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I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

blog.haschek.at

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Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#3
Years 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.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#5
post #3

Years 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 circumstance…

[deleted]

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#7

A more environmentally friendly solution is to get a heat pump.

Did 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.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#10
I 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.

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