Computers also generate heat. Wish I could use cryptocurrency miners for my heating needs. Why burn fuel or pass current through resistances for that?
I have not recently done the math, but I'm pretty sure in my area its still more economically efficient to heat my home with natural gas than resistive heat. Obviously, emissions are a concern, future price uncertainty of fossil fuels, etc. Not the best way forward.
However, heat pumps in my area can make a ton of sense. They're far more efficient than resistive heating as long as it doesn't get practically arctic cold outside. When in decent climates they're about as economically efficient than a gas furnace.
In other words, mining crypto for heat isn't necessarily the most economical thing to do. It may just be better for you to use a heat pump and put your savings into buying crypto if ultimately having crypto and being warm is your goal.
What calculations are these? How do I figure out if it's worth it?
Electric heat is 100% efficient. Natural gas is anywhere between 80-97% efficient depending on your model of furnace. Convert therms of gas[0] and kWh[1] to BTUs, and multiply by efficiency and price to determine which is cheapest[2]. Usually natural gas wins.
For emissions it’s more complicated. You need to look up the energy source for your grid[3], it will vary a bit seasonally, and factor in transmission losses for electric heat. You can then calculate the emissions per BTU of natural gas heat vs. the emissions of the grid to give you a BTU of electric heat. For most grids, natural gas still wins.
Where this gets complicated is if you use a heat pump, either a “mini split” (common in Europe and some new apartments) or a ground source (“geothermal”) heat pump. These have a seasonally adjusted efficiency rating[4], usually between 2 and 4. This means per unit of electrical energy the unit is moving 2-4 units of heat (depending on model and exterior conditions). You can take the electric heating number from above and divide by this number to figure out the cost and emissions for a heat pump. Usually a heat pump will win on emissions and lose on price (including installation costs) because natural gas is very very cheap.
0 - A “therm” of gas is the traditional measuring and billing unit of natural gas in the United States, it’s equivalent to roughly 100,000 BTUs. Your bill will probably be in therms, but cubic feet are trivially convertible to BTUs too.
1 - 1 kWh is 3,412 BTUs
2 - You can either compare per BTU costs, or your estimated monthly cost based on your heating need. The latter is important if you have tiered or seasonal electricity pricing. To figure this out take a sample monthly gas bill from winter, subtract your summer gas bill (if you have gas hot water) and use the calculations above to determine your heating needs in BTUs. This lets you calculate your electricity needs in kWh and therefore costs.
3 - It’s important that this is a seasonally correct. Most grids get dirtier as more polluting and less efficient power plants are turned on for summer AC, often coal power plants in most regions. Therefore the emissions per kWh will vary on a month by month basis for a given grid.
4 - If we’re being very precise, a non seasonally adjusted number would be best here. An air sourde Heat pump will struggle to extract heat from very cold exterior air, reducing its efficiency. A ground source one will be more efficient, given that ground water is warmer than the air typically.
On a somewhat recent decently high gas usage month that emulated a cold winter (forgot to turn off the pool heater from spa mode on the whole pool circulation mode for a few days...oof) my $/CCF (Centi-Cubic Foot) was 1.22. Converting $/CCF to $/MMBTU, divide by 1.037 to get ~$1.176/MMBTU.
Electricity is usually billed at kWh pricing. 1MMBTU = ~293kWh. I pay ~$0.086/kWh, so 293 * .086 = $25.198/MMBTU.
Obviously, you're not getting 100% efficiency with the natural gas furnace. I think the one I have in my attic which is almost a decade old is rated at like 85% efficient. 90% efficient furnaces are available, some of them don't even require a metal chimney as the resulting air isn't even that hot.
But even at only 85% efficiency, you're still taking more than 10x less dollars per heat.
This math changes when thinking about buying new equipment and other factors. I haven't looked at equipment pricing so it would be hard for me to say how expensive it would be compared to alternatives. This can also vary a good bit from your local market. Energy is stupid cheap in my area, natural gas is a good bit cheaper here than a good chunk of the US while electricity prices are about median, maybe a bit lower.
Realistically? Cost. If your goal is to heat a space, it's much cheaper and more reliable to NOT use thousands of dollars of silicon. Doing calculations based on the site below, you might be able to heat a smallish bedroom with a very beefy PC. I can get a space heater that puts out that much heat for less than $50 and is far less likely to stop working (e.g. heatsink gets clogged and system overheats).
https://www.stelpro.com/en/expert-advices/calculating-the-ri...
