to cooling.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
"I love the smell of vaporized toilet water in the morning". I just hope they find a way to clean the tubes as well.
If I lived in Douglas County, I'd be spending a weekend researching on what chemicals to flush to destroy this system.
Herb: Damn Jim, the server room evaporator is leaking again Jim: I just called roto rooter, they should be here in an hour Herb: I guess we can just mop this piss up
That's a pretty crappy way of cooling a datacenter.
(I'm sorry. I had to.)
What a shitty system.
"Graywater" is water that does not contain human waste, but has been used for other purposes and isn't fit for drinking.
"Blackwater" is sewage water containing human waste (and easily confused with the mercenary business formerly owned by Erik Prince).
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Engineers have been considering approaches like this for ages. It's good to see it being put into practice.
As best I can tell, one of the biggest hurdles is local waste-handling laws. When we had a local drought a few years ago, we were saving wash water to put on our outdoor plants -- but that was a violation of local policy, because cooties from your dirty clothes might get into The Environment, contaminating all the bird and squirrel and cat and dog waste that's already there.
I'm sure Google's treatment policies have satisfied the local authorities, and if they're proceeding with the project, I'm sure they've found a way that's cost-effective.
I am afraid that my opinion of the IQ of the average /. reader just dropped an infinitesimal amount.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Data centers are already full of shit, this is just a little more
Kirk: The cooling system to the warp drive is down again Scotty. How soon can you fix it?
Scotty: Ach Jim, I'm a warp drive engineer, not a plumber....
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
I'm no potty expert, but I thought that water that is output from a toilet is called black water, water collected from the bathtub, and kitchen are called grey water, and what they are actually using is called treated water.
Am I just behind the times on the terminology or is the article's writer just being sloppy?
Pooping in the sink,
pooping in the sink,
I'm clogging up their coolers
'cause I'm pooping in the sink!
Shower, bathroom sink, maybe clothes washer - not toilet.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
They need to stop the free soda and lemonade bar.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"Google has just won first place in a wet t-shirt contest" was all I read. I don't think that was even written anywhere.
What comes from toilets is 'black water', but 'grey water'. Grey comes from showers, washing machines, etc. It's specifically that which has been used, but has a low risk of pathogens in it.
From the article, it sounds like they're using a blend of the two ... but they never linked to the March 15th Jim Brown blog post. From reading his blog, he states, "We worked with the WSA to build a side-stream plant about five miles west of our data center that diverts up to 30 percent of the water that would have gone back into the river", while the article linked to states "about 30 percent of the water is diverted from the WSA system".
The article makes it sound like they're getting the water *before* it would have been cleaned by the water treatment plant ... from the blog post, I'd say it's after it's been treated, and getting it before it would have been sent back to the river. So it's treated wastewater, which would've already gone through some sort of system to remove pathogens.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
HTTP error 666: Turd overload
Usually "gray" water is water from showers, sinks, etc. -- everything but toilets. Water from toilets, including human wastes, is called "black" water. Some systems keep these separate, although most municipal systems (including, it appears, Douglas County, Georgia) mix them together. So this water starts out as "black", but according to TFA, it's partially cleaned up before being sent to the data center. Apparently it's treated enough to be called "gray", but still isn't potable. Then Google finishes the water treatment and releases the result into the river which is where it would have gone after the county treatment center anyway.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
OT but possibly of interest: the daughter of a friend of ours studied environmental biology at university. Her mother wondered what use it could possibly be. As a researcher into water treatment, she is now into her second paid postgraduate placement with the prospect of a very well paid international job at the end of it. Oil may be sexier, but water is actually the more important resource.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Given the high humidity of the South East I would think they could be better served with high efficiency air conditioners and some sort of solar to help offset the costs.
Garbage in, Garbage out?
I cool my servers with the frost piss
Let me guess.
The servers are all going to overheat on Seis de Mayo. All the spicy food the day before will be warming up the cooling water.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
until the shit hits the fan...
They're not using greywater. Greywater is untreated non-human-waste water, like from sinks and showers. Google is using the water which has already been treated by the waste water treatment plant and would otherwise be delivered back to a river. It's not pure enough to drink, but it isn't bathwater. It's purity is somewhere in between tap water and river water, with almost zero "floaties".
But yay poop jokes. Who knew /. had so many 4th graders?
Core dumped... All my data went down the tubes...
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
It's almost a reality?
http://www.google.com/onceuponatime/tisp/install.html
Paul: Father... father, the sleeper has awakened! - Dune
My g/f's from Japan and when we went to visit recently I noticed a lot of homes had toilets with a sink built into the top of the toilet tank. When you flushed, the water to fill the tank came out a faucet and you could wash your hands with it. Not only recycles but saves room in a 1/2 bath... a simple little thing we should see more of here in the states. As an example...
