Crypto as auxiliary winter bedroom heat source

First, I know nothing about crypto…except I heard they can throw off a lot of waste heat. I was wondering if I can utilize that waste to heat my bedroom in wintertime. Perhaps the currency I collect can pay the heating bill? I’m looking for help in finding acceptable used equipment; what do I need and how to set it up. Currently I have a budget of $0.0 in Canadian dollars. I’m posting now in the hope I will run across some kickass deals thru the spring, summer, and fall. If I know what to look for then maybe I will fin what I need at a cost I can accept. I’m currently just started fixing an old mobile home that was gifted to me. I have 35 years of experience in renovations so the fixing won’t be a problem. The mobile home is near Red Deer, Alberta, Canada. It has 2 bedrooms on either end. The south bedroom has lots of windows and will be used as an office. The north bedroom is where I will sleep. There is wood heat in the main living room/ kitchen area. I will have a fan to push heat down the hall to my bedroom but I feel that won’t be enough in mid-winter when temps can drop to -40C.

Is this a viable plan?
Any suggestions on hardware?
Good simple site/s to learn how to set up system and how to collect coin?
TIA
Richard

The kind of coins that are worth something, arent worth mining with GPUs AFAIK. You could donate your clock cycles to folding at home. A kind of a crowdsourced research project. Level1 has a folding team.

If you wanted to mine a coin with your machine theres a ton of options out there. Find a coin you think is interesting first, then look into how to set that up, be it solo, or in a pool.

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your better off with a space heater as you would need tons of gpus to keep a room warm if temps fall low and you have poor insulation. and the power bill would not be offset in the slightest.

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I mine with Bitmain Antminers, have used other ASICs, and have whatever GPUs I’m not actively using running in the background.

I heard they can throw off a lot of waste heat. I was wondering if I can utilize that waste to heat my bedroom in wintertime.

ASICs pump out a ton of heat, roughly equal to that of a microwave running 24/7. My home air conditioning is currently set to 26C, but the ambient room temperature with a single miner in operation is 33C.

So yes, it is possible to use the waste heat to offset your heating bills. I only ran heat a few times this winter because of it. It’s about as effective as an oil-filled radiant heater.

But…

Noise is a bigger problem than heat. Each Antminer is roughly the size of a shoebox, and is roughly as loud as a garbage disposal. (~80dB). Some people put their miners in coolers to isolate the noise, but then need fancier cooling/ventilation systems to handle the heat. Things that trap noise tend to also trap heat.

There’s also another real concern: electric heat is expensive. Propane, wood, and natural gas are all cheaper for the same amount of heat.

Add all of those concerns together, and while it is possible to heat with cryptominers, it’s not rational.

If you want a warm house and want to start collecting cryptocurrency, the saner path is to heat your house with the woodstove, and use whatever money you save on electricity and equipment to outright buy crypto on an exchange.

Mining profitably is inherently limited by electricity costs, and you’re competing with large-scale miners who have set up their operations in areas with extremely cheap electricity - outright subsidized by government, in many cases.

There are a few places in North America where electricity is cheap enough that it can be done. In the US, they’re all southwestern or west coast states. In Canada, the only location I’m aware of with cheap enough electricity is near Beauharnois because of the hydroelectric plant, but I haven’t done an exhaustive Canadian search.

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So the consensus is that the currency earned would NOT offset the electricity used?
The noise is an issue I didn’t know, thanks for the heads up.

I do have a fallback plan to pipe heat from the wood stove to the bedroom.

Thanks everyone.

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Interesting question; I too have wondered about how to use crypto setups, including cpu mining, to cover or subsidize heating costs.

The profit from mining doesn’t need to cover the electricity cost for it to be useful (although that would be amazing), since heating is a necessary cost either way. Of course the main question is whether mining profits plus electricity costs are less than the costs of alternative heating methods (oil, natural gas, etc). But for those who use electric heating anyways, this isn’t a factor.

Also, mining doesn’t have to be the only heating source. I’ve noticed how hot my room gets from stress testing my system. So if an idling computer can also function as an auxiliary heater while reducing heating costs, that would be great.

A key factor in using an idling computer is that the hardware cost is essentially “free” since it’s just exploiting unutilized resources. Building a crypto-heating system or getting an ASIC miner has that added capital cost which may have a long payback time. Searching online reveals several purpose-built crypto-heaters for sale, but they’re not cheap.

Even more amazing would be mining heating software that works with an ambient temperature sensor acting as a thermostat to throttle or turn off mining when the desired temperature is reached!

Toasting bread is optional. :wink:

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Even more amazing would be mining heating software that works with an ambient temperature sensor acting as a thermostat to throttle or turn off mining when the desired temperature is reached!

What you’re describing is possible. Most miners have open source firmware options, if it’s not supported by default. It’s not too hard to solder on a thermometer and do that.

Because blockchains need processing power regardless of the market price of the crypto being mined, most mining pools have a ramp-up period to discourage opportunistic mining.

Newly joined devices have a payout penalty for the first few hours they run. Because of this, it’s more cost effective to manage your temperatures than react to them. You’re crippling your return rate by constantly mining with the payout penalty.

You can avoid that by solo-mining, but solo mining isn’t really viable for miners with anything less than datacenter sized operations.

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My computer is how I heat my room during the winter, I have an oil heater in here but even on the lowest setting it is too hot so I just got in the habit of using my computer for the last 2 winters. Have thought of doing mining for more heat but I like it when it’s 40-50 °F so never bothered to.

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Yes, it will throw out heat. but it depends on how many cards and how hard you run them.

If heat is the goal then more volts, more clock, etc.

You definitely won’t make bank on crypto trying to heat your house with it but running crypto mining during winter is probably less costly if you take mined coins into account than normal heating. It just won’t put out a huge amount unless you’re doing it on epic scale.

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