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A more environmentally friendly solution is to get a heat pump.
by speedgoose 6y ago
A 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.