Unless your office is the size of a closet, that doesn't sound like it's enough to provide all of its heating needs (at least according to the formula of the website I linked).
It's certainly practical to provide to exploit heat generated by computers to partially heat a space, but I don't think it's practical to use silicon as the main heat source.
[0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2011/03/30/196054/using-hea...
Crypto mining hardware is >100% efficient, as it's exactly as efficient as an electric heater, but also generates revenue. Over time, others make more efficient crypto mining hardware, reducing the yield from yours. This causes your "efficiency" to gradually reduce down to 100%, but no lower.
However, nowadays we have heat pumps, which are also more efficient than our 100% benchmark, and produce additional useful heat.
It also makes the hardware depreciate (simply with the passage of time, but also because of the particular usage), which in practice effects the balance and can easily turn the monetary efficiency into negative.
4+ kWh electric showers are ubiquitous in my country. Literally a dumb piece of metal resistance immersed in water. Anything is better than the current situation. What if it was a processor instead?
What if a bunch of home servers could heat up stored water through their heat instead of just dissipating that energy uselessly into the air?
We'd be getting the heat we need and we'd be helping build a decentralized cash network. We were gonna spend energy heating up stuff anyway. Might as well get some cryptocurrency out of that heat.
https://qarnot.com/en/heating-water/
Not sure if it's even available outside Europe. I wonder if it's possible to somehow replicate this with a home server. How is it pumping the heat out of the components and into the water system?
A heat pump is more than twice as efficient as direct heat.
For a resistive heater, its taking 1 energy unit from the wall and putting 1 energy unit into the air.
A heat pump will use one unit of energy from the wall to take 3-5 units of energy from one side of the system and dump that 3-5 units of energy to the other side of the system.
I have a lot of solar panels in my home. I'm generating more energy than I'm using. I don't consider efficiency to be a significant concern at the moment.
I also produce a surplus and I sell it (for more than the local utility charges to boot). More efficiency is more money in my pocket, is it not for you?
> More efficiency is more money in my pocket, is it not for you?
Unfortunately, it isn't. I also inject surplus energy into the local power distribution network. In my country, I don't actually get paid for that. They give me "kWh credits" that I'm supposed to spend whenever I generare less energy than I consume. These credits will expire if unused, I can't accumulate them.
So it is simply not viable for any home or business to generate more power than they consume. I have space for more solar panels but I'd be giving the power companies free energy if I installed them.
Cryprocurrency is the perfect solution for my problem. Instead of giving them my energy surplus, I sink it into my computers instead so they can mine cryptocurrency. If the waste heat could be reused somehow, it would be even better...
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLO73bbIJtU
The premise was to only operate the miner in cold months, when the outside air could easily cool the system. I didn't fully re-watch this video but it does give a good setup and explanation for it.
All crypto currencies are used for gambling?
Can you give us a good solution to hedge against government induced inflation that does not involve usury or having enough cash to purchase property outright to rent it out? Note: almost all companies deal with interest in some way or another, even if they don't need to, so usury is embedded in their stocks.
Oh right, I'm dealing with someone who believes in the "free market" while plugging their ears when people talk about subsidies for the gas, meat, defense, and other "profitable" industries.
I don't believe in absolute free market as defined by capitalism. Case in point: I do not deal with interest (usury), as it is prohibited in my faith. There are also some other red lines which I will not get into here, as it is not the subject of discussion. I'm happy to go into them more though if someone is curious. As such, no, it is not your typical capitalistic position.
> Can you give us a good solution to keep the price of bread from rising above the ability for impoverished people to purchase it over government induced inflation?
Yes. In Islam, we have something called Zakat, a form of "wealth tax" if you will. Its proceedings go to impoverished people, among others. It has been documented that in Iraq during the Ummayad period, there were no poor people left to even accept Zakat, after everyone was paying their share.
Of course we still need to handle the root cause: move to a currency that is not bound to interest that keeps growing, and the government can print money at will, devaluing everyone's hard work in an instant.
Interest, in traditional western societies is just the measure of the present value of future time, which is understood as valuable. Thus, money+time=“more money”.
In Islam, there is no difference. If I lend you $10,000 and I ask for $10,000.01 back, that $.01 is usury. They are equal because both operate on the same exploitation principle, that not only pries on the poor, but exacerbates the wealth inequality gap that everyone is complaining about today. Once the door is open to artificially differentiate the two, many other immoral things become acceptable. We've seen it time and time again.
