You can still use a heat pump that takes the heat from the exhaust air to warm the fresh air. That way you can get the same amount of heat as if you were using three+ times as many graphics cards.
I usually use GPUs for heating during winter as the power has to be used anyway, so why not get ethereum for it.
> You can still use a heat pump that takes the heat from the exhaust air to warm the fresh air.
I don't think you understand how heat pumps work. Heat pumps have significantly greater than 100% "efficiency". They don't turn electricity into heat. They use electricity to move preexisting heat, and it turns out that's far more efficient in terms of Joules of heat delivered to your home per Joule of energy spent. In fact, for any given Joule of energy spent, you can generally move two to three Joules from outside your home to inside of your home.
If the source of heat you're pumping is coming from resistive heating you're using electricity for, you're only getting 1 Joule of heat for every Joule of electricity. Adding heat pumps to this system doesn't help you.
> I usually use GPUs for heating during winter as the power has to be used anyway, so why not get ethereum for it.
Because owning and operating a heat pump is almost certainly cheaper than the costs of owning and operating a mining rig, even offset by the value of the cryptocurrency you generate. You'd almost certainly be better off by heating your home with a heat pump and using the energy savings to buy that same cryptocurrency.
The exceptions to this are if you are in a location where energy is extremely cheap, or perhaps if you generate more than your household usage of electricity (including resistive heating) through solar or wind but aren't able to sell that electricity back to the grid.
I know very well how heat pumps work, and I find it ironic that you assumes others don't know because you don't understand it or haven't heard of it.
A heat pump doesn't have to take heat from the outside. By using heat from the extracted air, you can use whatever you want to generate heat inside and get multiple times the effective heating as it's reused. Use wood, electrical floor heating or GPUs. It doesn't matter. The energy from the extracted air is transferred to the fresh supply air. The exhaust air will be freezing.
Also, electricity has been expensive the last two years, but mining has still been profitable, considering I already have some GPUs in my workstation and home server.
You don't earn money by using a heat pump, you do(or at least did) by mining. By mining and using a heat pump on that energy I increase the usage of that energy. Win win win.
> I know very well how heat pumps work, and I find it ironic that you assumes others don't know because you don't understand it or haven't heard of it.
>
> A heat pump doesn't have to take heat from the outside.
If you're already spending 1J of energy to get 1J of heat, a heat pump is not going to turn that 1J of heat into 2-3J of heat, nor is it going to recover any of the Joules you've spent to generate that heat. So sure, you can use a heat pump to move that heat around a space. But doing so just spends more energy and decreases the overall efficiency of the system.
The principle of a heat pump getting such efficiency numbers is entirely predicated upon the notion that you're able to move that heat from somewhere it already exists "for free" in sufficient bulk.
> You don't earn money by using a heat pump, you do(or at least did) by mining. By mining and using a heat pump on that energy I increase the usage of that energy. Win win win.
You fundamentally misunderstand the economics of this situation. Mining costs money in the form of hardware and electricity. In exchange you can potentially extract some amount of revenue. If your alternative was to use that energy to generate one Joule of heat for every Joule of energy spent, you might as well mine to get a rebate.
But the sum of mining revenue minus mining costs are almost certainly less than the costs of simply operating a heat pump instead. Again, you'd be better off using a heat pump to heat your home and using the money saved on energy to simply buy $CRYPTO at market prices.
As I said, I already have GPUs. If you don't think mining has been profitable for me and others during e.g. the last year then you need a reality check, cause it has been profitable.
> If you're already spending 1J of energy to get 1J of heat, a heat pump is not going to turn that 1J of heat into 2-3J of heat, nor is it going to recover any of the Joules you've spent to generate that heat.
It's not magic, or complicated. The energy spent is used multiple times, as I said. You can save energy using a heat pump both by using it for initial heating, or transferring existing heat that would otherwise be thrown away.
So no, I'm not misunderstanding anything. If you think it's not possible then you too can get this "magic" using e.g. Nibe F750 + SAM40. Check their documentation, it even has charts for everything!
There was a comment on another web site a while back: "The words you're using - it's like you know what a microwave is, but you keep calling it a fridge, and you want that fridge to do an oil change on your cat."
You insist you know about heat pumps, but your comments indicate you don't understand the fundamental principles.
> You can still use a heat pump that takes the heat from the exhaust air to warm the fresh air
Unless I'm misunderstanding part of this proposed setup, I'm pretty sure this doesn't work. The higher efficiency of heat pumps comes from the fact that the outdoors is an effectively infinite (for the purposes of a house) source of temperature differential. You can only move as much heat as exists, so you can't use a heat pump to multiply a finite heat source.
I'm not sure what there is to misunderstand. Heat is taken for the outgoing hot air, and transferred to the fresh air coming in. So instead of hot air going out, the air going out will usually be freezing.
In my experience, people usually try to avoid exchanging air with the outdoors when they're concerned about significantly heating/cooling their homes. If you're exchanging air then a heat pump could super heat/cool the outgoing air, and that's the piece I was missing from your proposal.
A house must exchange air. Better insulated houses are basically air tight, so you must have ventilation to get fresh air.
A pro with that solution is that the extracted air has a high temperature all year, making it more efficient that using a heat pump to extract heat from outside that might be -30 celcius. A downside is that the amount of air is limited, so if you need more heat then you have to supplement it with something else.
You get it, but it seems there are a few others that don't realize that a heat pump can also be used to increase efficiency by reducing the heat lost. While I do get that it's unknown to most people, some people here perfectly illustrates the Dunning-Kruger effect...
That sounds like heat recovery ventilation; while useful, it serves a different purpose than heat pumps (which heats up enclosed spaces without the ventilation). Also HRVs normally work with whatever existing air and don't use extra heated air…
I usually use GPUs for heating during winter as the power has to be used anyway, so why not get ethereum for it.