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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

#271

Post by pedrocr »

Haemm0r wrote: post #247
pedrocr wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Nicely played :) Here we go: https://industrialheatpumps.nl/en/how_it_works/cop_heat_pump... or better this pic: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Performance-map-of-the-h...

That seems to be for a 2006 Daikin model:

> The heat pump model is based on linear interpolation in a performance map retrieved from manufacturer data (Daikin Europe N.V., 2006).

And that model is half as good as the modern one I linked:

> The nominal coefficient of performance (COP) is 3.17 at 2/35ºC and 2.44 at 2/45ºC test conditions (i.e. air/water temperature) for full load operation.

And even then it gets a COP of 2 at -15C. So modern systems getting to at least 4 at -15C seems likely. This claims there are low ambient mini splits that maintain 100% efficiency down to -15C:

https://www.ecomfort.com/stories/1341-Keeping-Your-Mini-Spli...

That should cover most places but for really cold climates ground source heat pumps seem ideal. From what I've seen there are simple solutions where a single vertical hole is drilled with common well drilling machines and a single tube that has the loop inside is driven down. Makes it easier to retrofit and implement in small properties.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#272

Post by barkingcat »

qvrjuec wrote: post #259
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #49

I did this in an apartment I lived in years ago, and do it now in my house. My computer room in the house is the lowest point in the house, so naturally, it tends to be a couple degrees cooler than the upstairs. This means that if I set the thermostat so that the computer room is comfortable, the bedroom is too warm. If I run the house circulation fan constantly, it's not an issue, but that consumes a decent amount o…

Aren't you concerned with hardware degradation with your GPU running at 100% most of the time?

This is usually a non-concern. It's likely that the GPU will become obsolete in the time that it fails due to being run at 100% of the time.

The other question to ask, if you compile programs, write webpages, and edit photoshop images: are you concerned with hardware degradation with your CPU if you run at 100% all time time, for example, compiling chrome that takes 3+ hours, applying photoshop filters to an image to get a production quality output, or for rendering a 3 hour long animated movie?

Do you worry about the GPU when you are retraining a GPT-2 or GPT-3 scale AI framework?

These questions are kind of ... dependent on each person. Presumably you buy a computer in order to perform computations. That is its purpose.

Just because it's crunching bitcoins/cryptocurrencies doesn't degrade it any more than ... say running an AI framework on a GPU for 3 months continuously to generate a self driving model ...

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#273

Post by bolasanibk »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #49

I did this in an apartment I lived in years ago, and do it now in my house. My computer room in the house is the lowest point in the house, so naturally, it tends to be a couple degrees cooler than the upstairs. This means that if I set the thermostat so that the computer room is comfortable, the bedroom is too warm. If I run the house circulation fan constantly, it's not an issue, but that consumes a decent amount o…

https://www.nicehash.com/ got the HN hug of death!

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#274

Post by IneffablePigeon »

robocat wrote: post #262
hnuser123456 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

France's electricity is largely generated by nuclear power which has minimal CO2 emissions.

True, but very misleading. When you add a marginal kWh of electricity usage, how is that extra 1 kWh generated? If France runs its nuclear power at nearly 100% utilisation, then if you add 1 kWh usage then that power comes from another source, which could be a high CO2 emitter. The same goes for hydroelectricity: if all the hydroelectric power is already being utilised (no spillway), then you cannot claim that your e…

This is an interesting topic - I agree with your interpretation, but to add another wrinkle, I live in the UK which has a decent but not amazing proportion of renewable energy now. I pay a little extra to my supplier to provide me with "100% renewable electricity" - meaning that for every customer on that tariff, they total up the power usage and buy at least that much renewable energy from the grid. I assume that this puts some upwards price pressure on renewable energy compared to non renewable, but how much? Presumably every extra watt I use doesn't result in a whole extra watt of renewable capacity being added, but what's the conversion - 5%? 50%? I don't even know where to start answering that question.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#275

