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I heat my home by mining crypto currencies
- speedgoose 6y agoA more environmentally friendly solution is to get a heat pump.
- krageon 6y agoThe first sentence in the second paragraph explains that the author has a heat pump and what it does for them. The article then goes on to explain where the miners fit in.
- speedgoose 6y agoHe also says he doesn't actually have a real heat pump setup because it's too expensive.
- celticninja 6y agoNo he does not. He says: Many heat pumps take heat from the ground to pre-heat (in winter) or pre-cool (in summer) the outside air before sending it to the heat pump but that would have been too expensive for me The expensive part is laying all the required pipe underground to be able to do this. His heat pump is in place and working, it is how he pre-heats (or cools) the air going into the heat pump that is the issue in play. The expensive option (digging up and installing underground piping) is what he doesnt use, he uses the cryptocurrency miners to do the pre-heating.
- CptMauli 6y agoJust because the air isn't prewarmed in his original setup, it doesn't mean its no heat pump.
- audunw 6y agoDid you even read the article? He does have a heat pump. He just uses mining to pre-heat the air, reducing the energy consumption of the heat-pump when the weather is cold. When it gets really cold, heat pumps can lose some of their efficiency, so in that case this might not be much worse than just relying on the heat-pump itself. It's still not a net-gain environmentally speaking, I guess, but since he uses GPUs he already had lying around I'd say it's not very bad at all.
- speedgoose 6y agoHe isn't using a heatpump. It's too expensive he says.
- freetime2 6y agoThe second paragraph begins with: > My house is heated (and cooled) with a central ventilation system powered by a heat pump. He is definitely using a heat pump.
- speedgoose 6y agoHe has an advanced ventilation system but what he describes is not a heat pump.
- freetime2 6y agoCan you elaborate on why you don’t think it’s a heat pump? He lists the equipment that he has, and the manufacturer deacribes it as a heat pump [1]. He also includes a photo of a compressor, which is typical of a heat pump. [1] https://www.nilanuk.com/domestic-solutions/compact-p/ https://www.nilanuk.com/domestic-solutions/compact-p/
- progval 6y agoI too was skeptical at first, but it does look like this is a heat pump. Heat pumps take as "input" a stream of air at temperatures T_cold and T_hot (T_cold < T_hot) and output streams at temperatures T_verycold and T_veryhot. You can see these four pipes here, around component (1): https://pictshare.net/1024/sbmusz.jpg https://pictshare.net/1024/sbmusz.jpg T_cold comes from outside and T_hot comes from inside; T_verycold and T_veryhot go to the outside and to the inside. However, the efficiency of the heat pump decreases as T_cold lowers (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump_and_refrigeration_cycle#Coefficient_of_performance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump_and_refrigeration_cy... ). So by "preheating" T_cold with the bitcoin miner, the efficiency of the heat pump itself increases. However, the efficiency of the whole system (heat pump + miner) decreases when you have the miner on. (Otherwise, heat pumps would just have a built-in heater to do it.) So adding the bitcoin miner decreases the power efficiency of the whole system; but it may increase the monetary efficiency, if the revenue generated by the miner is high enough to compensate for the increased power usage.
- celticninja 6y agoHe is using a heat pump, he is using the excess heat of the miners to pre-warm air used by the heat pump to heat his house. The miners offset some of the cost of the heat pump and pay for their own electricity use.
- speedgoose 6y agoI think he is wrong when he calls his ventilation system a heat pump. The point of the heat pump is to pump the heat from outside.
- celticninja 6y agoThats not how a heat pump works. It doesnt just take warm air from outside and blow it into your house, otherwsie they would be useless in winter. https://www.jerrykelly.com/blog/how-does-a-heat-pump-work-in-winter https://www.jerrykelly.com/blog/how-does-a-heat-pump-work-in... So this is a heat pump, it its taking heat from outside air, its just that in this case the outside air is first primed by running it via some cryptominers, which makes the heat pump work more efficiently.
