Topic: Bitcoin home heater idea - page 2. (Read 2278 times)

That is a very valid point if I had kept the receipts and the original heatsinks.
(I know, I know, I know. One day I had a "too-much-mess-in-this-place" moment).
Liquid-cooled as the GPUs are, they are not much of a value right now. Maybe the server in its entirety is, as it's a quite powerful machine.

Also selling stuff on eBay has a time cost to consider.
E.g. say that, in total, I spend 1.5 hours time to take a decent picture of an item, write down a description, set up an auction, follow up on it, prepare the package and send it to the auction winner.
Those 1.5 hours I rate against the hourly net income I have in my current full time job. If the resulting amount is higher/close to the price of the item I'm selling, in my view by selling the item on eBay I'm actually wasting time.

You don't have to worry about it now, but another thing you will need to consider after first halvings day and the asicpocalypse is the capital loss on the video cards from depreciation.

no! Hot Idea

Cool idea.

Ok, so the idea comes from the fact that I have electric heating at home, ad I can't change that.

I do have some 1.4 GHashes of GPUs that I bought last November. They are currently sitting there not doing much. Because they produce 750W of heat and I haven't used them in summer. Now the winter is coming. I need heat. 

I know that BTC mining with GPU is not much economically convenient in most countries due to high power costs. In my case I'm close to breaking even. Yet if I'm paying for electric heating, which is basically a direct conversion of electrical power into heat, I might as well mine bitcoins instead, and at least get some of my electric supply costs back.

My server/heater is liquid-cooled with a big radiator and PWM fans on it that are normally quiet but become very noisy when hashing. The noise can be disturbing when listening to music or watching TV, in which case I would switch to a conventional heater.

Sometimes I have friends visiting/staying over - and I enjoy their company a lot but they are not the kind I would want to teach how to launch commands on my server. 

So far what I have come up with is:
1. an automated task to fire up the miner software at certain times of the day;
2. a physical "kill switch" that will turn off the heater for a couple of hours. So my guest can just push the button and enjoy noise-free TV when needed.

I just ordered one of these: http://www.play.com/Gadgets/Gadgets/4-/6705118/-/Product.html
The button comes with a led, and it can be programmed with a driver available here: http://dreamcheekyusb.codeplex.com/

What I'll do is writing three simple AutoIt programs:
1. MinerOn.exe = checks if miner task is already launched; if not, it launches it & turns the button led ON
2. MinerOff.exe = checks if miner task is already launched; if yes, it kills it & turns the button led OFF
3. MinerSnooze.exe = like MinerOff.exe but also schedules MinerOn.exe in two hours.

(I know, I'm nuts)

Any comments/ideas?