5 ms·
Resistive heating is terribly wasteful. If you're going to heat a building electrically, far better to do it with a heat pump. The fact that some perverse quirk
by dTal 5y ago
Resistive heating is terribly wasteful. If you're going to heat a building electrically, far better to do it with a heat pump. The fact that some perverse quirk of economics makes it more economically viable to mine bitcoins than run a heat pump makes it bad for the environment, not good.
No matter how creative you get with the accounting, in the final analysis you're burning a lot of electricity with nothing tangible to show for it.
- emteycz 5y agoHeat pump is way too expensive. The issue here is cost.
- bradlys 5y agoNo, no it isn't. Heat pumps are cheap compared to 3090s and whatever other ASICs you're going to be using. Electricity costs also scale. You're paying 1/4 the electricity cost to heat your "castle" with a heat pump. That - in itself - is very important.
- emteycz 5y agoThe castle is paying like 1/3 they were paying for coal+transport, they're paying for the heat as they go and the crypto mining company is handling the ASICs or GPUs or whatever - the castle doesn't care about that at all (this kind of project is not unusual around here, it's not one-off - energy companies have special tariffs for them now). Unless you know about someone here who would offer this kind of deal with heatpumps, it's passe. The castle does not have enough money to invest, they're using donations from people to at least fix the most important problems - so projects like this are extremely important because every cent counts. They can't invest $XXk and hope it returns in 30 years because they're never going to have that sum to invest, and if they had, they would use it to fix the castle, not for heat pumps. The castle needs it now, not in 30 years.