Didn't watch the video, but a quick point on how the energy efficiency of this works out:
Electric heaters are 100% efficient at turning electrical energy into heat. All the energy they take in, that's where it goes.
Bitcoin mining (and computers in general) are basically in the same boat. There's some ancillary energy use for blowing air around or shining lights or making sound waves, but for the most part the electricity turns into heat and does some math along the way.
Sounds great! Perfectly efficient! But the important caveat is that heat pumps are (effectively) more than 100% efficient. They can take 100 watt of electricity to transfer 300 watts of heat from outside to inside.
It's not technically a measure of "efficiency", we call this the "coefficient of performance" instead. Or we call it the "seasonal energy efficiency ratio", which is the same thing except multiplied by some constant factor because somebody wanted a scale that went up to higher numbers. Or for heating, the heating season performance factor, which I forget the specifics of, but is geared toward how well it works pumping heat in from outdoors when your heat source (outdoors) is very cold.
In short, it's just as efficient as any other electric heater, but heat pumps are 3-4x better than that.
>heat pumps are (effectively) more than 100% efficient
The CoP of a heat pump is greatly dependent on the difference in temperature potential of the source and sink. If it's extremely cold outside, it's very hard to pump heat from colder air into a house. When the temperature potential between the two reservoirs is equal, sure the CoP beats out electric heating but when it's high (When your house is warm and the outside is below freezing) its extremely poor.
This is what we are doing at Qarnot Computing for 5years.
We created a heater using CPU as a heat source.
People send a docker image (3d rendering, financial analysis...) and we run it on heaters deployed in buildings in Paris where people are heated for free (we refund the electricity cost)
This is silly, CPUs are 100% efficient at converting electrical energy into heat. Where do you think that 'ancillary energy' is going?
Obviously heat pumps are more efficient - that's kinda beside the point though.
The main point here is you can take anywhere you had a resistive heating element and replace it with a mining chip, and you're now doing something useful with that energy you were turning into heat anyway.
Yes heat pumps are more efficient but there are plenty of places in your house you have plain old heat elements that aren't going away (water heater).
A coworker of mine mines ETH to heat his house and I am considering that too. I am not sure how much you can save money compared to electric heating when you account for the cost of GPUs, though.
Heat pumps have better energy efficiency than electric heaters but whether that translates to cheaper costs is another thing. Heat pumps are expensive (about $3000 per pump) and they require regular maintenance (a few hundred bucks per pump every few years). They're also big, bulky and noisy and installation requires poking holes in exterior walls.
I have 3 heat pumps and 2 fire places in my house but I still do need a bunch of electric heaters when it gets properly cold. The weather around here is right about freezing this time of year and so far no electric heaters are needed.
But soon it's time to turn on the heat and it's a consideration of money, not energy efficiency.
Pretty clever, I've never thought about it like that. Basically they turned a computer into a heater that pays for itself plus some. Makes you think we should be building datacenters where the heat could be used, rather than just pumping it out.
>It's not technically a measure of "efficiency", we call this the "coefficient of performance" instead.
I have to disagree. At its most general, the concept of efficiency means "desired output achieved per unit of scarce good expended" and can be applied in a variety of contexts: new users per dollar spent on marketing is a measure of your marketing efficiency, treasure value found per hour spent searching is a measure of your treasure-finding efficiency, etc.
Heat pumps are just a case where a) we use the same units for output and input even though they're different things, and b) in that unit system, the value for the output can be greater than the input. Since people can be unnecessarily suspicious of >100% efficiency, they use different terms for it.
If you expressed the efficiency as "2 joules of heat moved per joule of mains electricity consumed" you eliminate the canceling that would let you phrase the ratio as 200%.
Right, heat pumps cost 4x less, but a miner is returning profit. The only argument to be had is an ecological one. Mining is cheaper than a heat pump, gas, etc..
Of course, it would be cool if Bitcoin didn't require throwaway computation. Then we could use this computation for something that's actually valuable, like protein folding, or something, and still make use of the waste heat.
>it would be cool if Bitcoin didn't require throwaway computation
Sure, but that's a technology that does not exist. If you can figure out how to create a blockchain-like concept, where the 'proof of work' actually contributes to humanity, you have invented the next big thing.
Edit: Reading the comments below me, it looks like this is a space that is being actively explored. Exciting!
