Bitcoin Forum

Does anybody use the heat from their mining rig for anything useful (other than heating the space in which the rig sits)?

Help bread dough to rise.
Pipe the heat into an adjoining room, and add moisture to create a sauna.
Put rigs in a greenhouse and grow tomatoes year-round.

Not a lot of realistic uses, sorry.

:D

When I was mining, it would have been nice if I could use the mining heat to heat the hot tub.

The hot tub is only feet away, and consumes electricity on its own just to keep the water warm.  What a waste!  I could have water cooled rigs and free mining (the hot tub pays for it) if only I wanted to spend some time engineering some plumbing and frankensteining twelve video cards.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=52331

Thinking is good.... and apparently comfortable.

Wouldn't a thermal couple work for you. Its a little waste in efficiency but provides multiple uses other than the tub.

Yeah, that thread was the one that got me thinking about this topic, I was going to add a link to it, but you beat me to it :)

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3707.msg53879#msg53879

It would require a lot of work but you could use a heat exchange to pre-heat water for hot water heater.  Every watt of thermal energy you dump into the hot water heater is a watt you don't need to spend money for.  Obviously this requires water cooling.  The "warm" air exhausted from GPU is simply hot concentrated enough to be of any use.  Removing that heat by water makes the waste heat more "usable".

I have three open air rigs that have five gpu's each. I have a window style exhaust fan in front of each one that sucks air from the rigs and blows it out of my office , this has worked quite well to heat my entire downstairs of my house so far this fall

Someone is heating a bathroom with the heat produced. he made a thread about it somewhere but i cant find it anymore. all i could this https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3707.msg53879#msg53879 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3707.msg53879#msg53879). which is a re-post from his thread

Sounds great if you live WAY up north, but in Texas no one has a heated bathroom. Maybe because it's only cold for 1 month out of the year? The rest of the time, the bathroom is naturally hot.

its only heated floors no problem with having those all year around. cold bathroom floor tiles suck.

I would not want water inside my computer case so I would look for a non-conductive heat transfer fluid (many liquid cooling systems use them). You would then need a secondary heat exchanger which would then exchange heat with the water or air depending on your use. You would have to be careful though because if your heat isnt removed (ie you dont need hot air or water atm) then the heat could build up in the cooling medium and you could end up overheating. You would need some sort of a controller. Also depending on how many devices you are trying to cool with your liquid cooling setup you would want parallel lines run to each device because if it were connected in series you would be removing the cooling capabiltiy of the fluid (less of a delta T). This being said you would either be running your system warm or your cooling medium wouldnt be very warm and not very efficient for heating air or water (efficiency is driven by delta T).

It can be done but there are many limitations. One of the major limitations is cost because so far based on what I just described you could be up a few grand in costs. I think in new york they are contemplating using heat from servers for building heating. Its nice to dream of these things though lol.

There almost no fluids with higher thermal conductivity and lower electrical conductivity than distilled water.  The few that do exist are prohibitively expensive.  If you can't get around the need for using water that likely makes the problem uneconomical.

There is someone selling dehydrated strawberries and blueberries.

EDIT: link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=52331.0

I occasionally dry beef meat to produce home made Jerky. I dry it at 50C, so using hot air from the miner PC would work fine. Imagine the smell!

Distilled water is only so good at being nonconductive and it easily picks up ions from just about anything including the impeller on the pump that would be pumping it. Water is one of the most corrosive liquids around in deionized forms (eats away at brass, or anything with iron and water is also what brings down mountains over time). This could pose a problem for heat exchangers. I also assume that you mean deionized and not distilled because distilled could still be somewhat conductive.

Sure the nonconductive fluid would be expensive but it would only be necessary on the closed loop connected to the chips. The heat exchangers would probably be similarly expensive but if you were doing something like this it is what I would recommend. You are already spending thousands as is.

Meh.  Been watercooling systems for 7 years now.  Never had ions in water kill a rig.  I have blown many components over the years for non-water reasons.  Heat exchangers are pretty simply and cheap. 

High thermal conductive and low electrically conductive fluids are incredibly expensive and have to be changed regularly as they will become ionized over time also.  Flourinet is about $300 per gallon for example.  Use high quality tubing, distilled water, and good connectors.  The risk honestly isn't that high.

Water is incredibly good for cooling which is why it is used in everything from super computers, to racecars, to nuclear reactors.

I have never run one of these special fluids so I will take your word on that they have to be changed because of ionization. Water is excellent at dissolving things and at my job I have seen DI water completely dissolve brass over time (also very toxic to drink). Heat exchangers can vary in price depending on efficiency and design. I guess one more point against the fluids I mentioned would be if you have a breach in your heat exchanger wall (happens more than you think) then you would have contaminated your water. I believe the thermal conductivity for water is 1C/W-mL or something along those lines which is very good. Not going to argue with you at all on that. This is all good to know in case I ever plan on water cooling my PC (I will use DI with a plastic impeller pump).

I dry my clothes. I was thinking about under floor heating, and even driveway defrosting.  :)

I am in Texas so we have electric heat here anyway in apartments. With miners I do not have to run central heater at all (also electric), only central fan to keep air circulating. So during winter I can run the miners 24/7 at current prices. When it gets hot again and the price does not go up, I will have to stop the miners because of air conditioning cost.

While collect the heat using water is a good idea, the huge cost and labor of mounting water block for each card simply make it impractical

Defrosting food is the simplest way to use the hot air, since I put the rig outside, if there is a way to re-pipe those hot air back into the house, that will be perfect, but I'm afraid that also involves quite a bit of construction

Eventually we can heat the whole globe! Oh, wait..

If you have the space (or you make a box for your miners), you can just pump the heat outside. I have a small room with a window, I closed the room and put a box fan in the window during the summer. Even so, replacing a 1500W space heater with one that also makes Bitcoins is certainly a benefit in the winter!

Last week, we've moved our stuff in the basement (big basement!) of somebody who needed the heat for the winter (we are in Canada). It's been 1 week, and we didn't started the heater once with a temperature between 0 and -10 Celsius outside.

And usually, that house pays around 3500$ for heating in a year.

Right now, I really believe it is possible to reduce of the heating cost down to 0$. I'm curious to know how it will be if we get temperatures of -30 Celsius, I hope we have a mild winter  ;D

I've been debating setting up some tubing with a heat exchanger (sealed) to provide heating to my aquarium, since I need to heat it anyways.  I just haven't got around to it.  Plus I don't know how hot it will get (55 gallons), so I'll need to do some testing first so I don't come home one day to fish soup!
 
If it works, then I'd keep the regular heater on to provide backup in the event that my GPUs stop mining.

If you have a water cooling system you could use a thermostatic valve to divert the hot water to either aquarium or a radiator.

One way to get an idea of how much heat your aquarium needs is to plug it into a kill-a-watt.  My guess is that an aquarium doesn't lose that much heat.  Likely the output of your rig is vastly oversized compared to the needs of the aquarium.  Now 500 gallon, or a backyard swimming pool that might be more like it.

Living in Canada, let's just say that it's nice to have the computers warm the house up a bit :)

My rig is only 2 5770.
It's my gaming rig, so by the time the fluid got from my rig to the aquarium (one room over) there would be heat loss out of the tubing.
 
It was just a silly idea I had, but if the aquarium was in my same room, I'd look into it more seriously, but might give an idea to someone else reading. :)