[HN Gopher] I heat my home by mining crypto currencies
___________________________________________________________________
I heat my home by mining crypto currencies
Author : geek_at
Score : 417 points
Date : 2021-02-23 09:34 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.haschek.at)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.haschek.at)
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| Way back in my younger days, I left my PS3 running Folding@Home,
| and it left my living room noticably warmer - Enough that it
| replaced the baseboard heater in that room for most of the winter
| months. I could not say whether the electricity cost was changed
| any, but it certainly worked.
| joosters wrote:
| _My mining rig will stay profitable until the ETH price is at
| ~900$_
|
| I don't think this is at all true. Even if the price of the
| crypto remained stable, the mining difficulty will keep on
| increasing as more miners join. So after a time, his mining rigs
| will consume more money in electricity than they generate in
| coins.
| 3np wrote:
| Well, no, at a certain point (and indeed during normal market
| conditions, which right now isn't) there's an equilibrium. As
| global hashrate goes up, as you not, profitability goes down,
| which makes miners switch to other chains, or, eventually,
| power down their rigs.
|
| I think your initial statement is correct, but from the wrong
| direction; if the ETH price is at 900$, the incentive to mine
| is less, some of current hashpower will already have left the
| mining of ETH, ergo OP is actually likely to still be
| profitable, although less so.
| joosters wrote:
| I didn't specify a direction, so I'm not sure how I can be
| describing the wrong one? My point is that the price of
| ethereum doesn't have to move _at all_ and yet his mining rig
| will become unprofitable after a time. The hash rate will
| increase and /or more efficient miners will come online,
| leaving his equipment needing to mine faster or use less
| electricity in order to generate the same returns.
| 3np wrote:
| I misinterpreted your comment then, apologies!
|
| But, it's not a given that we'll have a significant enough
| increase of miners for that to be the case and time will
| tell (unless you happen to have knowledge I don't!)
| hoppla wrote:
| I was joking with my friend that we should make and sell heaters
| that are miners in disguise. The customers would not notice the
| difference
| kuon wrote:
| I am always amazed that some countries allow electricity for
| heating.
|
| Here it is mostly geothermal, solar, gas or oil (the last two
| being phased out). There are also a lot of cities with distant
| heating, for example, here, the garbage factory heat the whole
| city while burning the garbages.
|
| But well, if you can mine crypto while heating, good I guess,
| even if there might be better ways to use compute power.
| tallanvor wrote:
| Electricity doesn't have to be a bad option for heating. Norway
| gets 88% of it's electricity through hydropower, another 10%
| through wind, and the rest of it is geothermal, as an example.
| That doesn't mean that electricity is necessarily the most
| efficient option, or the cheapest, but it is clean.
| kuon wrote:
| I am not saying electricity is bad for heating. But it is
| surprising to me. It is "illegal" here, but honnestly I don't
| have an opinion or an objective view on it.
| viklove wrote:
| That's awesome, but it's too bad they financed the
| construction of all that green energy through the sale of
| oil, which is obviously being burned.
| birktj wrote:
| I don't think this is entirely true. A lot of the modern
| "green industry" stuff in Norway is funded by the oil
| industry. However, the hydropower industry in Norway is way
| older than the oil industry and is quite economical on its
| own.
| dgacmu wrote:
| Using an electric heat pump is very efficient, usually better
| than heating directly by burning gas. In many high efficiency
| houses, the leftover demand not satisfied by the heat pump is
| more easily satisfied by a small amount of electric resistance
| heating - and you get a double win if you don't have to run gas
| to your house at all, saving both the monthly gas connection
| fee, simplifying internal plumbing, and improving safety.)
|
| Using electric resistance heating alone is usually bad, as you
| say.
| s0rce wrote:
| In my old house we didn't have natural gas, options were: get
| a truck to refill a propane tank (we didn't have a tank),
| burn wood (we lived in the desert of eastern WA, not many
| trees) or use an electric heat pump (we had abundant cheap
| hydropower from the Columbia river basin). Was an easy
| choice. Supplemented with an electric resistance heater for
| the coldest days in the winter.
| aloisdg wrote:
| In France, the electricity is mostly nuclear. Heating with
| electricity is not a problem.
| shawnz wrote:
| If you prefer gas, you could use it to power a gas generator
| and use that electricity to mine bitcoins. All the waste heat
| from both the mining and the generator could be used to heat
| your house
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| The future will be electric heating for everyone, once we have
| enough renewable and storage sources.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| "Person inefficiently wastes gratuitous amounts of energy
| perpetuating imaginary currency, tries to pass it off as if it's
| all ok because their house gets warmer as a side effect"
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads into flamewar, and especially not
| with classic flamebait. We're trying for something else here.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| [deleted]
| mrzool wrote:
| All currencies are imaginary. Money is a human construct.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't post take HN threads on generic tangents. They
| lead to boring, repetitive discussion.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.
| ..
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| cblconfederate wrote:
| so many people use electric heaters, i dont see what s the
| problem if they are mining on the side
| rektide wrote:
| I've spent half a decade sitter ng around with some 4-node 2u's
| wanting to build a simulation/virtual city that I heat with in
| the winter. haven't made much progress on this side-quest though.
| too much other lifting to do.
| xenocyon wrote:
| 1. At an individual/hobbyist level this is a fine thing to do, if
| one is already a cryptocurrency enthusiast.
|
| 2. At a social/planning level it is important to remember that
| opportunity costs matter, and this should not be recommended as
| public policy. One kWh of electricity could either be used for
| mining bitcoin (creating _at most_ one kWh of indoor heat), or it
| could be used for running a heat pump[*], yielding multiple kWh
| of indoor heat due to the magic of heat pumps and their >100%
| "efficiency"[**].
|
| [*] Yes, I realize the OP is already using a heat pump, but
| assisting it with preheat is inherently less efficient than
| plowing the same energy into running the heat pump itself.
|
| [**] Yes, heat pumps aren't >100% efficient per a physics
| textbook, but what most people care about is that you can use
| them to get >1 joule of indoor heat from 1 joule of energy input,
| which feels magical when compared to electric heaters, gas
| furnaces etc.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Looks like even OP with their fancy own home didn't actually
| install a heat pump the way which will make it more than 100%
| efficient, what about the large horde of people who rent and
| can't do a thing about how their house is heated? It's trivial
| to find out if your heating system is actually efficient and if
| it's not why shouldnt you run crypto mining?
| fpoling wrote:
| Consumer-grade heat pumps do not approach the theoretical
| thermodynamic efficiency limit especially when the outside
| temperature is significantly below freezing temperature as that
| complicates design. Plus they do not last forever and it takes
| a lot of energy to make them. So a hybrid design with an
| electrical pre-heater for really cold weather can be the least
| consuming in the total balance of energy. But then one can just
| as well mine crypto currencies in the preheater just as the
| article described.
| drran wrote:
| Definition of efficiency (from Google): the ratio of the useful
| work performed by a machine or in a process to the total energy
| expended or heat taken in.
|
| Heat pumps are >100% efficient.
|
| Usually, we cannot convert all input energy into useful work,
| so efficiency is always <100%, because of energy losses, which
| are producing waste heat. However, in case of heater, heat is
| the "useful work", so electrical heaters have "impossible" 100%
| efficiency, while heat pumps have even more "impossible" >100%
| efficiency.
| seniorsassycat wrote:
| A heat pump in a -273 degC space will convert electricity to
| heat at a 1:1 ratio.
|
| If you count the heat taken from the space around the
| condenser, which you should based on Google's definition,
| heat pumps are only 100% efficient.
|
| Calling heat pumps >100% efficient is like calling my solar
| water heater >100% efficient. True if you only count the
| electrical input, and not other sources of energy.
| stopping wrote:
| This is incorrect. We measure the "efficiency" of a heat
| pump by the amount of heat moved into a space divided by
| the work energy provided to the pump (electricity in this
| case). This is called the "coefficient of performance".
| Typical heat pumps have a CoP of 3 or more. Meaning, you
| can spend 100W of electricity to pump 300W of heat into
| your home. A purely resistive heater only has a CoP of 1.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| You will be pleased to know that the majority of heat pumps
| are installed in homes whose exteriors stay above 0 kelvin
| year round. Also, in what I assume is an efficiency
| feature, most heat pumps do not allow operation in a zero
| Kelvin environment.
|
| Also, to nit pick: Kelvins are not degrees and do not use a
| deg sign.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| And, as a bonus efficiency feature, most heat pumps are
| installed with the condenser external to the home!
|
| Yes, if you draw an imaginary box around the home and the
| outdoor/underground condenser, they're exactly 100%
| efficient, but if you only consider the inside of the
| home and ignore that the condenser is taking in heat
| energy from the outside, they're more than 100%
| efficient.
| seniorsassycat wrote:
| The power station and natural gas plants are outside my
| house too, so my restive floor heaters and furnace are
| >100% efficient.
| seniorsassycat wrote:
| did not realize kelvin is not a degree. I fixed my
| comment.
| Nition wrote:
| Damn, I've been looking for a zero Kelvin heat pump that
| works in a vacuum to heat my spherical cows.
| OJFord wrote:
| > or heat taken in.
| lalaland1125 wrote:
| An alternative to using heat pumps is to use gas heating. Gas
| heating lets you achieve >100% "efficiency" relative to
| electric heating because you don't have to pay the price of
| converting the gas into electricity.
| TheOv3rminD wrote:
| I've been doing this for years. I keep my miners inside though
| and take a much more lazy approach. In the summer I exhaust the
| heat outside with 4" dryer conduit. In the winter I redirect the
| same conduit into the main living area and several rooms near the
| server room. Saves a ton on my heating bill. A lot of the time I
| don't even need to run the central heater at all.
| Havoc wrote:
| Same here. 200w 24/7 keeps the temp cozy
| major505 wrote:
| I believe the moment the author says that he's using amd gpus.
| speedgoose wrote:
| A more environmentally friendly solution is to get a heat pump.
| miked85 wrote:
| from TFA:
|
| _My house is heated (and cooled) with a central ventilation
| system powered by a heat pump._
| krageon wrote:
| The first sentence in the second paragraph explains that the
| author _has_ a heat pump and what it does for them. The article
| then goes on to explain where the miners fit in.
| speedgoose wrote:
| He also says he doesn't actually have a real heat pump setup
| because it's too expensive.
