--snip--
Now if you have a space to heat and spend $$$ on electrical power to heat it you can write off some cost since you are spending it on the heater.
True, but even if you do this, you have to take into calculation that you've acquired a $400 spaceheater that's probably very loud, and might break within a relatively short time. Offcourse, this spaceheater is repaying itself slowly... So you have to figure out IF you want to use an ASIC as a spaceheater, how many hours (in total, before you estimate it'll brake) you'll run this "space/ASIC", how much BTC it'll mine during this period, and wether or not this amount of bitcoins might be more than the cost of the asic minus the cost of a spaceheater of equal wattage
Just to make things complicated
Offcourse, this calculation is MOOT if you already have an old ASIC laying around that you won't sell... In this case it becomes a much easyer decission to use it as a spaceheater instead of an electrical spaceheater you would have used anyways... In this case, you only need to worry about the noise, and maybe fire hazard (eventough i'd never run an electrical spaceheater in an unsupervised environment).