Exhausting heat into house cold water line

[dude77]

I'm sure someone must already be doing this but I've looked around and can't find anything.

Suppose you did something like this:



Basically you have a heat exchanger such as from a car's heater core inserted in your house water line after the shutoff valve. Whenever someone uses any water in the house it will draw new cool water through the exchanger.

This will slightly heat up both the hot and cold sides of the faucets but unless you have a giant farm it will probably not be that noticeable on the cold side.

Has anyone done something similar? Would a car's heater core be able to hold the PSI needed or is there something else that is actually designed for doing this type of thing?

[trinitrate]

If you had a constant / steady draw of water usage in the house, yes you could theoretically do this.

The heater core would need to have a constant fresh supply of water moving through it, and would not be pulling out that much of the heat from the miners so you still have a need to circulate air. In reality, its probably not worth the hassle or risk of leaky pipes near your miners.

[dude77]

Here's a similar idea, at 3:40 he says he's going to be using a hydronics coil to heat his house:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7UjTc9H60E

Looking at ways to set up hydronics coils it looks like there are ways to use water tanks to store excess warmed water but this makes it a lot more complicated:

http://www.pmmag.com/ext/resources/radianthydronics/RH/2016/March/PM0316_Siggy-fig-2.jpg
http://www.pmmag.com/articles/100060-optimizing-coil-heat-exchanger-flow

Has anyone actually done something like this and have an idea at what point you need an extra thermal storage tank vs only using the heat exchanger? I'm assuming that leaky pipes are not a problem since plumbing is not very difficult and having a drain under the heat exchanger is not hard to add.

[dude77]

Two potential problems:

1.) The heater core might reduce the water pressure to the rest of the house

2.) It also might clog up eventually if your water has a high mineral content. A water softener might help. You'll probably need to run CLR through it every few years.


It might probably be better to have something like this, although this doesn't help to reduce the water heater bill:



----

However, the original idea would probably look something like this:

$25 - New car heater coil - from auto parts store - need to test if it can hold the pressure

$20 - PEX or Sharkbite plumbing connectors - from hardware store

$10 - PEX plumbing tubing - from hardware store

Optional:
$150 - Automatic Water Shut off Valve - these are normally used next to a water heater in a house to shut off the water supply if the water heater leaks. You could justify this cost by having the heater core and water heater next to each other so that the heater coil is helping a bit to heat the water heater and the auto shutoff valve is protecting you both from a heater coil failure and water heater failure

$20 - Materials to direct heat into heater core. This might be done using a "hot/cold aisle" layout that's used in server rooms, maybe using drapes or something similar to http://www.neuralenergy.info/2015/09/green-data-centers.html

One thing you would need to test well is that the connection from the water supply to the heater core is very secure. It's a 3/4" pipe coming from the main shutoff valve and you'd probably want to have a soldered adapter to 3/4" on both ends of the heater core to make sure it doesn't leak.

[fr4nkthetank]

It would be a better idea to use the heat for something more useful.  Like if you have a pool, you can heat your pool water with mining.  A car radiator is perfect for the job.  If I had a pool, I would try to rig something together to heat it up.

[Cormoran]

Two potential problems:

1.) The heater core might reduce the water pressure to the rest of the house

2.) It also might clog up eventually if your water has a high mineral content. A water softener might help. You'll probably need to run CLR through it every few years.


It might probably be better to have something like this, although this doesn't help to reduce the water heater bill:



----

However, the original idea would probably look something like this:

$25 - New car heater coil - from auto parts store - need to test if it can hold the pressure

$20 - PEX or Sharkbite plumbing connectors - from hardware store

$10 - PEX plumbing tubing - from hardware store

Optional:
$150 - Automatic Water Shut off Valve - these are normally used next to a water heater in a house to shut off the water supply if the water heater leaks. You could justify this cost by having the heater core and water heater next to each other so that the heater coil is helping a bit to heat the water heater and the auto shutoff valve is protecting you both from a heater coil failure and water heater failure

$20 - Materials to direct heat into heater core. This might be done using a "hot/cold aisle" layout that's used in server rooms, maybe using drapes or something similar to http://www.neuralenergy.info/2015/09/green-data-centers.html

One thing you would need to test well is that the connection from the water supply to the heater core is very secure. It's a 3/4" pipe coming from the main shutoff valve and you'd probably want to have a soldered adapter to 3/4" on both ends of the heater core to make sure it doesn't leak.

This is a great idea if you're running more than a few miners at home, since the heat starts to get overwhelming pretty quick. If you manage to get it set up and working, I'd love to see some pictures of the setup in reality and a brief how-to for total plumbing dummies; I'd love to get a few S9s or R4s running and collect a few more bitcoins without having to pay full exchange prices, and being able to use water cooling might very well cut the power costs on that significantly compared to air conditioning, though obviously not as efficient as outside ventilation. Still, for mining at home it's potentially useful. The tougher part, of course, may be actually finding R4s for less than $4k each on Amazon, since Bitmain themselves haven't released a batch in over 6 months.

[QuintLeo]

It would be MUCH more efficient to use that water for evaporative cooling.

 You're looking at a LOT of water flow to be able to cool anything significant with that method.

 Another alternative - you've got about half of a "geothermal loop" involved in your setup.

[Cormoran]

It would be MUCH more efficient to use that water for evaporative cooling.

 You're looking at a LOT of water flow to be able to cool anything significant with that method.

 Another alternative - you've got about half of a "geothermal loop" involved in your setup.

Hmm, hadn't thought about the amount of water involved. You may be right, as I said I'm a bit of a plumbing dummy, and evap cooling is certainly an efficient method. Creating a geothermal loop in order to recycle the heat created by the miners into energy that could be used to power the miners further is an even better idea, if it's realistic; like I said, I'm a plumbing dummy and would end up having to hire a plumber to do the work involved if I were to use either setup. Still, I like that idea. Anything that can make home mining more efficient when competing with the big corporate mines is a good thing for decentralization, as well as our own personal profits of course.

[beerlover]

If you're from few European countries, it's a violation. You only have permission to modify the water lines up to a certain point under your foundation after that point it becomes the property of the city where the county or whoever is providing your water. Similarly, doing this is violating code in the United States too.

[QuintLeo]

Probably a strawman issue, you wouldn't be tapping into the "main" to do this, you'd be tapping into a line IN THE HOUSE (probably the intake to the hot water heater unless you can get an internal line before it splits out).