I heat my home by mining crypto currencies • Hacker News Board

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#231

Post by bluGill » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 3:21 PM UTC

ehnto wrote: post #173

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…

Not quite what you mean, but a city in Australia is trialing "Smart Appliance Response Automation". The gist is that some appliances can utilize excess green power during the day in order to not need that energy later at night when it would need to be provided by gas turbines. The current trial is actually residential water heaters, by heating the water using excess green power during the day you effectively store th…

My parents have had a smart water heater since 1988. It was interesting a few years back hearing a politician talk about how bad smart meters were - he had to make it clear that the smart meter 80% of the room had for 20 years were nothing like the smart meters he was talking about. (which is to say the ones he was against gave minute by minute reports with the privacy concerns, the ones everyone had just turned the water heater and AC units off/on - I'll let you decide if the issue was real or not)

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#232

Post by bluGill » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 3:25 PM UTC

lmilcin wrote: post #225

user-the-name wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are thinking of something very different than what "heat pumps" actually are? They don't involve storing heat, they're just an inverse fridge.

I think guys you are all wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump The first sentence: "A heat pump is a device that transfers heat energy from a source of heat to what is called a thermal reservoir ." So yes, it involves energy storage. The way this works is you store heat in the summer (warm up a lot of rock or ground underneath your house) and recover that energy in the winter by pumping a liquid through warm…

The air outside your house counts as a thermal reservoir as well. That it doesn't store anything to the next season is annoying and makes it not work well in cold temperatures.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#233

Post by ehnto » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 3:28 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #231

ehnto wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite what you mean, but a city in Australia is trialing "Smart Appliance Response Automation". The gist is that some appliances can utilize excess green power during the day in order to not need that energy later at night when it would need to be provided by gas turbines. The current trial is actually residential water heaters, by heating the water using excess green power during the day you effectively store th…

My parents have had a smart water heater since 1988. It was interesting a few years back hearing a politician talk about how bad smart meters were - he had to make it clear that the smart meter 80% of the room had for 20 years were nothing like the smart meters he was talking about. (which is to say the ones he was against gave minute by minute reports with the privacy concerns, the ones everyone had just turned the…

I think the likelyhood of it being done in the "New Tech" fashion of bi-directional real-time data flows with high level languages is high, and the security of that will be low. So I'm not super pumped about the inevitable grid software exploits. Privacy aside, it's got other potential risks that are more important to address I think.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#234

Post by bluGill » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 3:33 PM UTC

dudul wrote: post #153

owlmirror wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heat pumps are not viable in a lot of cases, in an urban setting, it's probably the vast majority. So for the many cases were the alternative for heating would be burning fossil fuels, using electricity, ideally produced via renewable energy/nuclear, could be a superior alternative.

What a few of these "lot of cases" where they are not viable?

Anytime it is "cold" air source heat pumps don't work. Cold varies a bit, somewhere between -5C and - 25C depending on design factors. Even in the best case as you get closer and closer to the minimum temperature the worse they work (IE when you need them most!), and once you hit the cut-off you better have a backup source off heat.

You can use geothermo (ground) to work around this. I'd recommend it, but the one time install costs mean it is questionable if it is cost effective.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#235

Post by noxer » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 3:34 PM UTC

Someone clearly doesn't understand thermodynamics at all if he seriously thinks putting that thing outside and let the warm air be sucked in, is more efficient that running it inside. for obviously reasons (isolation loses/heat radiation) more energy (heat) is lost outside than inside (inside has zero loses because even the heat that doesn't go where you want it, still is inside the house.)

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#236

Post by pedrocr » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 3:39 PM UTC

Haemm0r wrote: post #219

pedrocr wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Name a source please" :)

Keeping 5x over the entire winter includes some pretty cold nights. And ground source systems can improve even this by quite a bit.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#237

Post by kuon » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 3:45 PM UTC

tallanvor wrote: post #210

kuon wrote: post #108

I am always amazed that some countries allow electricity for heating. Here it is mostly geothermal, solar, gas or oil (the last two being phased out). There are also a lot of cities with distant heating, for example, here, the garbage factory heat the whole city while burning the garbages. But well, if you can mine crypto while heating, good I guess, even if there might be better ways to use compute power.

Electricity doesn't have to be a bad option for heating. Norway gets 88% of it's electricity through hydropower, another 10% through wind, and the rest of it is geothermal, as an example. That doesn't mean that electricity is necessarily the most efficient option, or the cheapest, but it is clean.

I am not saying electricity is bad for heating. But it is surprising to me. It is "illegal" here, but honnestly I don't have an opinion or an objective view on it.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#238

Post by rektide » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 3:58 PM UTC

I've spent half a decade sitter ng around with some 4-node 2u's wanting to build a simulation/virtual city that I heat with in the winter. haven't made much progress on this side-quest though. too much other lifting to do.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#239

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 4:08 PM UTC

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #129

illustriousbear wrote: post #73

The thing I find funny about HackerNews is how you see plenty of wasteful hobby projects hit the main page. Yet someone using a crypto miner to generate heat / side money is somehow a terrible project.

It's almost like there are different scales of waste and contributing to a system that burns about as much energy as Argentina to secure a paltry number of transactions is on the higher end of that.

[deleted]

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#240

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Feb 23, 2021, 4:15 PM UTC

twobitshifter wrote: post #123

lmilcin wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, heat pumps don't have over 100% efficiency the same way hot water pumps that pump from municipal source don't have >100% efficiency in heating home (it uses hot water available from somewhere else). Heat pumps engage some other source of energy so if you want to measure efficiency you now need to include that other source into account. Since you are engaging natural source of energy you can measure how effective…

The efficiency calculation here measures only electrical power in vs heat energy out. Heat pumps are always listed with greater than 100% efficiency. There is no problem with the laws of thermodynamics of doing this and it’s even listed in text books with the explanation of how it is possible. The work of the heat pump is to move heat from one location to another, it does so with the byproduct of producing more heat,…

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