I used to increase my PC voltages every winter at my parents wooden heated house near the arctic circle. The room temperatures could drop all the way to 16C (60F) during the night. That allowed easy overclocks on my Athlon processor from 3 to 4Ghz. I still had to wear wool socks though, because the air pushing from the central unit would cause an annoying breeze of cold air onto my toes in the always chilly room.
I remember in college that we found it was cheaper just to use our computers to heat our crappy rented pad than to pay for heat and the electricity for our PCs.
So - I actually physically run 2 mining rigs - each with 6 Nvidia GTX 1070s - pulling 1020 Watts each. They each heat a room fairly nicely and I make around maybe $300 in profit from just selling coins per month. This is AFTER I subtract my electricity costs which for these 2 rigs is about $160 per month. I have not quantified the heating benefits but I'd estimate it at maybe $20 a month. I built them back in March/April for $6k total, and I've made twice that so far - paying for itself already and extra $$$ - plus I still have the hardware going or I can resell it at a profit even thanks to the shortage of high end video cards due to all these crypto miners like myself.
In the summer, I had the rigs in 1 room air cooled with just the windows open - no problems with 90 degree F days at all. Fun project, and so far quite successful.
But if you'd bought $6k worth of ethereum outright in march it would be worth $90k now. That's why I haven't started mining, it only seems profitable in a sideways market.
12 GTX 1070 (500$ avg) + the rest makes for a ~8000$ setup right ? so basically 2 years of 300$ profit from mining to get that money back. Will the profitable mining last longer than that ?
There is a startup which installs their servers in private homes and other buildings where they are used for heating. They essentially connect the market of server computing and heat.
This reminds me of a story; a buddy of mine during my college days lived in a solitary townhome adjoining a million-watt microwave emitter room. The thing produced enough waste heat to warm the apartment in the dead of winter, even with all the doors and windows open, plus the adjoining warehouse which was several times the volume of the dwelling.
I was envious at the time, although now I wonder about the health implications of the setup, and whether it was strictly speaking legal. The guy is alive and well today, fortunately.
It was probably fine; microwaves are fairly easily blocked by even a very thin metal screening. The main health issue with microwaves is the heating caused by it.
The eyes are usually what is damaged first because they tick all 3 boxes of:
* Easily damaged by heat
* High water content
* No good way of shedding heat
Testicles hit the last two, and the degree to which the first is true is debated.
Your description makes it sound like the most bizarre mixed use building. Townhouse/industrial equipment shed/warehouse is quite the combo. I can't imagine how they classified that for tax purposes or what the land was zoned for.
Assuming the actual emitters were high above his head and fairly directional then it probably wasn't a health nightmare, the heat would have mostly been waste heat from transformers, but it's probably not ideal.
What did he do in the summer? I guess it's school so he wouldn't be there for the hottest part, but there is still part of August and September as well as May and possibly June.
As a kid I always tried to convince my mom to let me play computer games to heat our house during winter. She didn't believe me. But it was probably not the efficiency of the heating that stopped her from letting me game all day, though
Did you tell her that you move you body when you're really engaged and generate additional heat by burning your calories? That might swing the balance to your favor.
There are many other cases of people heating homes with mining rigs, especially in places that has a year-round cold climate. Electricity savings in cooling the rigs as well as heating the home + the profit from mining, makes the whole thing worth it...
... IF you can tolerate the noise that the rigs generate
Towards the end of the video, the owner makes a point that this democratic distribution of mining power instead of large miners controlling the network is a good idea. Curious to hear more about this -- does anyone know good writing re: Democratic / distributed benefits of mining?
This technique could pair nicely with another problem we have- storing solar power.
In theory, you could build a system which uses solar power to mine bitcoin during the day, and store that heat somewhere (like an underground tank of water) until you need to warm your house at night.
Of course its not a perfect solution because the coldest places are obviously also the places which get the least sunlight.
Hm, I've politely ignored bitcoin for a long time, but I live in a cold climate and do make some use of electrical heating. Is there a good user-friendly miner setup I could use to supplement a space-heater? I assume a low-power linux box running some bitcoin-oriented package with a bunch of asics shoved into the USB ports?
There's nothing new about this. I remember a story from the days of mainframes, where a data center had to be redesigned - they had built it without heating, expecting the mainframe to provide all the heat the building needed in the winter. By the time they got around to buying a machine to put in it the technology had progressed and it was much more power efficient than they had planned.