| celticninja wrote:
| No he does not. He says:
|
| Many heat pumps take heat from the ground to pre-heat (in
| winter) or pre-cool (in summer) the outside air before
| sending it to the heat pump but that would have been too
| expensive for me
|
| The expensive part is laying all the required pipe
| underground to be able to do this. His heat pump is in
| place and working, it is how he pre-heats (or cools) the
| air going into the heat pump that is the issue in play.
|
| The expensive option (digging up and installing underground
| piping) is what he doesnt use, he uses the cryptocurrency
| miners to do the pre-heating.
| CptMauli wrote:
| Just because the air isn't prewarmed in his original setup,
| it doesn't mean its no heat pump.
| audunw wrote:
| Did you even read the article? He does have a heat pump. He
| just uses mining to pre-heat the air, reducing the energy
| consumption of the heat-pump when the weather is cold.
|
| When it gets really cold, heat pumps can lose some of their
| efficiency, so in that case this might not be much worse than
| just relying on the heat-pump itself.
|
| It's still not a net-gain environmentally speaking, I guess,
| but since he uses GPUs he already had lying around I'd say it's
| not very bad at all.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't comment on whether someone read an article.
| "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be
| shortened to "The article mentions that."_"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| tallanvor wrote:
| The author calls it a heat pump, and I'm not saying he's
| wrong, but when people think of heat pumps, they either think
| of a system that has some amount of piping buried in the
| ground or it has a unit that sites outside (and is generally
| reversible so it provides air conditioning in the summer)
| such as what is shown int his image: https://www.alliedmarket
| research.com/assets/sampleimages/hea...
|
| And it looks like the unit he has (assuming I've found the
| right one) uses a heat pump for producing hot water, but for
| heating the home it would often be paired with an external
| heat pump: https://www.nilanuk.com/domestic-
| solutions/compact-p/
| speedgoose wrote:
| He isn't using a heatpump. It's too expensive he says.
| geek_at wrote:
| It was too expensive to use a ground-preheated heat pump
| (where like 500m of cable are layed under ground to pre-
| heat the air). Mine is just sucking it in as-is
| amenod wrote:
| > Success! I was able to lower my heat pump's electricity
| needs by ~50%
|
| (didn't downvote you, just pointing out that you missed the
| point of the article)
| freetime2 wrote:
| The second paragraph begins with:
|
| > My house is heated (and cooled) with a central
| ventilation system powered by a heat pump.
|
| He is definitely using a heat pump.
| speedgoose wrote:
| He has an advanced ventilation system but what he
| describes is not a heat pump.
| freetime2 wrote:
| Can you elaborate on why you don't think it's a heat
| pump?
|
| He lists the equipment that he has, and the manufacturer
| deacribes it as a heat pump [1].
|
| He also includes a photo of a compressor, which is
| typical of a heat pump.
|
| [1] https://www.nilanuk.com/domestic-solutions/compact-p/
| progval wrote:
| I too was skeptical at first, but it does look like this
| is a heat pump. Heat pumps take as "input" a stream of
| air at temperatures T_cold and T_hot (T_cold < T_hot) and
| output streams at temperatures T_verycold and T_veryhot.
|
| You can see these four pipes here, around component (1):
| https://pictshare.net/1024/sbmusz.jpg
|
| T_cold comes from outside and T_hot comes from inside;
| T_verycold and T_veryhot go to the outside and to the
| inside.
|
| However, the efficiency of the heat pump decreases as
| T_cold lowers (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pum
| p_and_refrigeration_cy... ).
|
| So by "preheating" T_cold with the bitcoin miner, the
| efficiency of the heat pump itself increases.
|
| However, the efficiency of the whole system (heat pump +
| miner) decreases when you have the miner on. (Otherwise,
| heat pumps would just have a built-in heater to do it.)
|
| So adding the bitcoin miner decreases the power
| efficiency of the whole system; but it may increase the
| monetary efficiency, if the revenue generated by the
| miner is high enough to compensate for the increased
| power usage.
| fy20 wrote:
| It's a heat recovery ventilator, with a heat pump to move
| heat from the air into water. From the marketing page:
|
| > Compact P recovers the energy from the extracted air
| using a highly efficient counter flow heat exchanger. The
| remaining energy that is not utilised by the counter flow
| heat exchanger is used by the heat pump to produce hot
| water, and to further heat the supply air.
|
| https://en.nilan.dk/en-gb/frontpage/solutions/domestic-
| solut...
|
| HRVs take out stale air, bring in fresh air, and pass
| both streams through a heat exchanger to heat up the cold
| air coming in (or vice versa in the summer) with
| efficiencies of up to 95%. This is a purely mechanical
| system - the only moving parts are two fans.
|
| HRVs need a preheater in cold weather, so you don't have
| condensation or ice form inside the unit, however if your
| climate isn't that cold (and most importantly your home
| is well enough insulated), that heat can be more than
| enough to maintain your home at a comfortable temperature
| without additional heat sources.
|
| In OPs case the preheater is using an electric resistance
| heater, but as they said there are options to buy a heat
| pump preheater, using the ground as a heat source but it
| was too expensive (they are typically more than the heat
| exchanger itself, plus the cost of installing the ground
| pipes). Using the miners as a preheater just reduces the
| work of the electric resistant preheater. If you take
| into account the value of the crypto currency produced,
| then yes it is better than using the built in preheater,
| but using the ground source heat pump preheater would
| result in an overall lower electricity consumption.
|
| The heat pump part is purely on the exhaust air. There is
| always some loss in the heat exchanger, so if the
| incoming air from outside is 5c, the exhaust air to the
| outside may be 10c. This unit runs the exhaust air
| through a heat exchanger to produce hot water for taps,
| and if that is already satisfied, to attempt to preheat
| the incoming air to reduce the work of the preheater.
| (There's probably also an electric resistance heater for
| the hot water, in case demand is greater than what the
| heat pump alone can provide).
| oaiey wrote:
| Might be a German to English thingy. The German word
| "Warmepumpe" is IMHO applied to both concept in general
| usage.
| celticninja wrote:
| He is using a heat pump, he is using the excess heat of the
| miners to pre-warm air used by the heat pump to heat his house.
| The miners offset some of the cost of the heat pump and pay for
| their own electricity use.
| speedgoose wrote:
| I think he is wrong when he calls his ventilation system a
| heat pump. The point of the heat pump is to pump the heat
| from outside.
| celticninja wrote:
| Thats not how a heat pump works. It doesnt just take warm
| air from outside and blow it into your house, otherwsie
| they would be useless in winter.
|
| https://www.jerrykelly.com/blog/how-does-a-heat-pump-work-
| in...
|
| So this is a heat pump, it its taking heat from outside
| air, its just that in this case the outside air is first
| primed by running it via some cryptominers, which makes the
| heat pump work more efficiently.
| speedgoose wrote:
| > It doesnt just take warm air from outside and blow it
| into your house, otherwsie they would be useless in
| winter.
|
| For sure. I'm not talking about the air but the heat. If
| the heat is generated by resistive heaters (his GPUs are
| mostly that) the heat pump may not have to work as hard
| to get enough heat but the total efficiency (including
| the GPUs) is not as good.
| MayeulC wrote:
| I'm pretty sure it would be more efficient to directly heat
| the air inside than the heat pump input, though. At most they
| can transfer exactly the added energy.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| He also gets coins out of it? That at the moment could be
| worth more? There are several axis of 'cost' vs 'perf' vs
| 'utility' vs 'efficiency' that would need to be graphed out
| to see if it is actually worth this setup.
|
| He is seeing cost as a major concern. Getting coins for a
| set amount of energy and using the extra heat as offset for
| his heating bill. So I could see if you did this right it
| could come out better. But that would need to be graphed
| out.
| elwell wrote:
| > Some crypto currencies (don't call them "crypto", that's lame
| and wrong)
|
| "Cryptocurrency" is more than twice as long in letters and
| syllables. I think we've reached the point where "crypto" is
| disambiguated in most contexts from "cryptography", or did the
| author have a different reason for calling that abbreviation
| "lame and wrong"?
| blueline wrote:
| Crypto/cryptography is perfect nerd bait. Easy way to listen to
| yourself talk while being technically correct about something.
| akvadrako wrote:
| I think blockchain or cryptocoin is also acceptable.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Crypto is an abbreviation of cryptography, by trying to force
| the abbreviation to mean a specific subset of cryptography you
| limit all future uses of the word crypto to mean crypto
| currencies which seems excessive. We might have other words
| that follow crypto in future.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I find it quite interesting that we managed to make us of thermal
| waste through semiconductor based logic..
| dreen wrote:
| Years ago when mining with a single gaming card was more common
| and viable, I lived in a rented room in a house owned by a live-
| in landlord who controlled the heating, and wouldn't turn it on
| for very long in the winter. Since electricity was included in my
| (fixed) rent, I was able to keep my room a few degrees higher
| than the rest of the house.
|
| However I must point out that you shouldn't do this in most
| circumstances, there are environmentally friendly ways of heating
| your house.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| In countries like France [1], electricity heating is the most
| environmentally friendly, at 40 g Co2/kWh, while gas (the
| cheapest and most common) is >250.
|
| [1] https://www.electricitymap.org/map
| hokkos wrote:
| If the average carbon intensity of french grid is in the 40g,
| if you take into account when heating is used it is more in
| the 80gCO2/kWh, anyway a heat pump is always better.
|
| http://www.carbone4.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/06/Publicati...
