But with bitcoin mining your heat pays for itself, while if you use a heat pump you have to buy power to run the heat pump. So while heat pumps are more energy effient, bitcoin miners are far more economically efficient.
This is only true if the value of the Bitcoin you mine is higher than the difference in cost between buying and operating a heat pump and buying and operating a mining rig.
I don't agree with a lot of things in CAPEX vs OPEX, but this is one that is clearly right:
Having equipment sitting around unused is way more expensive than most people care to think about.
A heating coil might not be terribly valuable in July, but come November it will have roughly the same value it had the previous February. Bitcoin mining hardware that's switched off for five months is losing value at an alarming rate, and very quickly won't be a net reduction in costs.
Very quickly a heat pump becomes cheaper to operate, and cheaper to purchase. And if you amortize the cost over the life expectancy, that threshold is very, very low. People who have recent memory of living paycheck to paycheck are constantly screwed by the latter, and that Venn diagram overlaps heavily with several other circles that make crypto super attractive to some people and super ridiculous to others.
I went down this avenue of compute as radiator long ago, and I could never get the math to work, unless I moved somewhere that was cold most of the year, and that sure as fuck is not going to happen.
In a very brief nutshell, the ways in which buying a little hardware or a tool to save thousands of hours of frustrating development work is not a slam dunk because of colors of money.
In either case, you still have to compare against using the fossil fuels to heat your house instead of turning them to electricity first, to heat your house via the heat pump or the resistive heater
In that case you would still have an absorption refrigerator that "cools" the outside and dumps to the inside as an alternative. They are usually either gas-fired or running off of district heating (well, 50-120C seems usual).
2/3rds of that cost is labor. 3 ton multi-zone heatpump kit is $2500-3500, another $250-500 for an electrician to pull #6s and a ground to a 60A disconnect outside and sealtite whip into the heatpump, and 60-80 hrs at $125/hr to install the heat pump and air handlers, including all the exterior wall penetrations and sealing, running glycol lines, installing thermostats, wiring air handlers, etc.
Yeah single room. There's dual room splits that run a bigger compressor with two heads too. They are usually way cheaper than bigger units even when you account how much juice they eat up but you should do your own math because it depends on the house and the setup.
Also if you want to control every single room including bathrooms and walk in closets it gets tricky.
I'd assume that they were going to use carbon-generating fuel, and that someone somewhere would already run a mining rig. IE: It's murky.
If they were going to heat using an electric space heater, it's a wash.
If they were going to heat using natural gas, but the electricity comes from nuclear, it's lower carbon.
If they were going to heat using natural gas, and the emissions are higher. BUT, if they were going to run the mining rig anyway, and they've merely turned off the gas heat, the emissions are overall lower.
Heat pumps work by moving heat, they usually move more heat than input energy.
Basically, a refrigerator is a heat pump. The input energy runs the heat pump, which it uses to move heat out of the refrigerator. Typically, for every watt of electricity, more than a watt of electricity is moved out of the refrigerator.
They work by compressing gasses into fluids, and then letting the fluid expand back into a gas. Basically, when a fluid evaporates, it absorbs heat as potential energy. The energy can be harvested by compressing the gas at a high enough pressure that it condenses into a fluid. Do this in a loop, and you can move heat.
Or an example that might be more readily acceptable, being something that a person without any domain knowledge could simply test* to prove it to themselves:
Suppose you built a shed around the outdoor unit of a central air conditioning system and let it come up to max ambient temperature. Then right next to it you built a shed with a resistive heater which consumes the exact same wattage as the air conditioner. The first shed will be much warmer because you're not creating heat so much as you're moving heat. If you increase the resistive heater's wattage by about 2.5x then the sheds will be about the same temperature.
* Don't actually do this and expect the system to survive.
I understand this, but the argument I was responding to was "you're already going to use the electricity, you might as well make profit", but actually you could use less energy so it's not a given that all this electricity was going to be used. It is instead a choice between profit and carbon emissions.
Why would we assume they are (I'm not sure that the "someone somewhere" part of that is material either) going to use a mining rig already to assess the merits of mining rigs for heating? That's tautological.
For a guy in Siberia various climate models show that the global warming will improve life. Winters will be much milder, agriculture will be less risky.
My understanding is that this isn't true, because Siberia's muskeg soil isn't very suitable for growing things, whether frozen or not. (Same with northern Canada. Muskeg and mosquitos are why northern Ontario has never been settled.)
My point is that when we as outsiders look at this practice and evaluate its merits, we should care about the carbon emissions even if the people there don’t.
> If you live in Siberia you presumably want the planet to warm up more. ;)
No you don't, when permafrost melts it causes ground to move. It is really bad for everything build on or in it. Something like houses sinking and falling apart. In some cases it cause big holes in the ground and they got even bigger over time.
Because permafrost melting is the only negative consequences of climate change. There are no forest fires, no problems with insect due to milder winters, etc.
For bitcoin mining to pay for itself, you need to leave it running to the max 24/7. Each miner is a noisy ~3000w machine. So that's a 3000w heater. You would normally turn down the heater during the day, but if you turn off your miner during the day, you won't break even.
Apparently you haven’t heard of immersion cooling. It’s essentially silent, and many people are using DIY setups to augment a heat pump or hot water heater.
Commercial solutions have been in development for a few years. Here’s one example:
https://www.wisemining.io/
Edit: after re-reading your comment I realize you also aren’t aware that miners can be throttled. Powering it down is not the only alternative to consuming 3kW.
