Home Heat Hubs – a win-win for healthy homes and sustainable communities

It’s a rare day now when we don’t see something in our news feeds about AI and, increasingly, the infrastructure required to power its development and deliver its benefits.

The AI Opportunities Action Plan produced last year for the government set out targets to ensure the UK can lead in this frontier technology, and one year on many of these have or are being achieved. A central feature of this plan is the development of data centres across the country – and as I argued at the end of last year, one of these is coming soon to a community near you.

What’s changed in the last year has been both the speed of AI advancement and the scale of the infrastructure requirements to support it. This has led to a lot more awareness, and scrutiny, of the impact data centres have on the environment, on local health, and on their voracious demands for water and energy.  

In recent weeks awareness and scrutiny have reached new heights, and have underpinned a protest movement in some local communities where data centres are being proposed. We can expect the tension between those who believe that the rollout of data centres across urban hubs is a matter of life or death and those that believe data centres must be stopped to increase.

Easing these tensions will be challenging and require new approaches to balancing the often conflicting and competing demands for economic growth, environmental sustainability and community self-determination.

One such approach is to use the waste heat that data centres produce to heat homes, offices and public facilities in the communities where they are located. The opportunity is substantial -- according to the International Energy Agency, there are over 8,000 data centres around the world operating 24/7 to support digital activity, and these  already account for 1–1.5% of global electricity demand. Cooling alone consumes up to 40% of this energy, and the IEA estimates that nearly 97% of the electricity they use could be recovered as heat. “Traditionally vented to the atmosphere, this low-grade thermal energy presents a consistent, renewable source for local heating solutions”, their recent report states.

District heating schemes, which distribute heat generated from a centralised facility to nearby homes and businesses, are  

beginning to be developed around data centres. The continuous output from data centres can provide a steady heat supply for residential, commercial, and even agricultural applications, significantly reducing reliance on fossil fuels.

Several major regeneration projects in London, including Earls Court and Old Oak and Park Royal, are currently developing and operating these district heating systems, and the GLA is actively exploring ways to optimise data centres  in London through heat reuse. Other places in the UK benefiting from the heat transfer from data centres include Milton Keynes University Hospital where a new energy network is being developed to scale up this approach, and Crawley in East Sussex, where a scheme to take waste heat from nearby data centres and Gatwick Airport to heat local homes is in development.

District heating schemes powered by data centres are certainly a sustainable way forward for places undergoing large-scale regeneration, where both space to accommodate the data centre(s) and the infrastructure investment to deliver waste heat to multiple homes, offices and facilities are available (and plentiful). But what about smaller sites and smaller developments? How can an individual business or homeowner benefit from the low-cost and low-carbon heating solutions that our growing demand for data centres offers?

Enter Thermify, an energy technology company that provides low-carbon, affordable home heating and hot water by repurposing waste heat from distributed data centres. It’s the distributed bit that makes this work.

I learned about Thermify from a BBC report that caught my eye at the end of last year, which described a retired couple in Essex who replaced their gas boiler with a data centre in their garden shed. Their heating bill had fallen to between £40 and £60 each month, despite turning the heating up “fairly high to keep it nice and warm. “it's fantastic because it's eco-friendly - we're not burning any gases, so it's green and environmentally friendly,” they enthused.

Low-cost, low-carbon – low hassle? How can this be? The key is in small, distributed data centres, which is what Thermify produces as its Home Heat Hub.

Traditionally, data centres are large facilities that house a large number of powerful computers, sometimes thousands of them. Much of our digital activity, from browsing the web to editing an online document, actually happens in these facilities – commonly referred to as “the cloud”.

Thermify has developed a technology  - the Home Heat Hub - that offers customers cloud services through a distributed network of smaller data centres, called “cubes”. These cubes can be housed in a home, or a garden shed as is the case with the Essex couple, and Thermify will charge companies looking for cloud services to make use of these distributed, mini data centres. So by providing cloud services to businesses it acts as a heat provider for households -- the cost of electricity is largely covered by its cloud customers, allowing Thermify to offer low-to-no-cost heating to homeowners.

“Our mission is to eliminate fuel poverty in the UK”, says Travis Theune, the CEO of Thermify. “we are showing that energy use can be both affordable and sustainable”.

I spoke with Travis about the Home Heat Hub (HHH) and explored how it can deliver both the cloud services needed to drive the country’s economic growth and a sustainable, affordable energy solution to homeowners and local communities at scale.

He began our conversation by explaining that the model belongs to a new category: heat as a service. “It redefines ownership”, he pointed out – “instead of every home burning its own gas, these systems become part of a shared digital-energy ecosystem. The computing work supports businesses; the by-product heat supports households”.

For homes, that can mean lower bills and consistent warmth, vital in a country where fuel poverty remains a real and growing problem. For the planet, it means lower emissions, up to 75 percent less carbon than conventional heating, according to Thermify’s data. And for society, it shows what an inclusive Net Zero future could look like: one where technology and humanity align, and no energy goes to waste.

Travis came to Thermify via a cloud computing and engineering background, taking over the business with a partner in 2020 with a vision to develop and scale their HHH project. The company they took over was based in Llandow, Wales and this is important because their vision of manufacturing the data centre “cube” was dependent on the Raspberry Pi computer, which is made in nearby Cardiff.

The Heat Hub was developed at a time when both computing power and density had scaled up, enabling the packaging of multiple computers into high-density containers. Basically it’s about putting 56 Raspberry Pi computers into a box the size of a toaster”, Travis explained. “The power and size of the Raspberry Pi computers allows densification and access to heat beneficiaries, without any supporting infrastructure”.

The minimal infrastructure requirement is a major factor in the cost benefits of the HHH – there’s no digging up roads, no invasive installation. There is a requirement, however, for the installation of a second meter in each home to allow for heat transfer – and at present this is a challenge according to Travis, “although not one we can’t overcome”

I asked about the potential for HHH to support the development of small sites in cities like London, and Travis explained that it can be designed for both individual and multi-occupancy homes. “It’s modular in its design – the heat cubes that make up the Home Heat Hub can be built up or down”. So unlike the district heating systems described earlier which favour large sites and multiple dwellings, the HHH is ideal for supporting small-scale housing developments on smaller sites.

A key driver of cost in the manufacture of HHHs is the cost of memory chips, which are currently doubling every few months. This is a challenge to scaling up manufacturing, especially at a time when the demand from businesses for cloud computing is almost insatiable while fuel poverty continues to embed in local communities across the country. The need and the opportunity are growing.

At present Thermify is installing its Home Heat Hub in a limited number of homes as part of the UK Power Networks SHIELD initiative, which describes itself as

“an ambitious initiative designed to make the transition to Net Zero more accessible for low-income residents, including those in social housing and other tenures who may not be able to afford to heat their homes or access low carbon technologies (LCTs). The project uses innovative solutions — such as distributed data centres for heating, along with solar panels and battery storage — to intelligently balance energy supply and demand”.

If all goes well Travis is hoping to increase installations significantly over the next eighteen months. He’s hoping that given the charged political environment around both data centres and housing development, his company’s approach to growing cloud computing services while delivering low-cost and low-carbon heat to low-income households will be particularly appealing.

 Thanks to Travis and his team at Thermify for their time and support.

Clare Delmar

Listen to Locals

March 11 2026