- speedgoose 6y ago> It doesnt just take warm air from outside and blow it into your house, otherwsie they would be useless in winter. For sure. I'm not talking about the air but the heat. If the heat is generated by resistive heaters (his GPUs are mostly that) the heat pump may not have to work as hard to get enough heat but the total efficiency (including the GPUs) is not as good.
- MayeulC 6y agoI'm pretty sure it would be more efficient to directly heat the air inside than the heat pump input, though. At most they can transfer exactly the added energy.
- sumtechguy 6y agoHe also gets coins out of it? That at the moment could be worth more? There are several axis of 'cost' vs 'perf' vs 'utility' vs 'efficiency' that would need to be graphed out to see if it is actually worth this setup. He is seeing cost as a major concern. Getting coins for a set amount of energy and using the extra heat as offset for his heating bill. So I could see if you did this right it could come out better. But that would need to be graphed out.
- miked85 6y agofrom TFA: My house is heated (and cooled) with a central ventilation system powered by a heat pump.
- dreen 6y agoYears ago when mining with a single gaming card was more common and viable, I lived in a rented room in a house owned by a live-in landlord who controlled the heating, and wouldn't turn it on for very long in the winter. Since electricity was included in my (fixed) rent, I was able to keep my room a few degrees higher than the rest of the house. However I must point out that you shouldn't do this in most circumstances, there are environmentally friendly ways of heating your house.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- celticninja 6y agoI mean the OP found an environmentally friendly and economic way of heating his house.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- berdario 6y agoI'm in a similar situation, and I'm just using an electric heater... No fancy mining setup. But I'm also thinking, maybe actually this is for the better? (Not only for the stingy landlord, but for the environment). I mean, even if a heat pump is much better than an electric heater... Having to heat up only the rooms that need it, instead of kitchen, bathrooms, living room (plus the rooms of other flatmates who might not be bothered) might actually use up less energy total, than using a more efficient mechanism, which otoh would be used for the whole home.
- cjrp 6y agoI'm not sure if they're common where you are, but this is what Thermostatic Radiator Valves are used for. You can set an approximate room temperature, and the valve will open/close based on that. There are also smart ones now which can have a schedule applied to them, e.g. don't heat my bedroom during the day.
- 6y ago
- david_draco 6y agoAre you going to stop mining in summer?
- DuckyC 6y agoThe article says he only mines when the price is high enough and the house needs heating.
- andi999 6y agoTotal electricity consumption would be interesting.
- lmilcin 6y agoI wonder if we could make it even better and make smart heaters that instead of wasting calculations actually do something useful, something like folding proteins or some other computing load that doesn't require huge network load and can be easily distributed (something like SETI@home but actually useful). In densely populated cities we could bury huge datacenters underground and use that energy for heating directly, and use excess to produce electricity.
- bayindirh 6y agoWelcome to Qarnot. https://qarnot.com/en/the-radiator-computer/ https://qarnot.com/en/the-radiator-computer/
- neilalexander 6y ago> The computing-heater warms buildings ecologically and for free, thanks to the waste heat released by embedded microprocessors. By performing complex IT operations... ... which are what, exactly?
- ryankrage77 6y agoGoing by the vaguness of the site, I wouldn't be suprised if they're mining bitcoin for themselves while you pay for the electricity. Edit: Dug around some more, looks like they're building a BOINC-like service? https://computing.qarnot.com/en/ https://computing.qarnot.com/en/
- bayindirh 6y agoIf I remember correctly, they pay for the network and electricity use of the heater. They rent the platform for computation to other third parties. So you, store and cool the computer for free. They probably sell directly to buildings and municipalities during construction, so it's installed and left there. So you either just rent it for a nominal fee or pay nothing.
- jariel 6y agoFuture humans will wonder why humanity wasted so much valuable time, effort and real for no reason.