We don't deny the time value of money, we jus say that use money in a moral way to extract value over time, by taking appropriate risk in a manner that is not exploitative.
I've been reading on islamic banking recently, and I have to say that it appears one can arrive at a consistent philosophy and working economics with usury being prohibited. The world won't grind to a halt because capital is no longer entitled to gains by the virtue of purely existing, as opposed to being used productively. (Observe PoS vs PoW parallels, in the theme of this submission.)
You can lend money and earn a profit without interest, and you can pay for getting a credit without it being immoral. The trick is that both parties share both the gains and the risk, not just the lender being responsible for all the risk.
Note however, that this does not affect Islam one bit. True and honest scholars will always call out such actions, and they have been.
That being said, yes, at the core, true Islamic finance is about true and proper risk sharing, and reward sharing. Want to open a business? Get someone, or a group of people to fund you. They put in the money and you put in the risk. If it succeeds, you both share the rewards, if it doesn't, you lost the time and effort, and they lost the money. This is a very straight forward example.
Under Islamic law, lending money is only to be done as a purely charitable act, as the lender cannot benefit from the loan - either monetarily or in a non-tangential manner even. The general ruling is as follows: any loan that brings a benefit to the lender is Riba (can be loosely translated as usury). Riba involves more than the usury or interest that are done today by banks, it also includes things like buying gold on credit (Riba), or exchanging silver for silver of non equal amounts (also Riba).
Edit: Looks like matheusmoreira below doesn’t understand a 500w electric heater and a 500w crypto miner produce the same amount of heat and use the same amount of electricity.
- They're much more expensive than normal heaters, and the returns on mining don't make it cost effective.
- If you've spent that much money on heaters/miners, you're going to want to max them out 24/7 before they become obsolete rather than just switch them on when its cold, which defeats the point.
- They'll also need to be upgraded every 6-12 months to keep up with the mining arms race, and no-one wants to have to replace their super-expensive heating system that often.
Not to mention how much precious time cryptocurrency shills waste, and dangerous greenhouse gasses they produce from all the hot air of their rancid breath, by droning on and on and on about cryptocurrency all the time, parroting all the lies they heard in youtube get-rich-quick pyramid scheme videos.
Another shill in this thread just mindlessly repeated the same old lie they parrot all the time:
>Crypto helps accelerate the growth, demand, and build-out of renewable energy.
That's like saying using more Cocaine helps you quit using Cocaine faster.
"Cocaine makes me feel like a new man. And he wants some too!"
In an unfortunate and unintended way, it's true...
And the absurd idea of using a crypto rig as a space heater has already been completely debunked in this thread. Go back and read it.
If it's such a great idea, then why doesn't everybody already have one or a hundred of them, huh?
matheusmoreira: Do you really believe in get-rich-quick schemes and perpetual motion devices and miracle cures, even when you can't seem to find any for sale that actually work? Then you must not believe in the free market, either. Is it easier to believe there's a huge well organized conspiracy suppressing these technologies, instead of simply the laws of physics and economics?
Go back and read astoor's comment again, which trixie_'s fancifully wishful reply simply doesn't refute. But of course you can't argue facts with a true believer.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29095560
>Theoretically if every space heater right now was also a crypto miner, it would make any dedicated mining operation completely unprofitable.
If your grandmother had wheels, then she'd be a bicycle.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=If%20my%20gr...
>Sir, this is a casino. Please direct your anger towards Wall Street.
POS = Proof of Shock:
> More like Proof-Of-Waste, both of precious electricity, and of precious rare earth elements and other materials.
Is it really a waste if the heat produced is useful?
> idea of using a crypto rig as a space heater has already been completely debunked
Where? I've read detailed posts describing that it probably wouldn't be as efficient as other heat transfer methods. Doesn't mean it is "debunked". I'm convinced it could work in certain circumstances, such as availability of free energy in the form of solar power.
> If it's such a great idea, then why doesn't everybody already have one or a hundred of them, huh?
I don't know. I've been wondering for a while. That's why I started a discussion. Maybe the idea is too new or there aren't consumer products in the market that make it easy for people to do it.
Sir, this is a casino. Please direct your anger towards Wall Street.
Theoretically if every space heater right now was also a crypto miner, it would make any dedicated mining operation completely unprofitable.
Cryptos = suck that energy out of the power grid to gamble with one another.