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| France's electricity is largely generated by nuclear power
| which has minimal CO2 emissions.
| robocat wrote:
| True, but very misleading.
|
| When you add a marginal kWh of electricity usage, how is
| that extra 1 kWh generated?
|
| If France runs its nuclear power at nearly 100%
| utilisation, then if you add 1 kWh usage then that power
| comes from another source, which could be a high CO2
| emitter.
|
| The same goes for hydroelectricity: if all the
| hydroelectric power is already being utilised (no
| spillway), then you cannot claim that your electric car
| is being charged by hydro even if your country has a
| large percentage of it. There are complications when
| lakes are involved because whether your power usage is
| green or not often depends upon _future_ inflows (lots of
| future rain = green; no future rain = dirty generation in
| future when lakes get low).
| IneffablePigeon wrote:
| This is an interesting topic - I agree with your
| interpretation, but to add another wrinkle, I live in the
| UK which has a decent but not amazing proportion of
| renewable energy now. I pay a little extra to my supplier
| to provide me with "100% renewable electricity" - meaning
| that for every customer on that tariff, they total up the
| power usage and buy at least that much renewable energy
| from the grid. I assume that this puts some upwards price
| pressure on renewable energy compared to non renewable,
| but how much? Presumably every extra watt I use doesn't
| result in a whole extra watt of renewable capacity being
| added, but what's the conversion - 5%? 50%? I don't even
| know where to start answering that question.
| km3r wrote:
| I always figured those programs just would lead to people
| not on the green plans buying less green energy. Though I
| guess if you got enough of a critical mass of users on
| the plan it could have that upward pressure. I wonder if
| any studies have been done? It seems that green energy is
| often used as much as it can, as solar/wind/geo all have
| low marginal costs once built, and gas/coal/oil are the
| ones manually turned on/off based on total demand. That
| would lead me to believe buying green power would have no
| effect, but this is all conjecture.
| r00fus wrote:
| Your entire assumption is that France nuclear is at 100%
| utilization. While utilization%s aren't publicly
| available, from this graph on Wikipedia about TWh
| produced [1], you can see that Nuclear has upside
| capacity, and was probably never 100% utilized (it's the
| main baseload, thus the biggest buffer option).
|
| So the assumption that any marginal utilization is non-
| nuclear is flawed.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_France#/media
| /File:F...
| legulere wrote:
| At least in Germany you can also buy electricity that is 100%
| renewable at 0 g CO2/kWh. It also does not really cost much
| more (though we generally have pretty high electricity prices
| because of taxes on electricity).
| tgb wrote:
| I know that's what you're paying for, but I wonder what the
| marginal effects are. I.e. am I paying for a 100% renewable
| energy that otherwise would have been sold to a customer
| not on a renewable plan? If I use more of the 100%
| renewable energy, does that increase the amount of non-
| renewable energy that must be generated for other people's
| consumption? I have no idea how grids work.
| Aachen wrote:
| They don't run an extra cable though, they just buy credits
| and if you're lucky the profit doesn't go to the parent
| fossil energy company. It's still better than old energy
| firms but it's not as if the coal plants run any less hard
| when you turn on your bitcoin farm with a green contract
| instead of a fossil one. It's just a matter of where
| profits flow, and also some public perception. (E.g.
| Climeworks says that individual customers help show
| investors that that's a market for it, which helps them do
| more good than purely the CO2 you pay them to remove.)
|
| Regarding this "fossil parent" thing btw, list of checked
| companies: https://www.robinwood.de/oekostromreport (I'm
| with Green City Power because they don't only go the easy
| hydro route but also build out solar -- iirc, it has been a
| while). Switching is a matter of signing up with the new
| provider. Nobody needs to come by, power doesn't go out at
| all, you just tell them what the meter says on date X and
| all is good.
| adrianN wrote:
| Even in France a heat pump will give you at least twice the
| heat for the gram of CO2.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| Heat pumps need energy to operate. Hence at low
| temperatures the best combo is electricity+heat-pump. So
| cryptomining+heat-pump is exactly the same, minus the
| e-waste.
| simias wrote:
| Don't heat pumps work like a fridge/AC but backwards?
| That is, compressing the air inside to generate heat,
| then decompressing it outside where it gets extremely
| cold and is warmed up by the relatively hotter outside
| air?
|
| If so I fail to see how cryptomining features in there.
| arnaudsm wrote:
| You're right, the compression step is mechanical. Heat
| pumps are the most carbon efficient after ~0degC. So in
| most parts of the globe electrical heat-pumps are the
| most environment-friendly. Thanks I Edited my first
| comment.
| b15h0p wrote:
| Yes they do. They usually have classic resistive heating
| elements for when the outside temperatures drop too low
| for the heatpump to be efficient.
| tzs wrote:
| "Too low" has come down over time. Mitsubishi claims many
| of its current models of heat pumps work at 100% capacity
| down to 23 (-5 ), and 76% capacity down to -13 (-25 ).
| tuyiown wrote:
| Obviously, he meant that the heatpump mined the cryo out
| of outside cold air... cryomining, cryptomining, same
| thing, right ?
| ip26 wrote:
| Heat pump is 3x more efficient at heating than any
| electric resistive heat.
| berdario wrote:
| I'm in a similar situation, and I'm just using an electric
| heater... No fancy mining setup.
|
| But I'm also thinking, maybe actually this is for the better?
| (Not only for the stingy landlord, but for the environment).
|
| I mean, even if a heat pump is much better than an electric
| heater... Having to heat up only the rooms that need it,
| instead of kitchen, bathrooms, living room (plus the rooms of
| other flatmates who might not be bothered) might actually use
| up less energy total, than using a more efficient mechanism,
| which otoh would be used for the whole home.
| cjrp wrote:
| I'm not sure if they're common where you are, but this is
| what Thermostatic Radiator Valves are used for. You can set
| an approximate room temperature, and the valve will
| open/close based on that. There are also smart ones now which
| can have a schedule applied to them, e.g. don't heat my
| bedroom during the day.
| dreen wrote:
| Despite my precarious housing situation at the time, I also
| own a big house in the country over 150 years old. The main
| form of heating it originally were 2m tall ceramic furnaces,
| always placed so that they could heat two rooms at the time.
| You put material to burn in from either side, and after
| getting hot the furnace would keep heating the room for
| hours, and all it takes is a few logs of wood (that you later
| have to regrow anyway). I wonder how many bitcoins is that in
| term of environmental impact.
| jiofih wrote:
| 0.5kg of CO2 per kWh is the average for electric grids
| around the world.
|
| 1kg of wood produces around 2kg of CO2, every 400g of
| firewood gives you 1 kWh, so 0.8kg CO2/kWh.
|
| That's slightly worse than mining. Bitcoin is wasteful in
| its total energy consumption which is not reused, but 99%
| of the power you put into that GPU will be released as
| heat.
| mrkstu wrote:
| Difference being if he's using wood he's recycling that
| carbon over infinitely as long as it isn't from old
| growth forests.
| dmos62 wrote:
| > However I must point out that you shouldn't do this in most
| circumstances, there are environmentally friendly ways of
| heating your house.
|
| What aspect do you think could be friendlier to the
| environment? Rare metals and production emissions in high tech
| electronics? Or the fact that it's using electricity (as
| opposed to more isolation)?
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Your electricity likely comes from burning coal. Coal
| pollutes quite badly.
|
| Other ways to heat a dwelling are more efficient. For example
| natural gas heaters burn cleaner and energy losses are much
| smaller compared to all the conversion losses (by the time
| you produce a BTU of heat from electricity, several BTUs of
| energy have been lost due to conversion losses, while burning
| gas is much closer to perfect efficiency though obviously not
| perfectly efficient). Or if you can use co-generation, you
| essentially produce no noticeable environmental impact at
| all. Or you could go the other route and invest in insulation
| or a molten salt wall for passive heating.
| dmos62 wrote:
| But electricity isn't inherently dirty, right? It's
| probably better to have the network shift to greener
| sources than have every consumer do that individually.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Right. If you use solar panels you are definitely better
| off. The question is whether you are or not and for the
| time being most places still don't use renewable energy
| sources.
| dreen wrote:
| Apart from what others mentioned, proper insulation is the
| best way to keep your house warm, it is missing from many
| houses.
| [deleted]
| celticninja wrote:
| I mean the OP found an environmentally friendly and economic
| way of heating his house.
| [deleted]
| xfitm3 wrote:
| Tired of the environmental rhetoric. This person heats their home
| and profits. They already have a heat pump and has REDUCED the
| overall energy consumption.
|
| > Success! I was able to lower my heat pump's electricity needs
| by ~50% and half of the costs are also paid for by the mining
| earnings
| mtagius wrote:
| I think there is a misunderstanding here. His overall energy
| consumption has gone up, it is only the heat pump the uses ~50%
| less power now. His home overall used more electricity than
| when he started because any saved electricity is used to power
| the miners.
|
| This is corroborated by xenocyon's comment: "One kWh of
| electricity could either be used for mining bitcoin (creating
| at most one kWh of indoor heat), or it could be used for
| running a heat pump[*], yielding multiple kWh of indoor heat
| due to the magic of heat pumps and their >100% 'efficiency'"
|
| At the end of the day only the costs of heating were reduced,
| not the overall electricity usage. I'll admit, this mining
| setup is far more efficient than most because they use solar
| power in the summer and in the winter miner heat is used to
| reduce power needs for the heat pump, but there would be an
| increase in global electricity usage if this were more popular.
| St_Alfonzo wrote:
| _My mining rig will stay profitable until the ETH price is at
| ~900$._
|
| Or until Ethereum will switch to "Proof of Stake"?
| cortesoft wrote:
| So forever?
| david_draco wrote:
| Are you going to stop mining in summer?
| DuckyC wrote:
| The article says he only mines when the price is high enough
| and the house needs heating.
| lmilcin wrote:
| I wonder if a country could produce bitcoin miners that convert
| electricity to heat and use that heat for their industry while
| also getting to control trillions in bitcoin once they cross 50%
| of mining capacity.
|
| Most likely bitcoin would loose all value then as the value is
| basically product of trust in the bitcoin network, but still an
| interesting idea for a state-sponsored attack.
| keyme wrote:
| >50% bitcoin mining capacity is already in China since like
| 2014 (unless something drastically changed).
|
| The beauty of the PoW blockchain is that if a nation attains
| this kind of power, then still, the most profitable thing to do
| would be to keep playing by the rules. This is why bitcoin
| works.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| That assertion doesn't necessarily hold. There's political
| advantage to be gained by taking and holding that advantage
| so that it can be tactically trashed when it needs to be.
| Your comment implies that China would increasingly lean
| further in to supporting cryptocurrencies, when we know that
| they're not a fan of tolerating things that even look they
| might try to challenge their authority any longer than it is
| advantageous for them.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I did this in an apartment I lived in years ago, and do it now in
| my house.
|
| My computer room in the house is the lowest point in the house,
| so naturally, it tends to be a couple degrees cooler than the
| upstairs. This means that if I set the thermostat so that the
| computer room is comfortable, the bedroom is too warm. If I run
| the house circulation fan constantly, it's not an issue, but that
| consumes a decent amount of power.
|
| If I'm going to consume that much power, I might as well mine
| crypto and make a few dollars. Mining for NiceHash, a service
| that lets people rent hashing power from miners, I'll average
| $100-400/month worth of Bitcoin on my RTX 3080, depending on
| current hashing prices, and how much of my time I spend gaming,
| since mining is effectively paused while gaming. The mining
| happens while I use my computer with no noticeable loss in
| performance, and it puts a few watts of energy into the room to
| heat it up a bit, evening it out with the rest of the house.