- exdsq 6y agoBitcoin mining is still wastes half of the electricity of dormant (plugged in but unused) electrical devices in the US -- it's bad but we do other things that are worse
- ohgodplsno 6y agoJust because the house is on fire doesn't mean you let the shed that is on the side burn too. All you're saying is that there's an easy fix to save all that energy by just stopping mining bitcoin.
- foobar33333 6y agoOne of these is a minuscule amount of waste over an entire population which is very hard to reduce. The other is a very small group using a very large amount of power for very little gain which would be easy to stop. Regardless, the solution to all is pretty simple, a carbon tax. If bitcoin miners want to build their own solar farm, let them.
- dmos62 6y agoDo you really think Bitcoin mining/speculation is up there with the most wasteful and counter-productive things we do? It doesn't currently have much social value, but, man, there's much worse things. Think of US military spending. If you think that military has a reason to be, while speculation doesn't, you don't understand speculation.
- jariel 6y agoYes, BTC is the most wasteful. Other things we think are wasteful, are not - either they are for pleasure, or they are byproducts of other things, or they are contextually relevant (i.e. weapons/war), part of the systematic inconsistency but not strictly wasteful. Even then, there are benefits. Mining BTC using electricity is up there with the stupidest things we do - there are many ways to distribute new BTCs, handing them over to those who consume the most resources is a terrible idea. Given the cost of electricity and that it's a scarce resource, often subsidized etc. - BTC mining should probably be illegal unless you make your own electricity. My local government is actively trying to court BTC miners, with what is subsidized electricity - I can't think of a more directly wasteful thing to do.
- TheOv3rminD 6y agoI've been doing this for years. I keep my miners inside though and take a much more lazy approach. In the summer I exhaust the heat outside with 4" dryer conduit. In the winter I redirect the same conduit into the main living area and several rooms near the server room. Saves a ton on my heating bill. A lot of the time I don't even need to run the central heater at all.
- Sohcahtoa82 6y agoI did this in an apartment I lived in years ago, and do it now in my house. My computer room in the house is the lowest point in the house, so naturally, it tends to be a couple degrees cooler than the upstairs. This means that if I set the thermostat so that the computer room is comfortable, the bedroom is too warm. If I run the house circulation fan constantly, it's not an issue, but that consumes a decent amount of power. If I'm going to consume that much power, I might as well mine crypto and make a few dollars. Mining for NiceHash, a service that lets people rent hashing power from miners, I'll average $100-400/month worth of Bitcoin on my RTX 3080, depending on current hashing prices, and how much of my time I spend gaming, since mining is effectively paused while gaming. The mining happens while I use my computer with no noticeable loss in performance, and it puts a few watts of energy into the room to heat it up a bit, evening it out with the rest of the house.
- lupire 6y agoWhat is the $ cost of the power?
- hnuser123456 6y ago$0.10/kWh @ 300W = $0.1/kWh * 0.3 kW * 720 hrs/mo = $21.60/month
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Sohcahtoa82 6y agoAbout $20-25/month. But it's not as if the cost of power is wasted. It's generating heat which I desire. If my GPU is consuming 300W, then that's 300W of heat that my heater doesn't have to generate.
- ericd 6y agoElectric resistive heating is the worst form of heating, though - heat pumps are something like 3-4x the heat per kwh used. So not totally wasted, but a much worse way to get heat into your house, if that's your goal.
- progfix 6y agoThe author did not mention the key factor in this: Sufficient thermal insulation. Looking at the photo of his house, this type of modern house has at least 16 cm thermal isolation on the facade and at least 20 cm on the roof.
- H8crilA 6y agoWhat will happen to the cards once the crypto boom is over? There was a lot of trashed AntMiners out there after the late 2017 bubble, and with it a good amount of CAPEX written down.
