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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

#211

Post by epr »

cinntaile wrote: post #120
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

looking through their tech stack and the hello world example and stuff I think you can put your own stuff i n it, but probably the most common stuff is 3d rendering. on edit: I got a downvote so someone must think I'm wrong? the basis of my idea was - in the FAQ https://computing.qarnot.com/en/FAQ 3D: Blender, Maya, V-Ray, Guerilla IA / ML / Big data or simulation: Code Saturne FreeFem OpenFOAM PyTorch TensorFlow Sic…

You have been here for a couple of years, surely you have noticed downvotes don't always make sense.

Seriously. I've actually gotten into the habit of compulsively upvoting anything that has been downvoted unless someone is really out of line, even if I disagree with an opinion they're expressing.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#212

Post by fy20 »

progval wrote: post #68
speedgoose wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I 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 You can see these four pipes here, around component (1): 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…

It's a heat recovery ventilator, with a heat pump to move heat from the air into water. From the marketing page:

> Compact P recovers the energy from the extracted air using a highly efficient counter flow heat exchanger. The remaining energy that is not utilised by the counter flow heat exchanger is used by the heat pump to produce hot water, and to further heat the supply air.

https://en.nilan.dk/en-gb/frontpage/solutions/domestic-solut...

HRVs take out stale air, bring in fresh air, and pass both streams through a heat exchanger to heat up the cold air coming in (or vice versa in the summer) with efficiencies of up to 95%. This is a purely mechanical system - the only moving parts are two fans.

HRVs need a preheater in cold weather, so you don't have condensation or ice form inside the unit, however if your climate isn't that cold (and most importantly your home is well enough insulated), that heat can be more than enough to maintain your home at a comfortable temperature without additional heat sources.

In OPs case the preheater is using an electric resistance heater, but as they said there are options to buy a heat pump preheater, using the ground as a heat source but it was too expensive (they are typically more than the heat exchanger itself, plus the cost of installing the ground pipes). Using the miners as a preheater just reduces the work of the electric resistant preheater. If you take into account the value of the crypto currency produced, then yes it is better than using the built in preheater, but using the ground source heat pump preheater would result in an overall lower electricity consumption.

The heat pump part is purely on the exhaust air. There is always some loss in the heat exchanger, so if the incoming air from outside is 5c, the exhaust air to the outside may be 10c. This unit runs the exhaust air through a heat exchanger to produce hot water for taps, and if that is already satisfied, to attempt to preheat the incoming air to reduce the work of the preheater. (There's probably also an electric resistance heater for the hot water, in case demand is greater than what the heat pump alone can provide).

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#213

Post by johanvts »

wil421 wrote: post #204
mrweasel wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most articles are in Danish, the best I could find quickly is: https://www.datacentremagazine.com/data-centres/facebook-exp... Edit: It's should be noted that most Danish cities already have a remote heating infrastructure in place. Aside from the regulatory issues, it's mostly a question of hooking up datacenters and other heat producing industries to that infrastructure. In most places utilising the remote heating…

How are the houses centrally heated l? I live in the Southern US and we do not have harsh winters. Most houses are heated by gas or electric furnaces (central air). It’s interesting you can also use remote cooling from lime pits.

It's simply insulated pipes with hot water running underground. Homes in more remote places often use gas or electric heating.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#214

Post by Forbo »

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…

What you're looking for is called the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC). The work units for BOINC can be crunched to earn GridCoin.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#215

Post by agurk »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #141
cinntaile wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have been here for a couple of years, surely you have noticed downvotes don't always make sense.

sure, but I suppose it makes sense to the person making the downvote. And when it makes especially poor sense to me I start to think - maybe they see something I don't? on edit: I do sometimes also get paranoid and think, man there is just someone who doesn't like me and automatically downvote when they run across my name!

Particularly when there's a case of a single downvote, it's worth remembering that it's easy to click the wrong button here - especially on mobile. I make a habit of checking the command has changed to "unvote" or "undown" correctly to verify I voted how I wanted to.

I've also hit voting arrows a lot whilst scrolling (on mobile) and must not have caught that every single time.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#216

Post by Delk »

softawre wrote: post #198
Delk wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have also been plans to do this in Finland, but most of what I can find is either marketing material or news articles discussing plans [1, 2] rather than actual achievements, so I'm not sure what actually became of it. There's a brochure from the national innovation fund that mentions a town actually covering about half of its heating needs with heat from a data center, though. [3] Swedish telco Telia also has…

Here's a Finland example that was posted earlier. It makes it seem like it's already working. https://helsinkismart.fi/case/waste-not-want-not-data-center...

Thanks. That would seem to be the same case as in my third link.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#217

Post by jki275 »

sep_field wrote: post #136
jki275 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What matters is the % of miners who don’t collude. Honesty isn’t the issue, collusion is. The entire concept of Bitcoin assumes dishonest players. The only real attack is for miners to combine hash power to get over 50% of the network hash rate so they can execute double spends - and even that is self defeating as doing so degrades confidence and by extension price.

Only once it gets publicized. You have a window to sell and make an enormous profit before people notice and then the entire bit-conomy gets wrecked. I hope this happens as it is a much better outcome to this mess we've created than wrecking the biosphere.

Yeah, it's a really really tiny window though. chain reorganizations and 50% attacks are really easy to see on the chain and people do watch for them.

They've happened on smaller chains that don't have much hash power attached to them, but even there, they're caught very quickly.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#218

Post by Scoundreller »

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 was thinking we could build something like this for refining aluminum.

Every week you pick up your 10kg block of bauxite and exchange it for aluminum.

Not sure how much byproduct heat is actually involved though...

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#219

Post by Haemm0r »

pedrocr wrote: post #183
Haemm0r wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Modern A/C systems can pump heat at 500%+ efficiency even with very cold outside temperatures, no pre-heating needed." Name a source please.

Here's a current R32 system by Daikin: https://www.daikin.co.uk/content/dam/dauk/document-library/d... SCOP is at 5.15 and that's a seasonally adjusted value. So over the entirety of the winter the unit is expected to deliver 5.15 units of heat for each unit of energy. The unadjusted COP is 6.27. For this unit operational limits are listed at -15C/5F and I think there are units that go quite a bit lower. I haven't lo…

If you do not have temps below 0-5°C that might be true. Below the freezing point efficiency drops quite a bit.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#220

Post by [deleted] »

tom_mellior wrote: post #158
Nextgrid wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The proof of work in tokens has to be a net waste of energy; the idea is that the proof of work is costly enough to prevent a 51% attack. Making the proof of work do “useful” things would lower the cost of said work thus lowering the barrier of entry to an attack.

> Making the proof of work do “useful” things would lower the cost of said work thus lowering the barrier of entry to an attack. How does this follow? If the work is so universally useful that it lowers the cost of the work, it lowers the cost for everyone . Not just "attackers", but "defenders" as well. As it happens, Bitcoin miners mine not out of the goodness of their hearts but for financial profit. Bitcoin POW i…

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