| alasdair_ wrote:
| I have a 3090 and cheap-ish electricity. Is it actually worth
| doing GPU mining again? I thought that died out long ago.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > If I'm going to consume that much power, I might as well mine
| crypto and make a few dollars. Mining for NiceHash, a service
| that lets people rent hashing power from miners
|
| What's the benefit of this vs. just participating in a mining
| pool?
| qvrjuec wrote:
| Aren't you concerned with hardware degradation with your GPU
| running at 100% most of the time?
| polyterative wrote:
| just limit power to maximum efficiency. My card mines eth
| 52MH/s@100% and 49MH/s@55% power
| coralreef wrote:
| The only thing that really degrades is fans.
|
| Running a GPU for ~3 years at 75-82c
| cwkoss wrote:
| At those rates, the GPU will likely pay for itself before it
| fails.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| No.
|
| My GPU hovers at around 55-60 C while mining with the fans at
| 77%.
|
| Years ago, I was running an AMD R9 290. THAT ran HOT. Even
| with fans at 100%, it would hover around 95 C and constantly
| fight with thermal throttling.
|
| EDIT: And as someone else said, at these mining rates, it
| will pay for itself in 3-4 months.
| Bayart wrote:
| The main causes of degradation in electronics are usually
| material failure due to thermal stress (cycles of expansion
| and contractor weaken the electrical pathways, resistance
| goes up, that causes more stress etc.) and electromigration
| due to over-voltage (the flux of electrons induces a shift in
| the position of the atoms it goes through).
|
| Considering mining is a constant load (not much thermal
| stress) and improving efficiency requires lowering the
| voltage those aren't really concerns. There's far less risk
| than overclocking a GPU for gaming. The only electrical part
| that may be of concern would be the voltage regulation, but
| that's still an outlier as long as cooling is adequate.
|
| Fans are know to fail because they're ran at high speeds all
| the time, but they're a commodity.
| tullianus wrote:
| Electromigration can happen because of constant high
| temperatures as well!
| barkingcat wrote:
| This is usually a non-concern. It's likely that the GPU will
| become obsolete in the time that it fails due to being run at
| 100% of the time.
|
| The other question to ask, if you compile programs, write
| webpages, and edit photoshop images: are you concerned with
| hardware degradation with your CPU if you run at 100% all
| time time, for example, compiling chrome that takes 3+ hours,
| applying photoshop filters to an image to get a production
| quality output, or for rendering a 3 hour long animated
| movie?
|
| Do you worry about the GPU when you are retraining a GPT-2 or
| GPT-3 scale AI framework?
|
| These questions are kind of ... dependent on each person.
| Presumably you buy a computer in order to perform
| computations. That is its purpose.
|
| Just because it's crunching bitcoins/cryptocurrencies doesn't
| degrade it any more than ... say running an AI framework on a
| GPU for 3 months continuously to generate a self driving
| model ...
| balls187 wrote:
| The flipside, if you have a CPU and you can't keep it
| pegged 100% of the time, are you wasting resources?
| danans wrote:
| No, because a CPU isn't a consumable resource, like
| electricity or labor. You should occupy the CPU with all
| valuable work (for whatever definition of value) but
| keeping it pegged for no reason makes no sense, and just
| wastes electricity.
| [deleted]
| slaman wrote:
| It's value deprecates over time though, as it's market
| efficiency drops relative to newer cards.
|
| Your return on the opportunity cost is maximized if you
| can do work closest to the time the card was acquired.
|
| If you buy a card and leave it in the box for 10 years
| you have not 'consumed' the card, but you have wasted a
| few hundred dollars.
|
| From an electricity and financial perspective if you have
| valuable work to do, your costs are minimized if you do
| that work closest to the purchase date.
|
| This is obvious if you have a significant workload, but
| maybe not as obvious if you are running CAD. Is the cost
| of a new card worth the time saved by the new card?
| Significantly more efficient if you can keep it busy.
| amackera wrote:
| In a way, by not running useful work 100% of the time,
| you're wasting the resource of time.
| xienze wrote:
| I was quite surprised by this, but when running NiceHash on
| my 2070S with no overclocking etc. it stays at ~60C, fans
| aren't even audible, etc. And it generates the equivalent of
| $5 of BTC every day. Can't complain.
| gkfasdfasdf wrote:
| I would really like to try NiceHash, but the fact that I have
| to add it as an exception to Windows Defender antivirus, and
| that one of the founders has previously been convicted [0] and
| served time for writing botnet malware, really gives me pause.
|
| [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NiceHash
| lostmsu wrote:
| Self-ad: check mine (which is also conveniently called Mine).
| https://losttech.software/Downloads/Mine/
|
| I am considering to add a feature, that would pause when
| external sensor reports high temperature. But you can already
| hack around that by creating a background window titled
| "DON'T MINE" and setting the tool to stop when it sees it.
| kiddico wrote:
| I'd bet that writing botnet software was pretty good training
| for writing distributed processing software like NiceHash,
| though I think your concern is still valid.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Windows Defender flags all crypto miners. It is not unique to
| NiceHash. You don't _have_ to add an exception for the whole
| NiceHash directory for it to work, but it makes it easier.
| NiceHash updates the miners occasionally, and if you don 't
| add an exception for the whole directory, then every time a
| miner gets an update, it's disabled by Windows Defender until
| you manually allow it.
| xienze wrote:
| NiceHash is on GitHub and you could always build it yourself
| if you're worried. I think the reason it flags as malware is
| because virus scanners flag anything crypto mining-related as
| malware by default.
| mtone wrote:
| Nicehash (the app) is a convenience tool to manage miner
| executables. You can connect most miners to Nicehash (the
| service), and some are open-source.
|
| For instance I GPU mine with https://github.com/ethereum-
| mining/ethminer (no longer active, but works well for me) and
| CPU mine with https://github.com/xmrig/xmrig, both built from
| source. But I haven't looked at the source, so at some point
| I'm still trusting someone.
| lupire wrote:
| What is the $ cost of the power?
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| About $20-25/month.
|
| But it's not as if the cost of power is wasted. It's
| generating heat which I desire. If my GPU is consuming 300W,
| then that's 300W of heat that my heater doesn't have to
| generate.
| ericd wrote:
| Electric resistive heating is the worst form of heating,
| though - heat pumps are something like 3-4x the heat per
| kwh used. So not totally wasted, but a much worse way to
| get heat into your house, if that's your goal.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Fair enough, but my goal isn't to heat my whole house,
| just add a little bit to this one room.
|
| My whole house is heated with gas anyways, which AFAIK is
| more efficient than a heat pump, or at least, is more
| cost-effective.
| tialaramex wrote:
| Cost effective yes, efficient no.
| [deleted]
| ramraj07 wrote:
| I'm stull struggling to understand this concept can
| someone explain further
| Cu3PO42 wrote:
| Think of the way your fridge works, but your house is the
| outside of the fridge and the ground is the inside of the
| fridge. That is, the heat pump uses electrical energy to
| move heat from the ground (more specifically a deep hole
| that is drilled) into your house. It takes less than 1J
| of electric energy to move 1J of heat, therefore one can
| claim an efficiency >100%.
| [deleted]
| salawat wrote:
| You're still maximizing power generation demand. That makes
| environmental issues worse even if it does make fiscal
| sense. You aren't "using power tgat would go to waste
| anyway".
|
| All power is JIT. It makes a difference.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > You aren't "using power tgat would go to waste anyway".
|
| That's not what I said.
|
| I'm not "using power that would go to waste anyways", I'm
| generating heat that I would have needed anyways.
|
| In other words, I need to add a little bit of heat to
| this room. I can either run a small space heater on Low
| and consume about 300W and get nothing but 300W of heat,
| or I can mine crypto and consume around 300W, generate
| the heat I wanted, and earn about $200/month on top of
| it.
|
| In either case, I'm consuming 300W. I might as well make
| money in the process.
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| $0.10/kWh @ 300W = $0.1/kWh * 0.3 kW * 720 hrs/mo =
| $21.60/month
| [deleted]
| srcmap wrote:
| Is there any cost analyze for using solar panel power for
| Crypto?
|
| I am installing Solar from Tesla, wonder if I should just use
| the external power generated for crypto than to send them
| back to PG&E.
| sgc wrote:
| Since you can make money mining crypto paying for power,
| and the power company pays you less than they charge, or
| course using it for crypto makes financial sense.
| bolasanibk wrote:
| https://www.nicehash.com/ got the HN hug of death!
| pjfin123 wrote:
| How efficiently do GPUs heat? I'm assuming most of the input
| energy is lost to heat?
| oever wrote:
| GPUs are 100% efficient at turning low entropy energy into high
| entropy energy i.e. heat.
|
| If you take into account transport loss and efficiency of
| creating the electric current, then it's probably below 50%.
|
| Heat pumps typically have an efficiency of 300% (COP 3) because
| they pump heat from outside to the inside. (inverse of how a
| refrigerator works).
| altcognito wrote:
| Man, humans can rationalize just about anything.
|
| Lucky for him he had thousands of dollars of computer equipment
| just lying around he could use to heat his home.
|
| We're not even close to peak Bitcoin I imagine.
| dgellow wrote:
| > If you keep your coins longer than the one-year speculation
| period, it's tax free.
|
| You still have to pay income taxes on the mining reward (same for
| staking rewards). The 1 year period is only for capital gains, so
| only for the benefits made when selling the asset.
| ketamine__ wrote:
| There are no tax free capital gains?
| wffurr wrote:
| OP is in Austria.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| All these years i ve been wondering why they don't market miners
| as space heaters. How much would it cost to make one in the
| 400-800W range?
| naebother wrote:
| Green Crypto(tm)
| progfix wrote:
| The author did not mention the key factor in this: Sufficient
| thermal insulation. Looking at the photo of his house, this type
| of modern house has at least 16 cm thermal isolation on the
| facade and at least 20 cm on the roof.
| wrycoder wrote:
| In the winter, we move our electric food dryer into the kitchen,
| where it provides heat and humidity.
|
| Before October, it's outside, and is used to finish off the
| product from the solar dryer.
|
| Edit: Maybe it would make sense to get the miner out of the attic
| and turn it into a food dryer.
| andi999 wrote:
| Total electricity consumption would be interesting.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| I did this for a while. It worked. Too well. We had to open the
| windows amidst a boston winter. In net it was barely profitable,
| especially with the recoverable cost of the computers. Fun and
| kind of a weird art installation in a way. Ultimately wasteful.
| H8crilA wrote:
| What will happen to the cards once the crypto boom is over? There
| was a lot of trashed AntMiners out there after the late 2017
| bubble, and with it a good amount of CAPEX written down.