- geek_at 6y agothey still make great LAN party GPUs. HL2 mp is not a problem and even ark runs on them somewhat
- aloisdg 6y agothis is the way
- vgalin 6y agoThis is only true for ASIC miners, ASICs (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) are pieces of hardware designed to do very specific things - e.g. mining crypto currencies. When these cards become obsolete or aren't profitable anymore, trashing them is almost the only thing you can do. On the other side, GPUs, even if they are not profitable anymore to crypto currency miners, can still be used afterwards or sold back.
- pedrocr 6y agoThe explanation of needing to pre-heat the air into the heat pump is strange. Modern A/C systems can pump heat at 500%+ efficiency even with very cold outside temperatures, no pre-heating needed. Replacing that with resistances is a 5x or more reduction in efficiency. That heat pump doesn't seem to have an outside unit so may be less efficient but it would need to be very poor to go down to only 100%. Installing a proper A/C system would provide both much higher efficiency heating in winter but also add the capability to cool in summer when the solar panels are actually providing a lot of energy.
- Haemm0r 6y ago"Modern A/C systems can pump heat at 500%+ efficiency even with very cold outside temperatures, no pre-heating needed." Name a source please.
- pedrocr 6y agoHere's a current R32 system by Daikin: https://www.daikin.co.uk/content/dam/dauk/document-library/data-sheet/ac/R32/r32_split/FTXA-AB%20(WSTB)%20RXA-AB_Datasheet_1067.pdf https://www.daikin.co.uk/content/dam/dauk/document-library/d... SCOP is at 5.15 and that's a seasonally adjusted value. So over the entirety of the winter the unit is expected to deliver 5.15 units of heat for each unit of energy. The unadjusted COP is 6.27. For this unit operational limits are listed at -15C/5F and I think there are units that go quite a bit lower. I haven't looked at that much as -15C is plenty for us. And this is with air to air. With air to ground much higher efficiencies are possible. For cooling it's even better, with the equivalent SEER at 8.75. The improvements have been so good that the efficiency scale is already at A+++ because the A standard has been so exceeded.
- Haemm0r 6y agoIf you do not have temps below 0-5°C that might be true. Below the freezing point efficiency drops quite a bit.
- 6y ago
- williesleg 6y agoAnd that's why there is no such thing as global warming.
- cgufus 6y agoI'm not sure I understand the principle. A heat pump achieves a COP (coefficient of performance) of approx. 3-4 (e.g. by investing 1 kWh of electricity, a heat pump generates 3-4 kWh of heat by extracting from the surroundings, air or sole, 2-3 kWh). In this example, by pre-heating the air, you supply the heat pump with ~0.9 kWh of thermal energy (the miner will convert 900 watt directly to heat I would assume). So instead of 1 kWh of electricity consumption from the heatpump, you have 1 kWh of electricity for the heat pump, plus 0.9 kWh for the mining, and you end up with a bit more than 3-4 kWh (since the COP of a heat pump increases if the source temperature is higher). So in a nuthsell: before: in 1 kWh, out 3-4 kWh after: in 1.9 kWh, out 3.5 - 4.5 kWh so you lose 0.4 kWh?
- shoo_pl 6y agoOn principle, yes. There are quirks - the COP is different for lower temperatures, and becomes 1:1 at around 5F (-15C). So preheating the air could improve the effectiveness at low temperatures, and I am guessing it might look like this: - before: 1kWh in, 1kWh out - after: 1.9kWh in, > 1.9kWh out However, if it was that simple, I suppose heat pump manufactures would include a pre-heating as built-in feature. It's very likely that he reduced the energy consumption of heat pump by 50%, but at the same time he uses more than those 50% for mining and has a negative total result that is being offset by the profit from mining itself. Which probably nice for him, but not really for environment :)
- throw0101a 6y ago> There are quirks - the COP is different for lower temperatures, and becomes 1:1 at around 5F (-15C). It depends on the unit. Some (Mitsubishi FE12NA) have a COP of 1.75 even at -10F / -20C. See Table 6: * https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy11osti/52175.pdf https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy11osti/52175.pdf
- cgufus 6y agoThe used coolant mainly infleunces these numbers. check chart on: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Coefficient-of-performance-COP-versus-evaporating-temperature-at-condensing-temperature_fig6_264859123 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Coefficient-of-performan...