ASPLOS 2008 conference on Wild and Crazy Ideas already suggest the more general version of this: "Computation: A Byproduct of Home Water Heaters" http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~swanson/WACI-VI/
Earning $430 for month by bitcoin mining. What about the electricity costs?
If you factor in electricity costs and the money they spent on infrastructure(GPU's and high-end machines), it is a dumb idea. They could have spent $30-50 on heating equipment instead.
Electricity costs are probably subsidized (since otherwise in places where it gets super-cold it wouldn't look nice if people froze to death for inability to pay their power bill).
Electricity costs in Irkutsk (place where the place that the video is describing is located) are 0.7 RUR per 1 kWh for rural areas. That's about 1 cent per kWh. For comparison, California's lowest tariff in about 20c per kWh and if you are consuming a lot (which you'd do if you mine) you'll get over 35c/kWh. If you qualify for low income subsidy, though, you might get it for significantly cheaper :)
Is there a way into mining that is scalable? I mean some way where you don't have to shell out $8k up front and can build-as-you-save? There are lots of ways to save money on heating for people with $8k to spare
O once had a little freelance gig for a company that did offer computing resources to one part of their customers and heat for houses and water to the other with just that concept. cloud & heat
[+] [-] wlesieutre|8 years ago|reply
Electric heaters are 100% efficient at turning electrical energy into heat. All the energy they take in, that's where it goes.
Bitcoin mining (and computers in general) are basically in the same boat. There's some ancillary energy use for blowing air around or shining lights or making sound waves, but for the most part the electricity turns into heat and does some math along the way.
Sounds great! Perfectly efficient! But the important caveat is that heat pumps are (effectively) more than 100% efficient. They can take 100 watt of electricity to transfer 300 watts of heat from outside to inside.
It's not technically a measure of "efficiency", we call this the "coefficient of performance" instead. Or we call it the "seasonal energy efficiency ratio", which is the same thing except multiplied by some constant factor because somebody wanted a scale that went up to higher numbers. Or for heating, the heating season performance factor, which I forget the specifics of, but is geared toward how well it works pumping heat in from outdoors when your heat source (outdoors) is very cold.
In short, it's just as efficient as any other electric heater, but heat pumps are 3-4x better than that.
[+] [-] DINKDINK|8 years ago|reply
The CoP of a heat pump is greatly dependent on the difference in temperature potential of the source and sink. If it's extremely cold outside, it's very hard to pump heat from colder air into a house. When the temperature potential between the two reservoirs is equal, sure the CoP beats out electric heating but when it's high (When your house is warm and the outside is below freezing) its extremely poor.
http://alliedthermaldesigns.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/T...
[+] [-] TedLePoireau|8 years ago|reply
https://computing.qarnot.com https://www.qarnot.com/faq/
Disclosure: I work there :)
[+] [-] andbberger|8 years ago|reply
Obviously heat pumps are more efficient - that's kinda beside the point though.
The main point here is you can take anywhere you had a resistive heating element and replace it with a mining chip, and you're now doing something useful with that energy you were turning into heat anyway.
Yes heat pumps are more efficient but there are plenty of places in your house you have plain old heat elements that aren't going away (water heater).
[+] [-] mrfusion|8 years ago|reply
Most heat pumps are no good below 20f.
[+] [-] wallace_f|8 years ago|reply
I believe this isn't really an exception, this energy would also just be converted to heat?
[+] [-] tlrobinson|8 years ago|reply
Well, yes, but heat pumps can't mine Bitcoin :)
[+] [-] exDM69|8 years ago|reply
Heat pumps have better energy efficiency than electric heaters but whether that translates to cheaper costs is another thing. Heat pumps are expensive (about $3000 per pump) and they require regular maintenance (a few hundred bucks per pump every few years). They're also big, bulky and noisy and installation requires poking holes in exterior walls.
I have 3 heat pumps and 2 fire places in my house but I still do need a bunch of electric heaters when it gets properly cold. The weather around here is right about freezing this time of year and so far no electric heaters are needed.
But soon it's time to turn on the heat and it's a consideration of money, not energy efficiency.
[+] [-] vlunkr|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abysmalfitzg|8 years ago|reply
https://books.google.com/books?id=A4DGiaOn3BwC&pg=PA167&dq=%...
[+] [-] SilasX|8 years ago|reply
I have to disagree. At its most general, the concept of efficiency means "desired output achieved per unit of scarce good expended" and can be applied in a variety of contexts: new users per dollar spent on marketing is a measure of your marketing efficiency, treasure value found per hour spent searching is a measure of your treasure-finding efficiency, etc.