| vgalin wrote:
| This is only true for ASIC miners, ASICs (Application-Specific
| Integrated Circuit) are pieces of hardware designed to do very
| specific things - e.g. mining crypto currencies. When these
| cards become obsolete or aren't profitable anymore, trashing
| them is almost the only thing you can do.
|
| On the other side, GPUs, even if they are not profitable
| anymore to crypto currency miners, can still be used afterwards
| or sold back.
| geek_at wrote:
| they still make great LAN party GPUs. HL2 mp is not a problem
| and even ark runs on them somewhat
| aloisdg wrote:
| this is the way
| lmilcin wrote:
| I wonder if we could make it even better and make smart heaters
| that instead of wasting calculations actually do something
| useful, something like folding proteins or some other computing
| load that doesn't require huge network load and can be easily
| distributed (something like SETI@home but _actually_ useful).
|
| In densely populated cities we could bury huge datacenters
| underground and use that energy for heating directly, and use
| excess to produce electricity.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Currently a Facebook datacenter in Denmark is supplying around
| 10.000 homes with heating.
|
| You can argue that Facebook isn't actually doing anything
| useful, but still, it's better than to waste the generated
| heat.
| trungdq88 wrote:
| Fascinating! Is this true? Do you have a link? Thanks!
| Aachen wrote:
| I don't doubt it, they'd be silly not to do it: good PR
| from a waste product? Perhaps you can even charge for it?
| Amazing deal, especially the former and especially for
| Facebook. It's also very common; a school I went to was
| heated by the data center across the road.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Most articles are in Danish, the best I could find quickly
| is: https://www.datacentremagazine.com/data-
| centres/facebook-exp...
|
| Edit: It's should be noted that most Danish cities already
| have a remote heating infrastructure in place. Aside from
| the regulatory issues, it's mostly a question of hooking up
| datacenters and other heat producing industries to that
| infrastructure. In most places utilising the remote heating
| isn't voluntary, if it's available where you live, your
| home has to be connected.
|
| Things like datacenters are slowly replacing coal fired
| heating plants, because most of those plants where made to
| generate electricity, but that's now supplied by more and
| more renewable energy. So cities need to find other sources
| of heat, to replace the volume no longer coming from the
| power plants. Where I live that's datacenters, waste
| incinerators and heavy industry.
|
| As a new thing, remote cooling is now also attempted by
| using cold water from limepits.
| wil421 wrote:
| How are the houses centrally heated l? I live in the
| Southern US and we do not have harsh winters. Most houses
| are heated by gas or electric furnaces (central air).
|
| It's interesting you can also use remote cooling from
| lime pits.
| johanvts wrote:
| It's simply insulated pipes with hot water running
| underground. Homes in more remote places often use gas or
| electric heating.
| mrweasel wrote:
| The hot water pipes can actually run surprisingly long
| streches, but it's only economical for denser populated
| areas.
| Delk wrote:
| There have also been plans to do this in Finland, but most
| of what I can find is either marketing material or news
| articles discussing plans [1, 2] rather than actual
| achievements, so I'm not sure what actually became of it.
|
| There's a brochure from the national innovation fund that
| mentions a town actually covering about half of its heating
| needs with heat from a data center, though. [3]
|
| Swedish telco Telia also has had similar plans for a data
| center in Helsinki, Finland, and their website says their
| "goal is to recover and reuse all the heat produced" [4],
| but I'm not sure how much weight to give that since
| proclaiming a goal only costs a few words. It would be
| nicer if they said what they're actually doing at the
| moment even if it were much less than "all of it".
|
| [1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/from-deep-underground-
| data-cen...
|
| [2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jul/20/hel
| sinki...
|
| [3] https://www.sitra.fi/en/cases/district-heating-from-
| data-cen...
|
| [4] https://www.telia.fi/business/telia-helsinki-data-
| center
| softawre wrote:
| Here's a Finland example that was posted earlier. It
| makes it seem like it's already working.
|
| https://helsinkismart.fi/case/waste-not-want-not-data-
| center...
| Delk wrote:
| Thanks. That would seem to be the same case as in my
| third link.
| fiftyacorn wrote:
| I think Amazon does the same with a datacenter and powers a
| refuge
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| I don't think any rational person argues that Facebook isn't
| doing anything useful at all, lots of people value the
| connectivity and ability to share photos during lockdown.
|
| Facebook has a good and bad side just like humans do. For
| example, if Facebook got rid of the ability to post news, it
| would be a much better place.
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| Also, Facebook created apis that other developers utilize
| for many AppStore apps. So it's really nothing you can
| control.
| pmontra wrote:
| Or completely remove posts and keep only Messenger and
| Whatsapp. I've been using almost only Whatsapp and Telegram
| to share stuff with friends and groups of friends for a few
| years. If I want to read news I look for them either on
| Google News or on the very web sites that publish them, the
| ones I trust.
|
| If Google and Facebook would block news on my country I
| wouldn't notice much.
| nr2x wrote:
| The questions are twofold: does Facebook do more good than
| bad? Could the good be accomplished without much of the
| bad? The answers to both questions are arguably bad for
| Facebook.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| But then why is there no serious competitor?
| TomSwirly wrote:
| A social network is a natural monopoly. You are kept at
| Facebook because all your friends are on Facebook, and
| they are kept there because you are.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> no serious competitor?
|
| There are plenty. There is no mirror corporation doing
| exactly the same thing under a different name. But there
| is no mirror to Microsoft, Google, Apple or any other
| large tech corp. These are corporations backed by
| ironclad IP laws meaning nobody can every play on exactly
| the same field. For something like facebook, the
| competitor is _all things not facebook_. Every time you
| share a new story via SMS, you are competing with
| facebook. Every time you send a message via email rather
| than via facebook you are competing with facebook. And
| ever time you visit a store 's own website rather than
| their facebook page, you deny facebook a tiny bit of the
| world. That is the serious competitor.
| nr2x wrote:
| The competition for Facebook is owning the social graph
| as a means to fuel advertising profits. Google+ failed,
| sure. Instagram would have been eating Mark's lunch right
| now if he didn't buy them, and he knows it.
| nr2x wrote:
| Imagine a world where Facebook didn't buy WhatsApp and
| Instagram. So I think the better hypothetical is "imagine
| a world where Facebook didn't leverage its existing
| dominance to preempt competitors".
| hutzlibu wrote:
| Oh, since I do not use Facebook or Instagramm and only
| occasionally whatsapp, I can very well imagine a world
| without that all.
|
| Still, if enough people would be fed up with FB, their
| dominance would fade away. Well, afaik Telegram (and
| Signal) gained lots marketshare lateley, so lets see
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| https://friendi.ca is a serious competitor doing mostly
| the same things as Facebook. (Except it's a social media
| site first, instead of an ad network first.)
|
| But you probably _don 't need_ social media.
| brightball wrote:
| Part of me wonders if we aren't getting there now. The crypto
| craze is driving more heavy compute setups around the globe
| than anything else.
|
| When it finally slows down (if ever) what will all of that
| hardware be used for?
| zirkonit wrote:
| Another one: Yandex (disclosure: the company I work for) is
| using one of its datacenters to heat the entire town it is in.
|
| Proof: https://helsinkismart.fi/case/waste-not-want-not-data-
| center...
| 420codebro wrote:
| Interesting. Never ran across someone who worked for Yandex.
| Overall are you happy with your employer?
| rypskar wrote:
| There are several useful BOINC-projects, for protein folding
| you have https://foldingathome.org/, the projects mine
| computers use most time on are the projects at
| https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org. You can find lists of
| projects at https://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php and
| https://www.boincstats.com/page/projectPopularity.
|
| Interesting idea to combine it with larger heating than to heat
| a room or two. Many will probably argue that it is an
| ineffective way to create heat without also looking at the
| benefits from the work done
| ryankrage77 wrote:
| > Many will probably argue that it is an ineffective way to
| create heat.
|
| Electrical heating is as close to 100% efficient as you can
| get. Every watt your computer uses ends up as heat.
|
| Generating those watts from non-renewable sources is much
| less efficient though.
|
| I wonder if it's possible to calculate when the benefit of
| contributing to BOINC projects outweighs the CO2 generated.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| Can climate change be solved by crunching more numbers?
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Heat pumps have >100% efficiency. It's better to use AC to
| heat your house as long as outside temperature is not too
| cold.
| lmilcin wrote:
| No, heat pumps don't have over 100% efficiency the same
| way hot water pumps that pump from municipal source don't
| have >100% efficiency in heating home (it uses hot water
| available from somewhere else).
|
| Heat pumps engage some other source of energy so if you
| want to measure efficiency you now need to include that
| other source into account.
|
| Since you are engaging natural source of energy you can
| measure how _effective_ (not efficient in thermodynamical
| terms) your heat pump system is, by calculating how much
| energy it can transfer for energy put into the pump. But
| this has nothing to do with _efficiency_ , which in case
| of devices used to convert one type of energy into
| another or moving energy from place to place is typically
| meant in its strict thermodynamical sense.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| The efficiency calculation here measures only electrical
| power in vs heat energy out. Heat pumps are always listed
| with greater than 100% efficiency. There is no problem
| with the laws of thermodynamics of doing this and it's
| even listed in text books with the explanation of how it
| is possible.
|
| The work of the heat pump is to move heat from one
| location to another, it does so with the byproduct of
| producing more heat, therefore it produces more heat
| energy than the electrical energy put in.
|
| You're right that conservation of energy says that the
| heat in being moved did come from somewhere but that's
| outside the system, and you will always find heat
| anywhere but absolute zero. Calculations for turbines or
| engines don't make any efficiency allotments for heat
| already in the air, which is also necessary for them to
| run.
| [deleted]
| lmilcin wrote:
| I guess you are mistaken about what a heat pump is.
|
| Heat pump is a closed system in which you store energy
| when it is hot and recover it when it is cold.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump
|
| Heat pump is not just the pump mechanism, but the entire
| system which includes mass of rock that is heat
| reservoir.
|
| What typically happens is you drill deep in the ground or
| rock and circulate air, water or some other refrigerant
| underground. During summer you pump hot refrigerant to
| heat up the mass of rock. This can be for example water
| that has been made hot by the sun. During winter you push
| water through that warm rock to recover the heat to warm
| your home.
|
| No, it is not thermodynamically possible to recover more
| than 100% of stored energy.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| We're talking of home heating where the ground source
| heat pumps are rare. Here's an article explaining how
| they work. Efficiency is 200-300%
|
| https://www.finehomebuilding.com/2020/04/08/how-
| efficient-ar...
