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I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

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Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#21

Post by celticninja »

dreen wrote: 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…

I mean the OP found an environmentally friendly and economic way of heating his house.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#22

Post by speedgoose »

freetime2 wrote: post #20
speedgoose wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He isn't using a heatpump. It's too expensive he says.

The 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.

He has an advanced ventilation system but what he describes is not a heat pump.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#23

Post by celticninja »

speedgoose wrote: post #2

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

He 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.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#24

Post by celticninja »

speedgoose wrote: post #12
krageon wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 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.

He also says he doesn't actually have a real heat pump setup because it's too expensive.

No 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.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#25

Post by speedgoose »

celticninja wrote: post #23
speedgoose wrote: post #2

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

He 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.

I 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.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#26

Post by lmilcin »

medstrom wrote: post #18
lmilcin wrote: post #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…

Produce electricity? I assume electricity was used to do the computation in the first place, turning into let's say 80% work and 20% heat. The idea was to use that 20% to heat our homes. The original electricity still needs to come from elsewhere.

When I said Data Center can produce electricity I did not mean that it can produce as much or more than it takes in. I thought this obvious enough that it did not have to be said.

But alas, it has to be said.

No, you can't create perpetuum mobile ie. build a machine that given a supply of energy produces as much or even more energy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetuum_mobile

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#27

Post by geek_at »

speedgoose wrote: post #14
audunw wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

He isn't using a heatpump. It's too expensive he says.

It was too expensive to use a ground-preheated heat pump (where like 500m of cable are layed under ground to pre-heat the air). Mine is just sucking it in as-is

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#28

Post by ohgodplsno »

celticninja wrote: post #19
lmilcin wrote: post #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…

I understand your point but it does gloss over the fact that the calculations are useful to the bitcoin network in terms of security.

So, absolutely useless for 99.99% of the world.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#29

Post by [deleted] »

celticninja wrote: post #21
dreen wrote: 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…

I mean the OP found an environmentally friendly and economic way of heating his house.

[deleted]

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#30

Post by freetime2 »

speedgoose wrote: post #22
freetime2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 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.

He has an advanced ventilation system but what he describes is not a heat pump.

Can 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/

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