- illustriousbear 6y agoThe thing I find funny about HackerNews is how you see plenty of wasteful hobby projects hit the main page. Yet someone using a crypto miner to generate heat / side money is somehow a terrible project.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y agoIt's almost like there are different scales of waste and contributing to a system that burns about as much energy as Argentina to secure a paltry number of transactions is on the higher end of that.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- timdaub 6y ago> terrible project I think that's a terrible comment. I salute everyone that tries to make the incredible inefficient third law of thermodynamics more efficient. Sure, you can say that crypto mining is superfluid. But so is all human invented technology to a degree. I rather have someone building a cool heating system than enormous data centers wasting it.
- coold 6y agoI hope he uses a large air filter before GPUs.
- geek_at 6y agoeven pollen filters since I'm allergic to everything outside
- joosters 6y agoMy mining rig will stay profitable until the ETH price is at ~900$ I don't think this is at all true. Even if the price of the crypto remained stable, the mining difficulty will keep on increasing as more miners join. So after a time, his mining rigs will consume more money in electricity than they generate in coins.
- 3np 6y agoWell, no, at a certain point (and indeed during normal market conditions, which right now isn't) there's an equilibrium. As global hashrate goes up, as you not, profitability goes down, which makes miners switch to other chains, or, eventually, power down their rigs. I think your initial statement is correct, but from the wrong direction; if the ETH price is at 900$, the incentive to mine is less, some of current hashpower will already have left the mining of ETH, ergo OP is actually likely to still be profitable, although less so.
- joosters 6y agoI didn't specify a direction, so I'm not sure how I can be describing the wrong one? My point is that the price of ethereum doesn't have to move at all and yet his mining rig will become unprofitable after a time. The hash rate will increase and/or more efficient miners will come online, leaving his equipment needing to mine faster or use less electricity in order to generate the same returns.
- 3np 6y agoI misinterpreted your comment then, apologies! But, it's not a given that we'll have a significant enough increase of miners for that to be the case and time will tell (unless you happen to have knowledge I don't!)
- jcpham2 6y agoTakes me back to 2012 and the 600$ power bills
- kuon 6y agoI am always amazed that some countries allow electricity for heating. Here it is mostly geothermal, solar, gas or oil (the last two being phased out). There are also a lot of cities with distant heating, for example, here, the garbage factory heat the whole city while burning the garbages. But well, if you can mine crypto while heating, good I guess, even if there might be better ways to use compute power.
- dgacmu 6y agoUsing an electric heat pump is very efficient, usually better than heating directly by burning gas. In many high efficiency houses, the leftover demand not satisfied by the heat pump is more easily satisfied by a small amount of electric resistance heating - and you get a double win if you don't have to run gas to your house at all, saving both the monthly gas connection fee, simplifying internal plumbing, and improving safety.) Using electric resistance heating alone is usually bad, as you say.
- s0rce 6y agoIn my old house we didn't have natural gas, options were: get a truck to refill a propane tank (we didn't have a tank), burn wood (we lived in the desert of eastern WA, not many trees) or use an electric heat pump (we had abundant cheap hydropower from the Columbia river basin). Was an easy choice. Supplemented with an electric resistance heater for the coldest days in the winter.
- aloisdg 6y agoIn France, the electricity is mostly nuclear. Heating with electricity is not a problem.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoThe future will be electric heating for everyone, once we have enough renewable and storage sources.