| [deleted]
| hectormalot wrote:
| Residential sized heat pumps can do '400-500%' efficiency
| (i.e. 4-5kWh of heat for every kWh of electricity), so
| electrical heating at 100% efficiency is indeed
| inefficient. If the calculations are really valuable it
| could still be worth it though.
|
| Also, what would you do in the summer?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Miniscule % of people have heat-pumps. In UK most people
| use either a gas boiler or a dumb electric heater. And
| you can't even install heatpump in an an apartment
| building without re-constructing half of it.
| _Microft wrote:
| They are slowly becoming more common here in Germany. I'd
| say about half of the houses in the newly developed part
| of town have one and a few older ones are retrofitting
| them as well here.
| hectormalot wrote:
| Today that is true, but I think the trend will move
| towards a larger share in the future. Relevant anecdotes:
|
| - All newly build housing in the Netherlands must be
| without natural gas, thus either lower heat-grid or heat
| pump heating - People that use airconditioning for
| heating have a heat pump without being aware of it (if
| configured that way)
|
| Finally, for any technology early in the adoption curve,
| the market share - or even the growth rate (%) - today
| shouldn't be taken as good indicators for future
| development. E.g. McKinsey famously underestimated the
| mobile phone market by 100x that way [1] and the energy
| predictions on the adoption of solar manage to
| underestimate installed solar power _every_ year.
| Instead, also consider growth-of-growth and network
| effects as adoption grows.
|
| [1]:
| https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/38716/did-
| mckin...
| [deleted]
| mustyoshi wrote:
| The key here is that mining pays enough to offset electricity
| used for mining.
|
| SETI@home doesn't pay.
| amelius wrote:
| So we need a cryptocurrency based on useful calculations
| instead of useless hashing.
| Forbo wrote:
| What you're looking for is called the Berkeley Open
| Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC). The work units
| for BOINC can be crunched to earn GridCoin.
| VMG wrote:
| Cryptocurrency mining doesn't actually require huge network
| load
| okl wrote:
| I would call ~80 TWhpa "huge":
| https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/
| virgo_eye wrote:
| Network load here refers to bandwidth on the internet, not
| power consumption on the electricity grid, I believe.
| lmilcin wrote:
| I don't consider cryptocurrency mining as overall beneficial
| for humanity.
|
| You know, humanity has this huge issue of CO2 in atmosphere,
| maybe you have heard of it?
|
| We are building more and more renewable sources, but
| cryptocurrency mining is countering these benefits to a
| considerable extent.
|
| Additionally, even if we are able to produce 100% energy from
| renewable sources it still requires energy to scrub carbon
| from our atmosphere and so any energy put in bitcoin could be
| used for like saving our planet.
| VMG wrote:
| > You know, humanity has this huge issue of CO2 in
| atmosphere, maybe you have heard of it?
|
| yes, it is exhausting
| inter_netuser wrote:
| It is not wasted. This is the most common misunderstanding on
| this forum.
|
| Miners are required to provable expend effort in order to
| become eligible to produce a block. 2nd law of thermodynamics
| as core security mechanism, as it cannot be reversed.
|
| If you were to improve efficiency by routing excess heat for
| other purposes, it will gradually spread across the entire
| mining industry, and eventually you end up right where we
| started.
| mtsr wrote:
| Which is OPs point. The energy has to be wasted, or else
| everyone will do it to reduce cost and the difficulty just
| goes up until the net mining reward is similar to what it is
| now.
|
| And that for something that's almost exclusively used for
| speculation, because for anything else transactions costs are
| too high...
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| Sure, but if the rebates result in wasted energy instead
| being used for good, then we're getting an energy benefit
| while getting better power.
|
| Hell, _dont_ pay people, if I was mining and it was similar
| costs to donate the wasted energy I'd do it.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| What?
| htk wrote:
| I don't think GP misunderstood what miners do. What I believe
| he means by wasted cycles is that the final product in crypto
| doesn't have any practical purpose aside from what was agreed
| on by convention. For any other purpose it's a wasted effort.
| This calculation power could instead be used to try to find
| new practical knowledge, like protein folding to use on new
| medicine etc.
| bouncycastle wrote:
| It's a fallacy that high hashrate means high security.
|
| What matters is the % of miners that are honest. (See
| bitcoin.pdf)
|
| High hashrate just means higher difficulty. (The difficulty
| controls the average time between blocks, so it's always
| targeting to be 10 min on average).
|
| Also, for heating your home, mining bitcoin could end you up
| with a loss. For example, your heater needs an internet
| connection, and your heater is will become out-of-date very
| quickly as new more advanced bitcoin mining gear becomes
| available. You would also need to have your heater on 24/7 to
| break even, this it will cost you to turn off the mining
| heater due to warm weather or to cool it.
|
| Not to mention the noise.
| jki275 wrote:
| What matters is the % of miners who don't collude.
|
| Honesty isn't the issue, collusion is. The entire concept
| of Bitcoin assumes dishonest players.
|
| The only real attack is for miners to combine hash power to
| get over 50% of the network hash rate so they can execute
| double spends - and even that is self defeating as doing so
| degrades confidence and by extension price.
| sep_field wrote:
| Only once it gets publicized. You have a window to sell
| and make an enormous profit before people notice and then
| the entire bit-conomy gets wrecked. I hope this happens
| as it is a much better outcome to this mess we've created
| than wrecking the biosphere.
| jki275 wrote:
| Yeah, it's a really really tiny window though. chain
| reorganizations and 50% attacks are really easy to see on
| the chain and people do watch for them.
|
| They've happened on smaller chains that don't have much
| hash power attached to them, but even there, they're
| caught very quickly.
| inter_netuser wrote:
| A) 100% honest miners, 1 hash per century. B) 55% honest
| miners, 1 googol hashes per second.
|
| What is more secure in your view?
|
| hashrate is absolutely necessary for high security.
| bouncycastle wrote:
| Read bitcoin.pdf
| inter_netuser wrote:
| do you want to cite a specific paragraph?
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| > 2nd law of thermodynamics as core security mechanism
|
| LOL... this is the most ridiculous claim I've heard about
| crypto-mining yet. Might as well buy a truck-full of wine
| glasses, break them and use the shards of broken glass to
| prove that I've "expended effort". Now we're using the
| asymmetry of time itself as a security mechanism. Come to
| think of it, that may be actually less wasteful than burning
| the electricity to mine Bitcoin.
| crote wrote:
| The problem here is that densely populated cities generally
| aren't in need of heating: keeping them cooled is a bigger
| issue!
|
| From a heating perspective, there is basically zero demand for
| the kind of year-round low-quality heating a data center can
| produce. From a computing perspective, rare and uncontrollable
| bursts of computing power aren't desirable either and is a
| waste of hardware.
|
| The article should be considered an edge case. The author
| already had hardware lying around for free and required zero
| usable computation. An in-ground heat buffer wasn't an option.
| Longevity of the hardware was irrelevant. Heat demand was quite
| small.
|
| Does it work for a single person? Sure, why not! Will it work
| on a city-wide scale? Highly unlikely.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Wth is this "low-quality heating from datacenters"?
| dudul wrote:
| Where does this claim that densely populated cities don't
| need heating come from?
| lmilcin wrote:
| So where do you live exactly?
|
| I live in Europe and I would say that heating _IS_ life or
| death problem whereas cooling isn 't.
|
| See, there is this thing that is called hypothermia and if
| you take a look at the map and find where it is possible to
| die of hypothermia vs where it is possible to die of
| overheating, the number of people that live in places that
| _require_ heating is much more than number of people that
| live in places that _require_ cooling.
|
| That may change in the future.
| jgtrosh wrote:
| Apparently nobody here has mentioned Gridcoin yet:
| https://gridcoin.us/
| ehnto wrote:
| Not quite what you mean, but a city in Australia is trialing
| "Smart Appliance Response Automation". The gist is that some
| appliances can utilize excess green power during the day in
| order to not need that energy later at night when it would need
| to be provided by gas turbines.
|
| The current trial is actually residential water heaters, by
| heating the water using excess green power during the day you
| effectively store that energy as heat and that water then gets
| used later that night or early morning for
| showers/baths/washing etc.
|
| Another example is a more obvious one, which is electric cars
| and other large battery appliances. The ultimate goal is to get
| these appliances talking to the grid directly, so that they
| know when to draw power and when to idle.
|
| https://www.energyrating.gov.au/sites/default/files/2020-01/...
| bluGill wrote:
| My parents have had a smart water heater since 1988. It was
| interesting a few years back hearing a politician talk about
| how bad smart meters were - he had to make it clear that the
| smart meter 80% of the room had for 20 years were nothing
| like the smart meters he was talking about. (which is to say
| the ones he was against gave minute by minute reports with
| the privacy concerns, the ones everyone had just turned the
| water heater and AC units off/on - I'll let you decide if the
| issue was real or not)
| ehnto wrote:
| I think the likelyhood of it being done in the "New Tech"
| fashion of bi-directional real-time data flows with high
| level languages is high, and the security of that will be
| low. So I'm not super pumped about the inevitable grid
| software exploits. Privacy aside, it's got other potential
| risks that are more important to address I think.
| rini17 wrote:
| On one side, you want to recoup the miner investment and run it
| as much as possible, ideally 24/7.
|
| But on the other side, you want the heater to regulate
| temperature (not overheat the room) by switching itself off as
| needed.
|
| You can have both only if you either waste energy (vent it to
| outside) or have a thermal storage. It is already existing
| technology i.e. for electric heaters that accumulate heat using
| cheap night electricity and slowly release it during the day.
| Or water boilers. But they are bulky and can only store several
| hours worth of heat.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I was thinking we could build something like this for refining
| aluminum.
|
| Every week you pick up your 10kg block of bauxite and exchange
| it for aluminum.
|
| Not sure how much byproduct heat is actually involved though...
| bayindirh wrote:
| Welcome to Qarnot.
|
| https://qarnot.com/en/the-radiator-computer/
| neilalexander wrote:
| > The computing-heater warms buildings ecologically and for
| free, thanks to the waste heat released by embedded
| microprocessors. By performing complex IT operations...
|
| ... which are what, exactly?
| ryankrage77 wrote:
| Going by the vaguness of the site, I wouldn't be suprised
| if they're mining bitcoin for themselves while you pay for
| the electricity.
|
| Edit: Dug around some more, looks like they're building a
| BOINC-like service? https://computing.qarnot.com/en/
| bayindirh wrote:
| If I remember correctly, they pay for the network and
| electricity use of the heater. They rent the platform for
| computation to other third parties.
|
| So you, store and cool the computer for free. They
| probably sell directly to buildings and municipalities
| during construction, so it's installed and left there.
|
| So you either just rent it for a nominal fee or pay
| nothing.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Sounds like what Nerdalize tried to do in the
| Netherlands, but IIRC they went bankrupt not long ago.
| acomjean wrote:
| Im not sure what it's doing but "folding@home" is doing
| biology simulations as it's useful distributed computing,
| that can probably generate some warmth.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home
| bayindirh wrote:
| Folding@Home has an unofficial guide for it too [0].
|
| At the end of the day, Qarnot rents this infrastructure
| to other companies for computation and use the heat
| energy to heat stuff (air, water, warehouses, etc.). Not
| a bad idea.
|
| [0]: https://greenfoldingathome.com/2020/05/25/how-to-
| make-a-fold...