Post by mrkstu »

jiofih wrote: post #201
dreen wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite my precarious housing situation at the time, I also own a big house in the country over 150 years old. The main form of heating it originally were 2m tall ceramic furnaces, always placed so that they could heat two rooms at the time. You put material to burn in from either side, and after getting hot the furnace would keep heating the room for hours, and all it takes is a few logs of wood (that you later have…

0.5kg of CO2 per kWh is the average for electric grids around the world. 1kg of wood produces around 2kg of CO2, every 400g of firewood gives you 1 kWh, so 0.8kg CO2/kWh. That’s slightly worse than mining. Bitcoin is wasteful in its total energy consumption which is not reused, but 99% of the power you put into that GPU will be released as heat.

Difference being if he’s using wood he’s recycling that carbon over infinitely as long as it isn’t from old growth forests.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#276

Post by xenocyon »

1. At an individual/hobbyist level this is a fine thing to do, if one is already a cryptocurrency enthusiast.

2. At a social/planning level it is important to remember that opportunity costs matter, and this should not be recommended as public policy. One kWh of electricity could either be used for mining bitcoin (creating at most one kWh of indoor heat), or it could be used for running a heat pump[*], yielding multiple kWh of indoor heat due to the magic of heat pumps and their >100% "efficiency"[**].

[*] Yes, I realize the OP is already using a heat pump, but assisting it with preheat is inherently less efficient than plowing the same energy into running the heat pump itself.

[**] Yes, heat pumps aren't >100% efficient per a physics textbook, but what most people care about is that you can use them to get >1 joule of indoor heat from 1 joule of energy input, which feels magical when compared to electric heaters, gas furnaces etc.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#277

Post by blacksmith_tb »

pstrateman wrote: post #270

This makes sense unless you have the option of natural gas heating, then not so much.

How so? He says "on sunny days the miner and whole heat pump are running fully on solar energy collected on my roof", hard to beat that with gas. I would say that moving more houses to all-electric heating, water heaters, clothes dryers etc. is future proofing - right now, a lot of that energy would be from fossil fuels, but swapping in renewables is easy.

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#278

Post by balls187 »

barkingcat wrote: post #272
qvrjuec wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't you concerned with hardware degradation with your GPU running at 100% most of the time?

This is usually a non-concern. It's likely that the GPU will become obsolete in the time that it fails due to being run at 100% of the time. The other question to ask, if you compile programs, write webpages, and edit photoshop images: are you concerned with hardware degradation with your CPU if you run at 100% all time time, for example, compiling chrome that takes 3+ hours, applying photoshop filters to an image to…

The flipside, if you have a CPU and you can't keep it pegged 100% of the time, are you wasting resources?

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#279

Post by gkfasdfasdf »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #49

I did this in an apartment I lived in years ago, and do it now in my house. My computer room in the house is the lowest point in the house, so naturally, it tends to be a couple degrees cooler than the upstairs. This means that if I set the thermostat so that the computer room is comfortable, the bedroom is too warm. If I run the house circulation fan constantly, it's not an issue, but that consumes a decent amount o…

I would really like to try NiceHash, but the fact that I have to add it as an exception to Windows Defender antivirus, and that one of the founders has previously been convicted [0] and served time for writing botnet malware, really gives me pause.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NiceHash

Re: I heat my home by mining crypto currencies

#280

Post by s0rce »

dgacmu wrote: post #111
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.

Using an electric heat pump is very efficient, usually better than heating directly by burning gas. In many high efficiency houses, the leftover demand not satisfied by the heat pump is more easily satisfied by a small amount of electric resistance heating - and you get a double win if you don't have to run gas to your house at all, saving both the monthly gas connection fee, simplifying internal plumbing, and improv…

In my old house we didn't have natural gas, options were: get a truck to refill a propane tank (we didn't have a tank), burn wood (we lived in the desert of eastern WA, not many trees) or use an electric heat pump (we had abundant cheap hydropower from the Columbia river basin). Was an easy choice. Supplemented with an electric resistance heater for the coldest days in the winter.
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