Heat pumps are just a case where a) we use the same units for output and input even though they're different things, and b) in that unit system, the value for the output can be greater than the input. Since people can be unnecessarily suspicious of >100% efficiency, they use different terms for it.
If you expressed the efficiency as "2 joules of heat moved per joule of mains electricity consumed" you eliminate the canceling that would let you phrase the ratio as 200%.
[+] [-] wrcwill|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] acjohnson55|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ArchReaper|8 years ago|reply
Sure, but that's a technology that does not exist. If you can figure out how to create a blockchain-like concept, where the 'proof of work' actually contributes to humanity, you have invented the next big thing.
Edit: Reading the comments below me, it looks like this is a space that is being actively explored. Exciting!
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kemitche|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] virtuexru|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clarkmoody|8 years ago|reply
So Bitcoin is not valuable?
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Jhsto|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nerdponx|8 years ago|reply
That's what you call cold up in the arctic? That's definitely how cold my NYC apartment is every night from November through March. Heat is expensive!
[+] [-] johnnywishbone|8 years ago|reply
Those were the days.
[+] [-] kiddico|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] where_do_i_live|8 years ago|reply
In the summer, I had the rigs in 1 room air cooled with just the windows open - no problems with 90 degree F days at all. Fun project, and so far quite successful.
[+] [-] himlion|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asavinov|8 years ago|reply
[1] https://cloudandheat.com
[2] https://www.informationweek.com/cloud/heating-your-house-wit...
[+] [-] _greim_|8 years ago|reply
I was envious at the time, although now I wonder about the health implications of the setup, and whether it was strictly speaking legal. The guy is alive and well today, fortunately.
[+] [-] aidenn0|8 years ago|reply
The eyes are usually what is damaged first because they tick all 3 boxes of:
* Easily damaged by heat
* High water content
* No good way of shedding heat
Testicles hit the last two, and the degree to which the first is true is debated.
[+] [-] jandrese|8 years ago|reply
https://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/simpsons/images/1/18/Th...
Your description makes it sound like the most bizarre mixed use building. Townhouse/industrial equipment shed/warehouse is quite the combo. I can't imagine how they classified that for tax purposes or what the land was zoned for.
Assuming the actual emitters were high above his head and fairly directional then it probably wasn't a health nightmare, the heat would have mostly been waste heat from transformers, but it's probably not ideal.
What did he do in the summer? I guess it's school so he wouldn't be there for the hottest part, but there is still part of August and September as well as May and possibly June.
[+] [-] nerdponx|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maaaats|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ComodoHacker|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hw|8 years ago|reply
... IF you can tolerate the noise that the rigs generate
[+] [-] andreyf|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] evv|8 years ago|reply
In theory, you could build a system which uses solar power to mine bitcoin during the day, and store that heat somewhere (like an underground tank of water) until you need to warm your house at night.
Of course its not a perfect solution because the coldest places are obviously also the places which get the least sunlight.
[+] [-] Pxtl|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] top256|8 years ago|reply
It's built on the same idea but a more mature and more general solution to the same problem.
[+] [-] subleq|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] in_hindsight|8 years ago|reply
Seriously though in Irkutsk electricity is about 0.017usd per kilowatt/hour
[+] [-] criddell|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mark-r|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] em3rgent0rdr|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vden|8 years ago|reply
Couple of weeks ago there was an ethereum-mining heater Comino https://comino.io
These guys say they use optimized liquid cooling to transfer heat from GPUs to the room effectively (and earning like $10-$15 a day).
[+] [-] rajeshp1986|8 years ago|reply
If you factor in electricity costs and the money they spent on infrastructure(GPU's and high-end machines), it is a dumb idea. They could have spent $30-50 on heating equipment instead.
[+] [-] smsm42|8 years ago|reply
Electricity costs in Irkutsk (place where the place that the video is describing is located) are 0.7 RUR per 1 kWh for rural areas. That's about 1 cent per kWh. For comparison, California's lowest tariff in about 20c per kWh and if you are consuming a lot (which you'd do if you mine) you'll get over 35c/kWh. If you qualify for low income subsidy, though, you might get it for significantly cheaper :)
[+] [-] jimnotgym|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmkni|8 years ago|reply
How much does a Bitcoin mining rig usually last for before it needs replaced?
[+] [-] hennsen|8 years ago|reply