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| looking through their tech stack and the hello world
| example and stuff I think you can put your own stuff i n
| it, but probably the most common stuff is 3d rendering.
|
| on edit: I got a downvote so someone must think I'm wrong?
| the basis of my idea was - in the FAQ
|
| https://computing.qarnot.com/en/FAQ
|
| 3D:
|
| Blender, Maya, V-Ray, Guerilla
|
| IA / ML / Big data or simulation:
|
| Code Saturne FreeFem OpenFOAM PyTorch TensorFlow
| SickitLearn Spark
|
| If there is a Docker image, we support the software! You
| can either bring your own or choose an existing one on
| Docker Hub. You can also ask our experts for help!
|
| I expected the 3D stuff put up top made it the most used,
| but could be wrong in that. Obviously also some data
| crunching, ML tasks, but at any rate if my answer was wrong
| and so off base as to get a downvote maybe you could also
| just say why I'm wrong and what it's generally used for?
|
| on second edit: developer documentation https://computing.q
| arnot.com/en/developers/overview/qarnot-c... made me think
| that maybe if you have one you can get your own api token
| and put your stuff on it, obviously you would have to pay
| them for that so not sure how it would work.
| cinntaile wrote:
| You have been here for a couple of years, surely you have
| noticed downvotes don't always make sense.
| epr wrote:
| Seriously. I've actually gotten into the habit of
| compulsively upvoting anything that has been downvoted
| unless someone is really out of line, even if I disagree
| with an opinion they're expressing.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Same here. Unless it's something intentionally offensive
| or trollish, I don't downvote anyone. Including opinions
| I don't agree with.
|
| If it's something I disagree, and worth discussing, I set
| aside five minutes to write a good reply instead. I think
| it's much more constructive.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| sure, but I suppose it makes sense to the person making
| the downvote. And when it makes especially poor sense to
| me I start to think - maybe they see something I don't?
|
| on edit: I do sometimes also get paranoid and think, man
| there is just someone who doesn't like me and
| automatically downvote when they run across my name!
| rl3 wrote:
| > _I do sometimes also get paranoid and think, man there
| is just someone who doesn 't like me and automatically
| downvote when they run across my name!_
|
| It certainly can feel like that sometimes. I rarely enjoy
| posting here anymore as a result. The fact a single
| downvote can inhibit your comment's visibility and
| negatively bias its progression is silly.
|
| The unsettling part is it feels like there's very little
| stopping individuals and organizations from weaponizing
| that dynamic. Anything from targeted sustained
| psychological distress to censorship is possible with the
| current scheme.
| agurk wrote:
| Particularly when there's a case of a single downvote,
| it's worth remembering that it's easy to click the wrong
| button here - especially on mobile. I make a habit of
| checking the command has changed to "unvote" or "undown"
| correctly to verify I voted how I wanted to.
|
| I've also hit voting arrows a lot whilst scrolling (on
| mobile) and must not have caught that every single time.
| BenoitEssiambre wrote:
| I don't know much about this company but I love the name
| Qarnot which is suggestive of thermodynamically optimal
| computing. Carnot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_L%C3
| %A9onard_Sadi_Carn...) was the father of thermodynamic
| efficiency. He came up with thermodynamics to optimize steam
| engines, maybe making him the most steampunk of scientists.
| Thermodynamically optimizing bits is an echo of that for the
| age of computing.
| agumonkey wrote:
| happy to know they're still on
| exdsq wrote:
| 'Proof of Useful Work', as opposed to proof of work, is a
| thing!
|
| https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/203.pdf
| monkeydust wrote:
| Any coins / tokens that implement this or something similar?
| Uberphallus wrote:
| Gridcoin.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| The proof of work in tokens has to be a net waste of
| energy; the idea is that the proof of work is costly enough
| to prevent a 51% attack.
|
| Making the proof of work do "useful" things would lower the
| cost of said work thus lowering the barrier of entry to an
| attack.
| lupire wrote:
| That's only true if the work is profitable for you and
| not something lie for folding@home
| cwkoss wrote:
| How can you chain folding@home puzzles?
|
| PoW requires that a block's solution proves that the
| solver had access to the previous block.
| guerrilla wrote:
| The linked paper says the opposite.
|
| > This results in PoWs whose completion does not waste
| energy but instead is useful for the solution of
| computational problems of practical interest.
| inter_netuser wrote:
| do you believe every paper that comes across without
| critical review?
|
| This 31 page paper most definitely has not been fully
| evaluated by anyone commenting on it in this thread.
| betterunix2 wrote:
| In fact, nobody seems to have read the first page, which
| has a note that the definition of "proof of useful work"
| in that paper is trivial. An updated version is available
| here:
|
| https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/559
| exdsq wrote:
| Thanks for finding a better paper, I just went for the
| first paper with the relevant title as I was on my phone.
| Igelau wrote:
| Proof of waste.
| tom_mellior wrote:
| > Making the proof of work do "useful" things would lower
| the cost of said work thus lowering the barrier of entry
| to an attack.
|
| How does this follow? If the work is so universally
| useful that it lowers the cost of the work, it lowers the
| cost for _everyone_. Not just "attackers", but
| "defenders" as well.
|
| As it happens, Bitcoin miners mine not out of the
| goodness of their hearts but for financial profit.
| Bitcoin POW _is_ "useful" to them: It gives them more
| money than they put in. They do it precisely _because_
| the cost of said work is lower than the returns.
| [deleted]
| dvdbloc wrote:
| For years in an apartment I generated heat using surplus
| servers folding proteins. Some servers that are still quite
| fast and only a few years old are pretty cheap on eBay.
| Dockerize the whole thing and it's easy to start and stop. One
| time I woke up however and it was especially cold, I realized I
| had a network issue and my servers could not get any more work
| units...
| m463 wrote:
| I've wondered the same thing every time I hear of "bitcoin will
| change the climate".
|
| I think we could even design processors differently if heat was
| not part of the equation. Right now it's all about perf-per-
| watt, which gives up absolute speed.
|
| Also it would be fun to say "It was so cold that night, <x>"
| like "I could raytrace in realtime" or "I mined 1 bitcoin" or
| "crysis ran 10,000fps"
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| I think that could be interesting. As others have said,
| whatever the computations are, if they are being done anyway,
| might as well use the generated heat for something useful
| instead of letting it go to waste.
|
| But I wonder what would happen with such a system in the
| summer? For example in most on France it gets pretty cold for
| long enough every year that having a proper heating system and
| good insulation makes financial sense. But during the summer
| it's pretty hot, especially in cities. While the heating can be
| turned off between March and October (give or take), Facebook &
| co would probably like their DC to keep on working, so to keep
| on heating, year round.
| tuukkah wrote:
| District heating is used year round to get warm water.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| How hot is hot? A few days ago it was -18 here and now its
| 27. In a few months we will hit 38. I'm sure I dont want to
| be doing computations then.
| medstrom wrote:
| Produce electricity? I assume electricity was used to do the
| computation in the first place, turning into let's say 80% work
| and 20% heat. The idea was to use that 20% to heat our homes.
| The original electricity still needs to come from elsewhere.
| lmilcin wrote:
| When I said Data Center can produce electricity I did not
| mean that it can produce as much or more than it takes in. I
| thought this obvious enough that it did not have to be said.
|
| But alas, it has to be said.
|
| No, you can't create perpetuum mobile ie. build a machine
| that given a supply of energy produces as much or even more
| energy.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetuum_mobile
| innocenat wrote:
| It is still not viable.
|
| Assume your datacenter runs at 50C (122F) and the
| temperature outside is -40C (-40F), using the datacenter
| heat to generate electricity has _theoretical_ maximum
| efficiency of 27.85%. If your datacenter is at 23C (73F)
| and room temp is 0C (32F), then the theoretical maximum is
| 7.77%. Note the word 'theoretical maximum', in reality
| probably at least 10 times worse than that.
| lmilcin wrote:
| You assume DCs are cooled by the whole volume of air
| inside when in fact you can put heat pipes on components
| and get closer to 70-90 degrees heat source. Even years
| ago when I worked in datacenters the air was circulated
| from outside to the server rack and then back outside,
| never crossing from the rack into server room.
|
| Newer generations of CPUs are going to be exchange less
| frequently but will produce more energy as they offer
| more dense computing. This makes case for investing more
| in the server hardware.
|
| Even then understand, that 7% of a huge amount of energy
| is still huge amount of energy.
|
| Edit: Apparently "Facebook datacenter in Denmark is
| supplying around 10.000 homes with heating" -- source,
| another poster.
|
| So... you need to rethink your expertise on defining what
| is and what is not viable.
| innocenat wrote:
| You can supply heat no problem. What I was talking about
| was recovering energy from heat, which is physically
| limited by Carnot engine. The percentage was Carnot
| engine efficiency. Note that it is impossible to create
| Carnot engine in real life, so actual efficiency is much,
| much, much lower.
| oefrha wrote:
| Doing computations hardly stores any energy anywhere (the
| energy stored in, say, magnetization in a magnetic disk is
| pretty much negligible), so almost 100% of electricity is
| turned into heat.
|
| The problem with this ~100% efficiency is that, if your goal
| is heating, you can move way more than 100% heat with 100%
| electrical energy if you use, say, a heat pump.
| owlmirror wrote:
| Heat pumps are not viable in a lot of cases, in an urban
| setting, it's probably the vast majority. So for the many
| cases were the alternative for heating would be burning
| fossil fuels, using electricity, ideally produced via
| renewable energy/nuclear, could be a superior alternative.
