These first experimental models are like cars that consume 40 gallons / 100 miles.
There will be people who will optimize the "mining-heater",
I think You can't optimize those mining heaters by avoiding the law of physics, end of story!
Heat pumps have always provided more energy than they consume because they work on a different principle, you can't have a bitcoin miner that cossumes 3kw produce more than the equivalent joules of heat.
Besides, unlike any other systems ASICs need to run 24h, you won't be shutting them during the day and putting them back at night when you're cold, and during the day you have to get rid of the excess heat, how you do that, by venting it out using more energy to get rid of unwanted heat, do I have to tell you the efficiency of it?
The truth right now is that miners use more energy to get rid of the heat compared to the heat that is actually used.
I have a feeling that these articles have forgotten about the noise a bitcoin miner makes.
I don't say that using the heat of the ASICs is bad (I think that some even use it for their garden/plants) as long as they mine anyway, I just say that the topic may need to be expanded/completed in order to make it actually useful.
That's because the guy in the article was mining with a GPU, so...
I have a feeling that sometimes people want to talk about how they wish things would work not how really they do.
ASICs are terrible as a home companion, they produce so much noise it's like having an industrial vacuum near you, I actually have my headphones sometimes when I enter that room, the screeching noise is just not the thing you want to listen to for more than 5 minutes. Then you have their enemies, dust, and humidity, you can get rid of dust but humidity is a pain in the ass.
So unless you have a spare room with no neighbors to complain everything is close to impossible, and if you have that in your house, you have the problem of transferring the heat because it's quite hard to transfer heat via air tubes for ventilation and not to transfer noise also!
Of course, there are ways to mitigate those
- tune your mines to low, it will reduce the consumption and thus the need for ventilate the heat and the noise
- use the miners to direct the heat only to the room next to you, heating it and transferring then naturally the heat without the noise
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/how-to-heat-your-home-with-bitcoin-miningI bet he spent more on that than his S9 will make in all its lifetime.
I’ll be removing the stock fans from the S9 and using an inline fan (an AC Infinity CLOUDLINE S4, which goes for around $100 at time of writing
An s9 makes 1$ a day, so there it goes 3 months and a half with just replacing the fan.