Flush the queue!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Sounds like a pretty crappy design to me.
Just another ignorant American.
There are small systems that can produce recyclable water even for single family homes. The National Sanitation Foundation now has NSF Standard 350 so manufacturers can test to a protocol and become certified. The water can be used (depending on state code) to fill toilets, urinals, water the lawn, wash your car, lots of non potable uses. Right now there is only one device certified, the Bio-Microbics Bio-Barrier http://www.biomicrobics.com/?p=59 However several other manufacturers are now testing. Recycled water is no longer limited to large facilities.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
someone has to do the dirty work on saving the planet.
does not have the electrolytes data centers crave.
Unless they are running puppy linux. My dogs love the big white drinking fountain.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
...but a giant floating corncob.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
hardware with nipples - I think I died and went to heaven
Well, the three water treatment specialists I know include two PhDs and a mere MSc, who between them have done research into everything from rural water purification in Africa to the adhesion of bacterial colonies on permanent water hardness deposition in domestic pipes. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I have to admit I had to read the TFA in order to understand how the hell this system works.
So they use open circuit cooling towers with cleanish water coming from a sewage treatment plant.
Those wet cooling towers are known for being prone to Legionellosis, even when clean water is used.
This problem probably becomes worse with dirty water.
I wouldn't like to be the technician cleaning and repairing those towers.
Anyway, thanks for the epithets.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Evaporative cooling works well in hot and dry climates. In humid climates it is not that good a choice. For a large building they would need large towers with powerful fans (think helicopter) creating a slight vacuum in the up draft to encourage evaporation. Usually intake water temperatures will drop only a few degrees and that slightly cooler water is then pumped into a chiller which eats electricity big time. The water chilled in the chiller is usually about 55 degrees and is pumped through coils that act like the opposite of a radiator in your car. This requires water treatment and should only be done in areas that have water low in calcium. Frankly I doubt that Georgia is the right place for this type of cooling system. Perhaps they have done something different than what i think they have done.
I don't know about you, but I poo in my shower. Easy to clean off and I don't waste toilet paper. Plus there's just something satisfying about taking a shit while standing up, my wife agrees. I had a garbage disposal installed in my bathtub drain just for that reason.
Captcha: Spurted
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/
stephen
A minor point, but one that shines out in an economic discussion about water, is that there is, and can never be, any such thing as a WATER shortage.
There are about two cubic kilometers of water for each man, woman and child on this planet. And when we drink or use water it is never destroyed. It just passes through us and returns in a cycle. So the idea of 'saving' or 'wasting' water is mistaken. Subtly, but nonetheless fundamentally mistaken.
What there CAN easily be is a water storage and distribution infrastructure shortage. Water will always be there somewhere - we just have to consider how much we want to spend to obtain it. That is the infrastructure cost - NOT the water cost.
What tends to happen is that water companies do not want to spend their profits on new infrastructure as a population rises. Instead, they run the infrastructure with higher pressures, and try to make do. Then, as the rainfall naturally fluctuates, a short year will catch them out. Because the 'short' years' lack of rainfall is obvious to the population, the water companies find it easy to claim that a 'climate change' has occurred, and that everyone must 'save this scarce resource'. In fact, the water resource is fixed (at about 330m cubic miles) and can never be used up - it is infinite in practice - and the shortage is actually in the provision of water storage/head of population.
Going for 'water-saving' systems therefore completely misses the problem. It just lowers people's water-using lifestyles to bring them into line with the water companies' ability to provide without any new investment. And when that happens, the water companies rake in the profit, selling a reduced level of product (their infrastructure/per head) to many more people at the same price as before. There is no particular reason to be profligate with water use, but equally, there should be no reason to 'save' it. What you are actually saving is water-company investment, NOT a 'natural resource'.
I have yet to see ANY appreciation of this fact when 'water shortages' are discussed...
Facts don't matter. It's the feeling that matters.
I think you are perfect for a career opportunity with the TSA!!!
Instead of boiling water to the atmosphere, they could boil ethanol / sour mash into fuel. That would seem to have a much greater environmental and monetary pay-off than simply turning sewage into slightly less sewage + excess humidity.
If treated for the proper components, perhaps the sewage could be used for the mash water...then you're killing about three birds with one stone.
It would make more sense to move server farms to the arctic where the heat could be used to keep greenhouses warm.
Epitaph: At last! Root access!
sounds wasteful. har har har har.
Where I am from water from the toilet is black water. Grey water is water from shower/sink.
Microsoft aggravates my tourettes syndrome.
I mean seriously, this could explain a lot. And here you guys have been blaming SEO.