- shawnz 6y agoIf you prefer gas, you could use it to power a gas generator and use that electricity to mine bitcoins. All the waste heat from both the mining and the generator could be used to heat your house
- lmilcin 6y agoI wonder if a country could produce bitcoin miners that convert electricity to heat and use that heat for their industry while also getting to control trillions in bitcoin once they cross 50% of mining capacity. Most likely bitcoin would loose all value then as the value is basically product of trust in the bitcoin network, but still an interesting idea for a state-sponsored attack.
- keyme 6y ago>50% bitcoin mining capacity is already in China since like 2014 (unless something drastically changed). The beauty of the PoW blockchain is that if a nation attains this kind of power, then still, the most profitable thing to do would be to keep playing by the rules. This is why bitcoin works.
- FridgeSeal 6y agoThat assertion doesn’t necessarily hold. There’s political advantage to be gained by taking and holding that advantage so that it can be tactically trashed when it needs to be. Your comment implies that China would increasingly lean further in to supporting cryptocurrencies, when we know that they’re not a fan of tolerating things that even look they might try to challenge their authority any longer than it is advantageous for them.
- altcognito 6y agoMan, humans can rationalize just about anything. Lucky for him he had thousands of dollars of computer equipment just lying around he could use to heat his home. We’re not even close to peak Bitcoin I imagine.
- dgellow 6y ago> If you keep your coins longer than the one-year speculation period, it's tax free. You still have to pay income taxes on the mining reward (same for staking rewards). The 1 year period is only for capital gains, so only for the benefits made when selling the asset.
- ketamine__ 6y agoThere are no tax free capital gains?
- wffurr 6y agoOP is in Austria.
- Havoc 6y agoSame here. 200w 24/7 keeps the temp cozy
- major505 6y agoI believe the moment the author says that he's using amd gpus.
- pjfin123 6y agoHow efficiently do GPUs heat? I'm assuming most of the input energy is lost to heat?
- oever 6y agoGPUs are 100% efficient at turning low entropy energy into high entropy energy i.e. heat. If you take into account transport loss and efficiency of creating the electric current, then it's probably below 50%. Heat pumps typically have an efficiency of 300% (COP 3) because they pump heat from outside to the inside. (inverse of how a refrigerator works).
- wrycoder 6y agoIn the winter, we move our electric food dryer into the kitchen, where it provides heat and humidity. Before October, it’s outside, and is used to finish off the product from the solar dryer. Edit: Maybe it would make sense to get the miner out of the attic and turn it into a food dryer.
- FridgeSeal 6y ago“Person inefficiently wastes gratuitous amounts of energy perpetuating imaginary currency, tries to pass it off as if it’s all ok because their house gets warmer as a side effect”
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- cblconfederate 6y agoso many people use electric heaters, i dont see what s the problem if they are mining on the side
- mrzool 6y agoAll currencies are imaginary. Money is a human construct.
- dang 6y agoPlease don't post take HN threads on generic tangents. They lead to boring, repetitive discussion. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=generic%20discussion%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dang 6y agoPlease don't take HN threads into flamewar, and especially not with classic flamebait. We're trying for something else here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- cblconfederate 6y agoAll these years i ve been wondering why they don't market miners as space heaters. How much would it cost to make one in the 400-800W range?
- klmadfejno 6y agoI did this for a while. It worked. Too well. We had to open the windows amidst a boston winter. In net it was barely profitable, especially with the recoverable cost of the computers. Fun and kind of a weird art installation in a way. Ultimately wasteful.
- elwell 6y ago> Some crypto currencies (don't call them "crypto", that's lame and wrong) "Cryptocurrency" is more than twice as long in letters and syllables. I think we've reached the point where "crypto" is disambiguated in most contexts from "cryptography", or did the author have a different reason for calling that abbreviation "lame and wrong"?
- andy_ppp 6y agoCrypto is an abbreviation of cryptography, by trying to force the abbreviation to mean a specific subset of cryptography you limit all future uses of the word crypto to mean crypto currencies which seems excessive. We might have other words that follow crypto in future.
