Bitcoin Forum

Hi :)

One problem with BitCoin mining is that it generates heat. For me, in Winter in Australia, that's a useful thing; but for the majority of miners at the moment it's a problem rather than an asset.

What I'd like to see is for people to find ways to make use of this heat.

For example, in my '70s caravan there was a fridge that ran on LPG. It had an element that made cold air when you heated it. Given video cards are generating 200-300 watts of heat energy, perhaps it is possible to make a fridge driven by BitCoin mining.

Similarly, you might be able to build a dehumidifier. (A 70 watt peltier element will usually cover one room.)

And of course, for the major miners, perhaps it's possible to make an air conditioner using similar principles.

Another option is a tropical fish tank heater.

I don't know if there's a practical way to differentiate between green and dirty bitcoins, but it's an amusing idea. Perhaps a Green pool?

While it might be possible for me to patent such ideas, doing so would limit the possibility for people to build such things; so I'd rather just put the idea out there if it's not already.

A hot water system for houses powered by bitcoin mining would be nice.

Might even be able to claim carbon credits for it  :D

I wonder how you can coordinate the heat from multiple cards for that purpose? I guess you could use a liquid cooling setup for CPUs, but pipe the coolant through a copper coil of pipe inside the tank. Our bathtub-sized tank uses 3,600 watts but you would probably only need 1/3 of that. The hardest part I suppose would be that most tanks are mains pressure tanks these days so it'd be an engineering challenge. Not impossible 'tho.

Maybe you could reclaim some electricity with a sterling engine hooked up to an alternator. (Probably not cost effective though)

I like the water tank idea but I'm not sure 30 gallons could retain enough heat, and since water heaters are insulated, they don't dissipate heat and the water will approach the temperature of the cards. Maybe you could have an alert that will tell you to take a shower or do a load of laundry if the cooling system isn't performing.

Also for me it's especially bad as I have a solar pre-boiler that gets the water to 76 degrees C (170 F), so the system is already being heated to at least that level.

You could loop it into a pool for extra heating there. The nice thing is that a pool a large heat sink and it has an open surface that dissipates the heat.

Definitaly there are ways to use heat from BTC miners. I'm looking for solutions as well.The winter is comming, so I'm not really in rush, but I want to design and make something usefull until winter ends.
LPG fridge is running basically on fire, which means high temperature above 200°C. So this is not usefull application for BTC miners.
Dehumidifying with peltier uses cold side of peltier to condensate water. The heat generated+moved at the other side of peltier in fact waste. There is no cold spot on BTC miner and you cannot improve peltier condensation effect with additional heat, so this is not possible.
Air conditioner is same principle. You want to "generate" cool with heat. Not possible. (At least not efficiently.)
This might be good application.
Most effective way to use BTC miner heat is, not suprisingly, to heat things. :D
If you use it for heating your water, you could achieve effectivity close to 100% and you can save on electricity (or any other thing you use to heat your water). I want to achieve exactly this option. But it's not easy task.
You need to use water cooling to efficiently take heat from miner.
Your miner need to be cooled. That means it "likes" cold water. You need to supply it with cold water and it will provide you less cold water.
For example: supply water has 10°C, output water has 20°C. Miner is happy, you in shower are probably not.
When watter heats up to 60°C, output water could be 70°C, you will be happy in shower, but your miner will be near melting.
So there needs to be balance between this two situations. And probavbly backup cooling in case your tank reaches target temperature.

They have a camping stove pot that you create electricity by heating/boiling water. The same can be applied here--it's going to come, don't worry.

Currently I have a ducting system setup that allows me to concentrate heat from the server room (now all miners) throughout the heating system in the rest of my house and I have also added a travel path / shut off that diverts it to the outside when I do not want to utilize the heat. It's the simplest method and not all that high tech, but it's fairly easy to do yourself.

I think I saw somewhere else, someone suggested a Jally beneath a lava lamp would be pretty easy to rig up.

It has the right properties, as in - you don't really care if it's X degrees, or if it's going to be hot enough to make a cuppa with, you just care that every now and then it gets hot enough to move the oils around in the lamp and looks cool. Sure it's not 'green' or useful in any way, but it's something.

Needs to be something simple that doesn't require boiling or very hot temperatures. Like a hot water bottle heater or a glove warmer / sock warmer. All these ideas with transferring heat from graphics cards somewhere else with tubes and so on are pretty complicated. You need simple rigs that are close to the miner.

There was a guy who heated his bathroom floor with his miner ::)

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

You can save energy by feeding warmed water to the main boiler. Lots of solar water heaters save money this way, not because they get water to a boil.

Doesn't mean it is simple in practice like you say...

It sounds complicated, but doable. I would suggest a hot-tub design where GPUs are targeted to run constantly at ~85C and pump water into a 2-4 person unit and accept water back from the unit, which should be somewhat cooler. What you don't want is a closed system where the water gets continually hotter because your GPUs would start to experience issues and shutdown around 100C.

My wife owns a Women's Gym, and recently our Sauna Heater broke.  We're planning to get the same model (sounds crazy, why get the same model that failed... but it must have served a decade?  We've only owned the gym for 1 year): a SAWO SCA-80NS (http://www.sawo.com/sauna_steam/scandia/).  First time I've had to look at such things, and looking at the specs: it draws 8,000 Watts of power! 

I must admit, my mind was racing for a moment, thinking about how many 28nm bitcoin miners that would power... My Jupiter pulls about 540W for about 500GH/s.  15 Jupiters would draw about 8.1kW, of which I think a lot (most?) ends up as heat.  Imagine somehow capturing that heat to run the sauna, and having a 7.5TH/s Bitcoin mining farm as a side-effect!

Tried the idea on my wife, no dice.  It just seems to me such a waste of 8kW of power... but engineering a bitcoin mining solution would take effort, time, space, and be impractical... right? ;)

i think be haters bitcoins and lovers  ::)

It would cancel out the nerd factor of mining for coins.  Then you'd have a money machine that heated your hot tub that you could fill with girls.

If you know a deal about HVAC, it is pretty easy to setup your house (or garage, chicken coop, etc.) to be heated with the excess heat from a mining operation. Marijuana growers have been doing it for some time as well.