If you live in a part of the world where it gets cold during the winter, you probably pay money to heat your home. What if you could use surplus heat from bitcoin mining to heat your home during the colder months and also stack sats? Some people are doing just that and it’s yet another reason why bitcoin is an energy solution, not an energy problem.
How Do We Currently Heat Homes?
There are a number of different ways that humans have found to heat homes. From simple methods of heating with a fireplace to advanced passive solar-assisted homesteading, humanity has managed to find some incredibly innovative ways to heat homes.
Most commonly, we burn natural gas or propane in a furnace that heats our homes, offices, schools, etc. Once the natural gas is burned, a heat exchange is used to heat air or oil in pipes that is circulated throughout a house, office, etc.
With a surplus of heat from bitcoin mining, there is a growing faction of bitcoin miners who are working to use that surplus heat for just about any possible heating application that currently consumes resources.
How Much Heat Does Bitcoin Mining Generate?
When we consume resources to produce heat energy, we tend to only heat a couple of things. We heat air and fluids. When we heat air, we circulate it through our houses via HVAC ducts and the fluids we heat are water that we use in showers, dishwashers, washing machines, etc. In radiator-heated homes, we heat oil which is circulated throughout homes to keep them warm. They both work really well as a means of keeping things at a reasonable temperature through the winter but the heat always dissipates, things cool back down, and there’s nothing left to show for it at the end of the day.
Obviously, the primary reason to mine bitcoin is to earn the block reward but since bitcoin miners also produce a lot of heat as a byproduct, there’s a substantial incentive to harness that surplus heat and put it to use.
Bitcoin miners produce low-grade heat from about 100-180 degrees Fahrenheit (about 40-80 degrees centigrade). This is substantially warmer than most houses so it only makes sense that this otherwise wasted energy is put to use by heating homes, offices, warehouses, greenhouses, etc.
Using Surplus Heat From Bitcoin Mining
Due to the immense amounts of competition for Bitcoin’s absolute scarcity, bitcoin miners have an incentive to do everything they can to reduce their operating costs. Typically reducing the cost of mining Bitcoin involves buying more efficient mining hardware and seeking out cheap electricity but that’s only part of the equation.
Since mining bitcoin generates a lot of heat, there’s an opportunity for bitcoin miners to innovate and turn their heat byproduct into something of value. While it has yet to be implemented at scale, bitcoin miners around the world are actively working on ways to use their heat byproduct to heat homes, workshops, greenhouses, water tanks, and more.
Here are some of the ways that are currently being experimented with to use surplus heat from bitcoin mining.
Bitcoin Mining Space Heater
Heating air with bitcoin miners is the first and most obvious application for surplus miner heat because most bitcoin miners just sit on a rack somewhere producing hashes and blow the heat out the back of the miner via the exhaust fan. Naturally, this surplus heat can be used to function as a bitcoin mining space heater.
Using bitcoin miners as space heaters is the first and most basic method to use heat from bitcoin miners. It doesn’t require any special skills, hardware, or time investment. All you have to do is put a bitcoin miner in the same room as something that you want to dry or heat up and walk away. It will be noisy but there is a growing community of pleb miners who are all busy building free and open source mining boxes to cut down on the noise.
In the Netherlands, a bitcoin miner who goes by @BdGBertdeGroot is using solar powered bitcoin miners as a space heater to maintain the temperature in his greenhouse where he grows flowers. Since solar energy is wasted if it doesn’t get used, mining bitcoin with solar energy while simultaneously heating a greenhouse is a win-win for both the owner and the bitcoin network.
In a workshop in the Netherlands, @BdGBertdeGroot and @onthebrinkie are using a bitcoin miner to heat the workshop when the cost of natural gas is greater than using electricity. When the heat dissipates, they are still left with some fresh new sats.
Bitcoin Mining Heating System
Rather than just put a bunch of miners on a rack in a room, pleb miners have engineered a multitude of different bitcoin mining heating systems. These might be as simple as running bitcoin miners in the garage or basement where it tends to be cooler. More advanced heating systems might involve tying a miner into an existing HVAC system which gets pushed throughout a house or circulating excess heat through a radiant heating system.
Bitcoin mining heating systems like this require hardware, tools, and more expertise than just leaving a miner in a room. In true open source fashion, the pleb miners are coming up with all sorts of different systems that are proving to reduce the amount of resources that are consumed by furnaces, reduce heating bills, and stacking sats in the process. All of this supports the bitcoin network and also makes a bitcoin miner more efficient.
Not only does this generate heat for youre own home but there is something remaining after all of the heat dissipates. Naturally, I am talking about all of those fresh new sats.
Bitcoin Mining Heat Exchange
Some mining plebs are also using surplus heat from bitcoin miners to heat the oil used in radiant heaters via immersion cooling systems. Mining hardware is submerged in specialized oil (that doesn’t conduct electricity) which heats the oil and cools the miners. The hot oil is circulated through a heat exchange to heat any number of fluids such as water or oil. It can even be run through an air cooled radiator to heat air.
Bitcoin Mining Clothes Dryer
Clothes dryers use a lot of energy to generate the heat that is used to dry clothes. Wouldn’t it make sense to use heat from mining Bitcoin to dry clothes while also stacking sats? This innovative pleb miner has managed to preheat air before it goes into a clothes dryer. In theory, this reduces the amount of energy consumed while clothing is being dried because fewer resources are being consumed to heat the air in the dryer itself.
Using surplus heat from Bitcoin miners helps to reduce the costs associated with drying clothes which helps to offset the cost of mining bitcoin.
Bitcoin Mining Water Heater
We all enjoy homes that are a comfortable temperature in the colder winter months but I think we all tend to enjoy a hot shower all year round. That means consuming resources to heat water to the point where we can use it in showers. Not only do we heat the water for showers but we also use a good bit of energy to heat water to use in dishwashers, washing machines, preparing food, hot tubs, and more.
One of the ways that miners can be kept cool is with a simple water cooling heat exchange. Cold water is run through pipes to keep the miners cool which heats up the pipes. That water that is in the pipes can now be circulated back into your water heater at a higher temperature to reduce the amount of resources required to heat your water. Water heated in a closed-loop like this will also be used anywhere else that you use hot water like your dishwasher, clothes washer, kitchen sink, etc.
Once again, the pleb miners have open sourced their designs so that others can convert their existing water heaters into bitcoin mining water heaters.
Heating The SPA-256 Hot Tub
Here’s one example of a miner who is using his surplus heat energy to help heat his hot tub. This is actually a very simple concept for a heat exchange. He has appropriately named it SPA-256.
While most people don’t have a hot tub, it certainly shows the small scale solutions that are being experimented with. For larger operations, they could potentially heat entire bodies of water with some sort of water cooled mining.
Final Thoughts
If you live in part of the world where you have to consume resources to heat air or fluids (especially during colder months), perhaps using surplus heat from Bitcoin mining is an option worth exploring. Not only can you convert your fiat currency into the most sound money in history, you can also stack non-KYC sats while you offset the cost of heating your living space, warming up water, and more.
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