- akvadrako 6y agoI think blockchain or cryptocoin is also acceptable.
- blueline 6y agoCrypto/cryptography is perfect nerd bait. Easy way to listen to yourself talk while being technically correct about something.
- Abimelex 6y agoThere is even a company which had specialized on heating homes using server heat. https://www.cloudandheat.com/ https://www.cloudandheat.com/
- noxer 6y agoSomeone clearly doesn't understand thermodynamics at all if he seriously thinks putting that thing outside and let the warm air be sucked in, is more efficient that running it inside. for obviously reasons (isolation loses/heat radiation) more energy (heat) is lost outside than inside (inside has zero loses because even the heat that doesn't go where you want it, still is inside the house.)
- dang 6y agoOk, but can you please post to HN without supercilious disses? The information here is good but we don't want a culture of putdowns here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- yarcob 6y ago- He mentioned that mining is more efficient when the GPUs are cooler, so using them to pre-heat outside air is better than using them to heat up room temperature air. - since he would be forcing a lot of air through the miner, almost all heat would be transferred into the house using convection. The miner would stay cool and there would be very little radiation loss. - finally, his ventilation system probably needs pre-heating on very cold days (often with a resistive pre-heater). Using the miner for that is smart.
- noxer 6y ago>He mentioned that mining is more efficient when the GPUs are cooler... Its simply not true. GPUs dont work fast or slower based on temp as long as the temp is in the rated range. It could potentially save energy by spinning the fans slower if the air around is super cool but the energy savings from that would be incredible small. >since he would be forcing a lot of air through the miner, almost all heat would be transferred into the house using convection. The miner would stay cool and there would be very little radiation loss. That's also not how thermodynamics work. The greater the temp differences are the more heat will be lost. The air need time to pick up the heat so you have a partially open box full of warm air outside that will heat up everything around it and possibly radiate heat directly in the sky unless it is extensively isolated. But even then you cant effectively isolation the air intake. >- finally, his ventilation system probably needs pre-heating on very cold days (often with a resistive pre-heater). Using the miner for that is smart. Sure, using the miner _outside_ is the not smart part.
- rektide 6y agoI've spent half a decade sitter ng around with some 4-node 2u's wanting to build a simulation/virtual city that I heat with in the winter. haven't made much progress on this side-quest though. too much other lifting to do.
- pstrateman 6y agoThis makes sense unless you have the option of natural gas heating, then not so much.
- blacksmith_tb 6y agoHow so? He says "on sunny days the miner and whole heat pump are running fully on solar energy collected on my roof", hard to beat that with gas. I would say that moving more houses to all-electric heating, water heaters, clothes dryers etc. is future proofing - right now, a lot of that energy would be from fossil fuels, but swapping in renewables is easy.
- rblatz 6y agoMost electric heaters are heat pumps which are significantly more efficient than heating via resistive or mining. In fact a heat pump's efficiency is about 300%.
- Aachen 6y agoJust to be sure, you're not talking of those €20-50 electric heaters right? Because you say "most" and afaik those are pretty much the only ones people have unless they're in some fancy new building or have a fancy AC and paid extra for that option.
- lgessler 6y agoGP's referring to HVAC systems you'd find eg in a relatively new (1980s+) single family home in America
- shawnz 6y agoYou could run a gas generator to power the miners and all of the waste heat could still heat your home.
- oconnore 6y agoNatural gas heating contributes significantly to climate change, and if you're in an area with significant renewable electric (or if you expect you will eventually over the lifetime of your system), you can lower your carbon footprint by heating with electric heat pumps.
