7 ms·
If you have a use for the heat generated (like heating a home or business) then running a miner means getting free heat, even if the cryptocoin generated does n
by rapjr9 4y ago
If you have a use for the heat generated (like heating a home or business) then running a miner means getting free heat, even if the cryptocoin generated does not pay for the electricity. Current cryptominers are generally too noisy for home heating though (although GPU's might be quieter).
- lxgr 4y agoElectric heating is extremely inefficient, compared to almost all alternatives.
- LegitShady 4y agoelectrical heating is 100% efficient - heat pumps, though, have higher efficiency since they're just moving heat instead of generating it.
- anonymousab 4y ago100% efficient at the home, but not necessarily overall. Power generation itself and transmission to the home can be much less efficient (and much more expensive!) than, say, home natural gas heating. Depends on the area and many other factors, e.g. how the electricity is generated. In much of the northern US/south eastern Canada, electric heating is much more expensive and less efficient overall.
- LegitShady 4y ago>natural gas heating Natural gas heating is less than 100% efficient (if a new furnace maybe in the area of 80%), and causes global warming. >Power generation itself and transmission is separate from the efficiency of the heating process, which is 100% efficient.
- philwelch 4y agoIf the electric power at your home was originally generated by natural gas, it’s more efficient for you to burn the gas yourself.
- LegitShady 4y agobut if it wasn't, then it isn't.
- philwelch 4y agoI thought that went without saying, but you’ve gone and said it anyway and you aren’t wrong. Unless your power is generated by coal, in which case you’re even better off using natural gas.
- lxgr 4y agoA discussion about the (in)efficiency of mining is necessarily one about externalities, so arguably you can‘t ignore these.
- ericbarrett 4y agoTo put it in perspective, heat pumps typically have an "efficiency" (coefficient of performance) of 250-350%, meaning they pump 2.5-3.5 times as much energy as they consume. So it's roughly 1/2 to 1/3 the cost to heat the same amount of space.
- LegitShady 4y agothe problem is that as the outside gets colder, heat pumps get less efficient, so places that need the most heating benefit the least from heat pumps, and those are the places that use the most amount of energy for heat. So yes, I agree, but heat pumps have cold weather limitations that mean they only benefit relatively warm climates.
- ericbarrett 4y agoTrue, but if the heat pump is designed to operate in very cold weather the minimum efficiency is 100% (backup resistance heating), so you will always at least break even versus pure resistance heating. Discounting equipment costs of course :) Also, I've never seen a building (in the U.S.) that relies on electric heating if temps in the area will get much below 10°F (-12°C). At that point, it's always natgas/propane/fuel oil/wood.
- Epa095 4y ago> if the heat pump is designed to operate in very cold weather the minimum efficiency is 100% (backup resistance heating), so you will always at least break even versus pure resistance heating. But the heat pump has a "outside" part, where there is a fan and other electrify using stuff. Can you not risk that more heat is generated outside than is moved inside?
- LegitShady 4y ago>I've never seen a building (in the U.S.) Sadly I've seen many buildings (apartments and homes) that use electric baseboard heaters, and you probably have as well. They just aren't very modern.
- 4y ago
- lxgr 4y agoOnly if you disregard how it‘s produced. Burning gas to generate electricity to heat a home is much less efficient than just burning the gas within that home, for example.
- ipspam 4y agoHeating a single room as opposed to a house can allow electrically generated heat to make sense. Keep the house at 66, heat one room at a time to 70.
- helpfulclippy 4y agoI like to keep my mining rig on a handtruck, and then I cart it from room to room to keep warm. The children so love gathering around it, warming their hands by the ASICs, as they listen to their father tell spooky stories about fiat currency and central banking and the time we had a real house with a working furnace and lost it because daddy leveraged it with an adjustable rate mortgage to buy a dumb ape avatar on Twitter.
- aidenn0 4y agoMy previous house had resistive electrical heating, and I seriously considered building a mining rig to only run in the winter.
- philwelch 4y agoOne of my crackpot startup ideas is a “smart space heater” that mines cryptocurrency.
- c0balt 4y agoSome people actually followed that idea through. A quick search yields a few results including this[0] 3-9K$ "product line". [0]: https://bitcoinminingheater.com/ https://bitcoinminingheater.com/
- ProllyInfamous 4y agoThis is exactly what I do in my residential home — winter heating — the only time I'm mining (Monero, typ) is when my heat pump can't keep up. I have my main miner eject heat onto my feet/workstation in lieu of an electric space heater. From my own energy monitoring applications, I recon about 40% of my winter heating needs are met in this manner. I DO use a heat pump for heating between 40°F-60°F, but the efficiency of such a device rapidly diminishes as the temperature falls below freezing. Below 20°F, an average heat pump begins to be LESS efficient than simple resistive heating.
- tzs 4y agoCurrent heat pumps can do quite a bit better than that. Mitsubishi's residential air-source ductless mini-split heat pumps that have their "Hyper-heating inverter" technology, and similar systems from Fujitsu, are still about twice as efficient as electrical resistance heating down to around 0℉. They don’t start getting beat by resistance heating until around -15℉. Their capacity starts dropping at around 23℉ and would be around 75% at -15℉ so if you need to go below 23℉ you do have to oversize your system.