Topic: What's stopping companies making an actual space heater bitcoin miner for home? - page 2. (Read 496 times)

This is spot on.

I got the apollo when it first came out and it is the only asic I am running in my home non stop.

I do run a ton of gpus in my home even now in the upcoming summer.

Why is that

 one quite quiet
two they still turn a profit at my summer power rate of 17 cents and 3 for cooling and it is  20 cents a kwatt. I burn 50 kwatts in mining each day so 0.20 x 50 = 10 usd in power cost

earnings are around 19 dollars.

if I ran a pair s17s set to 958 watts it would burn  about 10-11 and do 80 th with vnish firmware.

80th earns  10-11 bucks after the development fees.

so a bit louder and maybe break even with the s17s or

quiet and make say 7-8 bucks a day with the gpus with 17+3. = 20 cent summer in home power.

Bitmain already tried to produce the Antminer R4, but it wasn't very popular. Way back in 2013, the very first Bitcoin ASICs were from Butterfly Labs and they were quiet. Then we had Gridseeds for LTC/DOGE which used 50-100w each.

I think most people who home mine will buy GPU rigs without even considering a Bitcoin ASIC. If they're mining anyway, why not buy the equipment with the highest profit-to-power ratio?

Well, its a nice idea but I think the main reason why miners want to cool their maschines is to keep it running efficiently and fast. Because as they heat up that can have an effect on the performance. That is not optimal for heating a room anyway. One effect that people who buy "gamer laptops" do not understand. Heat degrades electrical components. Although this becomes an optimal solution for people who live in very cold areas e.g Siberia and have many miners... Just as long the miners don't overheat at their specific room temperature requirements.

hmm, I don't think the number of chips is relevant to cooling, see I am not a thermodynamics expert by any means, but my understanding is that heat is just a form of energy, so when "electrical energy" passes through the chips of the miner it will convert to " heat energy" of the same amount, so a 1000watts electrical energy will always create a 1000 joule regardless of how that  "electrical energy" is being utilized.

You are right about using more efficient chips at the best efficiency you can squeeze of them, but that will only allow you to get more hashrate for the same amount of heat, but consuming 2000w will always generate 2000j worth of heat, now it's up to you if you want to move the heat away or keep it inside the miner to get some siclon sauce, but you can't possibly cool a 2000w miner without noisy fans.

I believe by using the best noise to airflow ratio fans on any miner, you can't sleep in the same room with a miner that pulls anything above 600-700w, ok maybe add an extra 100-150w if you are a heavy sleeper but that's all about it, sleeping next to a 2000w miner is just close to impossible.

Yes, it is, you can get the Vornado for $150 and the Apollo for $899.99, let's assume 1000W running for 6 hours a day for 6 months at 20cents/kwh for the heater and you have an energy bill of 200$ each year, but you paid in an advance for nearly 4 years. Let's assume you will keep the Apollo nonstop for heating purposes and you've got 18$ a month ignoring power.
So, why would anyone bother with these, especially since as years pass your machine will be less and less efficient compared to the newer models?


Spot on, this is common everywhere and this is why in some cases manufacturers of goods do not even sell directly to the consumer, they unload all this to resellers and let them deal with a mob of shoppers that will probably encounter every single problem in the universe. One tiny fraction for the profit and you can cut a lot of personnel in support and a lot in accounting, you won't be faced with tens of failed payments, chargeback, and everything else.


You can't without using air but you can reduce the noise by playing with the numbers of chips and their settings, of course, this would end with a mining machine mining at 1/3 of its capacity and not being a lot cheaper either. I just check my emergency air heater, it's rated 1500W and 50DB, and I bet the chips would melt at the temperature that the ceramic plate inside is heated.

I have that rig in white. with this card

https://www.lenovo.com/us/lenovopro/en/p/accessories-and-software/graphics-cards/graphics_cards/4x61e26089?

Yeah, absolutely right. Most experienced miners would be able to do this by tinkering with the devices themselves. There's no market for it really.

And having a custom built PC for heating/mining could be a great idea as you can also use it when not mining for many other purposes.

For example this enclosure for a PC would be actually perfect, and very similar to the space heater I had in mind:

Having modded tons of different loud miners into quiet miners that will heat a home no one will buy an expensive space heater miner when they can mod a miner.

Also pcs with two gpus can be quiet. they mine btc indirectly.

Mining gears manufacturers make more, better and easier money when selling to industrial-scale miners, they don't even make those loud 1200-1500W gears anymore, it's all 3kw and above now, they know that mining is no more a home thing, and only large farms will afford to buy a dozen miners each, so give them what they want, a large farm rather manages 10000 gears of 3.5kw than 30000 of 1200w gears, also the manufacturer rather deal with 10,000 possible warranty claims, support, and shipment that dealing with three times the number.

So the majority of buyers are happy with these loud gears since they don't mine at home, the people that make them are even happier, why bother making a small miner? this will cause them many problems, 10k space heater miners will be bought by 10k people (maybe half the number of they are lucky), so instead of dealing with 1 client that can place a single order of 10k miners, you will need to deal 10k or 5k clients, many of which don't understand a damn thing about mining or/and how to set these little miners up.

Also, manufacturers are bottlenecked by chips supply, labor and time, so if you have 1 million chips, 100 engs, and 3 months, it makes a lot more sense to build something you have already built, you have clients that have already PAID upfront and a thing that is easier to build, why would you go out of your way to satisfy the average joe who wants to heat his bedroom while mining some sats? nobody is going to do that.

But even if someone else was going to do what you suggest, how would they exactly cool 1000W-2000W without moving enough air? and to do that you will end up using "load fans", the setup you are talking about is limited by the chip efficiency, with the current efficiency we have, any hashrate close to 20th will be in the 1200w range if using something like  BM1397, and then about 600w if using something like BM1398BB but will be extremely costly.

Maybe someone can modify the Apollo miner to give it a better look, maybe put double the chips to get 4-6th and improve the cooling, that might work, but again, will cost an arm and a leg to make, I think the best thing home miners can do for now would be to buy a few Apollo miners if they aren't happy with just one for a space heater.

Every time I read something about a bitcoin miner being a space heater it ends up being either a joke, or a vaporware.

Is there anything fundamentally wrong for making this?, I would be happy to buy one that looked good and wasn't very noisy.

For example, have a look at this great little space heater:



It looks good, produces nice heat, and it's not crazy loud or annoying at all. It has 2 modes, low(750W) and high(1500W). It's a great little machine.

Now, for home miners, look at something like the Apollo BTC:



It also looks good, produces nice heat, and it's not crazy loud or annoying at all. It has 3 modes, ranging from around 100W to 300W or so generating about 2-3TH/s. It's a great little machine.

Why hasn't anyone made a great looking space heater with something like that?

You could make basically something like the Vornado, but internally instead of just having a simple heating element, you would have something like 10 times what the Apollo has. There's enough room to do that.

It would run nice and quiet, produce enough heat, look great, consume about 1000W-2000W or so(configurable) and generate around 20TH/s. It would be a great little space heating machine that gives you a few sats while running it.

My only guess is that it would be too expensive, but I'm not sure about that really...