- xenocyon 6y ago1. At an individual/hobbyist level this is a fine thing to do, if one is already a cryptocurrency enthusiast. 2. At a social/planning level it is important to remember that opportunity costs matter, and this should not be recommended as public policy. One kWh of electricity could either be used for mining bitcoin (creating at most one kWh of indoor heat), or it could be used for running a heat pump[*], yielding multiple kWh of indoor heat due to the magic of heat pumps and their >100% "efficiency"[**]. [*] Yes, I realize the OP is already using a heat pump, but assisting it with preheat is inherently less efficient than plowing the same energy into running the heat pump itself. [**] Yes, heat pumps aren't >100% efficient per a physics textbook, but what most people care about is that you can use them to get >1 joule of indoor heat from 1 joule of energy input, which feels magical when compared to electric heaters, gas furnaces etc.
- drran 6y agoDefinition of efficiency (from Google): the ratio of the useful work performed by a machine or in a process to the total energy expended or heat taken in. Heat pumps are >100% efficient. Usually, we cannot convert all input energy into useful work, so efficiency is always <100%, because of energy losses, which are producing waste heat. However, in case of heater, heat is the "useful work", so electrical heaters have "impossible" 100% efficiency, while heat pumps have even more "impossible" >100% efficiency.
- seniorsassycat 6y agoA heat pump in a −273 °C space will convert electricity to heat at a 1:1 ratio. If you count the heat taken from the space around the condenser, which you should based on Google's definition, heat pumps are only 100% efficient. Calling heat pumps >100% efficient is like calling my solar water heater >100% efficient. True if you only count the electrical input, and not other sources of energy.
- CobrastanJorji 6y agoYou will be pleased to know that the majority of heat pumps are installed in homes whose exteriors stay above 0 kelvin year round. Also, in what I assume is an efficiency feature, most heat pumps do not allow operation in a zero Kelvin environment. Also, to nit pick: Kelvins are not degrees and do not use a ° sign.
- GauntletWizard 6y agoWay back in my younger days, I left my PS3 running Folding@Home, and it left my living room noticably warmer - Enough that it replaced the baseboard heater in that room for most of the winter months. I could not say whether the electricity cost was changed any, but it certainly worked.
- St_Alfonzo 6y agoMy mining rig will stay profitable until the ETH price is at ~900$. Or until Ethereum will switch to "Proof of Stake"?
- cortesoft 6y agoSo forever?
- idlewords 6y agoI heat my home by shorting crypto futures. Together we have created a true perpetuum mobile.
- simon_000666 6y agoHow about just building a simple compost heap under the heatpump and using the hot air generated by that to ease the energy needs?
- maerF0x0 6y agoAdded feature is the smell and rats.
- xfitm3 6y agoTired of the environmental rhetoric. This person heats their home and profits. They already have a heat pump and has REDUCED the overall energy consumption. > Success! I was able to lower my heat pump's electricity needs by ~50% and half of the costs are also paid for by the mining earnings
- mtagius 6y agoI think there is a misunderstanding here. His overall energy consumption has gone up, it is only the heat pump the uses ~50% less power now. His home overall used more electricity than when he started because any saved electricity is used to power the miners. This is corroborated by xenocyon's comment: "One kWh of electricity could either be used for mining bitcoin (creating at most one kWh of indoor heat), or it could be used for running a heat pump[*], yielding multiple kWh of indoor heat due to the magic of heat pumps and their >100% 'efficiency'" At the end of the day only the costs of heating were reduced, not the overall electricity usage. I'll admit, this mining setup is far more efficient than most because they use solar power in the summer and in the winter miner heat is used to reduce power needs for the heat pump, but there would be an increase in global electricity usage if this were more popular.
- naebother 6y agoGreen Crypto™
- agumonkey 6y agoI find it quite interesting that we managed to make us of thermal waste through semiconductor based logic..
- hoppla 6y agoI was joking with my friend that we should make and sell heaters that are miners in disguise. The customers would not notice the difference
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- CountDrewku 6y agoHow about don't heat your home with electricity? It's stupid and expensive. Use natural gas. There's a reason no one uses electricity for heating in cold climates.
- minitoar 6y agoIn many places electricity or propane delivered by truck are the only options, aside from burning wood.