| lrem wrote:
| Wait, why heat pumps are not viable in an urban setting?
| lmilcin wrote:
| For many reasons.
|
| First, transporting heat as opposed to electricity is
| very wasteful, so you only want to transport it in very
| short distances.
|
| Second, typically even small single family home requires
| quite large volume to store the heat effectively for many
| months. It isn't that complex only because in a single
| family home setting you already have a bunch of
| uncontested land available so you can use the volume that
| is relatively flat and not too deep.
|
| Building this on a scale of a city would be
| insurmountable challenge. You would have to dig deeper
| than the buildings are high and any kind of works like
| that are difficult in urban areas.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| A heat pump is just a backwards air conditioner. Not
| whatever you are thinking it is.
| user-the-name wrote:
| I think you are thinking of something very different than
| what "heat pumps" actually are? They don't involve
| storing heat, they're just an inverse fridge.
| lmilcin wrote:
| I think guys you are all wrong.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump
|
| The first sentence:
|
| "A heat pump is a device that transfers heat energy from
| a source of heat to what is called a _thermal reservoir_.
| "
|
| So yes, it involves energy storage.
|
| The way this works is you store heat in the summer (warm
| up a lot of rock or ground underneath your house) and
| recover that energy in the winter by pumping a liquid
| through warm rock back to your house and use it as a heat
| source.
| liminvorous wrote:
| I think wikipedia is wrong or confusing here. A heat pump
| requires a thermal resevoir (something that doesn't
| change temperature much when you move heat to or from it)
| of some sort, usually the atmosphere, or in ground source
| heat pumps pipes running through the ground, but it can
| move heat in either direction.
|
| > While air conditioners and freezers are familiar
| examples of heat pumps, the term "heat pump" is more
| general and applies to many heating, ventilating, and air
| conditioning (HVAC) devices used for space heating or
| space cooling.
|
| Basically what I would understand from the term heat pump
| in ordinary conversation would be an air conditioner
| intended for use in a heating dominated climate rather
| than a cooling dominated one, but there might be some
| regional differences in usage.
| user-the-name wrote:
| Given that the neighbouring house has one on their wall,
| I think I know what they are.
| bluGill wrote:
| The air outside your house counts as a thermal reservoir
| as well. That it doesn't store anything to the next
| season is annoying and makes it not work well in cold
| temperatures.
| oefrha wrote:
| Thermal reservoir is a technical term in thermodynamics
| and as others have pointed out it doesn't mean what you
| think it means. Anything remotely resembling a (reversed)
| Carnot cycle would involve thermal reservoirs. You can
| read its own Wikipedia page.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| My urban apartment has a heat pump and it's nothing
| special. I even pay the heat bill and they still gave me
| a heat pump. I have no idea why someone would say they
| aren't viable. Not only are they viable, they're typical
| for new construction in warmer climates.
| dudul wrote:
| What a few of these "lot of cases" where they are not
| viable?
| bluGill wrote:
| Anytime it is "cold" air source heat pumps don't work.
| Cold varies a bit, somewhere between -5C and - 25C
| depending on design factors. Even in the best case as you
| get closer and closer to the minimum temperature the
| worse they work (IE when you need them most!), and once
| you hit the cut-off you better have a backup source off
| heat.
|
| You can use geothermo (ground) to work around this. I'd
| recommend it, but the one time install costs mean it is
| questionable if it is cost effective.
| dudul wrote:
| OK, so that's one, very well understood case. Yes, a heat
| pump will not work all the time. I have one and it stops
| working around 20F and the furnace takes over. So what? I
| live at the US/Canada border and my furnace runs maybe ~2
| months during the year. This is still tremendous savings.
| bluGill wrote:
| Big savings, but is it big enough to be worth the extra
| expense of a heat pump vs used using the furnace year
| round. The times when the heat pump works are the times
| when you least need it, since other activities of life
| are adding heat to the house too.
| virgo_eye wrote:
| No, essentially 100% of energy used for computation will turn
| into 'waste' heat.
|
| If you calculate 1000 digits of pi, those digits will not
| embody any energy.
| medstrom wrote:
| Just turning chaos into order takes thermodynamic work, but
| I was wildly off with my percentages. Thinking in terms of
| an idealized computer that doesn't create heat, but didn't
| realize how far we were from that.
| celticninja wrote:
| I understand your point but it does gloss over the fact that
| the calculations are useful to the bitcoin network in terms of
| security.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| So, absolutely useless for 99.99% of the world.
| [deleted]
| lmilcin wrote:
| This was discussed before on HN.
|
| The issue is building consensus protocol (in this case
| consensus that a transaction happened or did not happen).
|
| There exist no physics law that says that achieving this
| requires burning extraordinary amounts of energy.
| Graffur wrote:
| > This was discussed before on HN.
|
| You say that like the conversation is resolved?
| ForHackernews wrote:
| It is resolved.
|
| Everyone except bitcoin bagholders can see that the BTC
| proof-of-work protocol is obscenely wasteful. There are
| already superior cryptocurrencies that use different
| consensus algorithms and have similar or better
| security/anonymity properties.
| afarrell wrote:
| I think you might be underestimating the amount of work
| required to achieve real consensus among humans.
| Spivak wrote:
| Look the actual problem as solved by BTC which is digital
| cash with no protections like chargebacks requires only
| one single trusted entity (can be more if we want)
| maintaining a very simple ledger of transactions
| operating in the open with auditing done by interested
| parties.
|
| This is plenty achievable given that banking, which is
| far more complicated and messy, works. It doesn't not
| require a small country's energy usage to achieve human
| consensus.
|
| BTC is super cool having created an pseudoanonymous
| digital voting system that's resistant to ballot stuffing
| but we're allowed to make stronger assumptions for our
| financial systems.
| Geee wrote:
| What happens when banks break the consensus and what is
| needed to prevent that?
| celticninja wrote:
| it is not about physics, it's about security.
| xvector wrote:
| In other words, when the last Bitcoin is mined, Bitcoin is
| well and truly fucked.
|
| Bitcoin and other non-inflationary proof-of-work coins need
| to switch to proof-of-stake if they want any hope of
| longevity.
| hvidgaard wrote:
| It is assumed that transaction fees will be enough to
| incentivize miners.
| user-the-name wrote:
| Only if you assume the conclusion.
| stevewillows wrote:
| SETI coin should be a thing. It's nice for people to fold
| without prompting or compensation, but the added incentive
| would most likely draw a significantly larger market.
| Abimelex wrote:
| There is even a company which had specialized on heating homes
| using server heat. https://www.cloudandheat.com/
| pedrocr wrote:
| The explanation of needing to pre-heat the air into the heat pump
| is strange. Modern A/C systems can pump heat at 500%+ efficiency
| even with very cold outside temperatures, no pre-heating needed.
| Replacing that with resistances is a 5x or more reduction in
| efficiency. That heat pump doesn't seem to have an outside unit
| so may be less efficient but it would need to be very poor to go
| down to only 100%. Installing a proper A/C system would provide
| both much higher efficiency heating in winter but also add the
| capability to cool in summer when the solar panels are actually
| providing a lot of energy.
| Haemm0r wrote:
| "Modern A/C systems can pump heat at 500%+ efficiency even with
| very cold outside temperatures, no pre-heating needed."
|
| Name a source please.
| pedrocr wrote:
| Here's a current R32 system by Daikin:
|
| https://www.daikin.co.uk/content/dam/dauk/document-
| library/d...
|
| SCOP is at 5.15 and that's a seasonally adjusted value. So
| over the entirety of the winter the unit is expected to
| deliver 5.15 units of heat for each unit of energy. The
| unadjusted COP is 6.27. For this unit operational limits are
| listed at -15C/5F and I think there are units that go quite a
| bit lower. I haven't looked at that much as -15C is plenty
| for us. And this is with air to air. With air to ground much
| higher efficiencies are possible.
|
| For cooling it's even better, with the equivalent SEER at
| 8.75. The improvements have been so good that the efficiency
| scale is already at A+++ because the A standard has been so
| exceeded.
| Haemm0r wrote:
| If you do not have temps below 0-5degC that might be true.
| Below the freezing point efficiency drops quite a bit.
| pedrocr wrote:
| "Name a source please" :)
|
| Keeping 5x over the entire winter includes some pretty
| cold nights. And ground source systems can improve even
| this by quite a bit.
| Haemm0r wrote:
| Nicely played :)
|
| Here we go: https://industrialheatpumps.nl/en/how_it_work
| s/cop_heat_pump...
|
| or better this pic:
| https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Performance-map-of-
| the-h...
| pedrocr wrote:
| That seems to be for a 2006 Daikin model:
|
| > The heat pump model is based on linear interpolation in
| a performance map retrieved from manufacturer data
| (Daikin Europe N.V., 2006).
|
| And that model is half as good as the modern one I
| linked:
|
| > The nominal coefficient of performance (COP) is 3.17 at
| 2/35oC and 2.44 at 2/45oC test conditions (i.e. air/water
| temperature) for full load operation.
|
| And even then it gets a COP of 2 at -15C. So modern
| systems getting to at least 4 at -15C seems likely. This
| claims there are low ambient mini splits that maintain
| 100% efficiency down to -15C:
|
| https://www.ecomfort.com/stories/1341-Keeping-Your-Mini-
| Spli...
|
| That should cover most places but for really cold
| climates ground source heat pumps seem ideal. From what
| I've seen there are simple solutions where a single
| vertical hole is drilled with common well drilling
| machines and a single tube that has the loop inside is
| driven down. Makes it easier to retrofit and implement in
| small properties.
| williesleg wrote:
| And that's why there is no such thing as global warming.
| jariel wrote:
| Future humans will wonder why humanity wasted so much valuable
| time, effort and real for no reason.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't post generic flamebait to HN. It leads to
| repetitive discussion, which is not on topic here.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| dmos62 wrote:
| Do you really think Bitcoin mining/speculation is up there with
| the most wasteful and counter-productive things we do? It
| doesn't currently have much social value, but, man, there's
| much worse things. Think of US military spending. If you think
| that military has a reason to be, while speculation doesn't,
| you don't understand speculation.
| jariel wrote:
| Yes, BTC is the most wasteful.
|
| Other things we think are wasteful, are not - either they are
| for pleasure, or they are byproducts of other things, or they
| are contextually relevant (i.e. weapons/war), part of the
| systematic inconsistency but not strictly wasteful. Even
| then, there are benefits.
|
| Mining BTC using electricity is up there with the stupidest
| things we do - there are many ways to distribute new BTCs,
| handing them over to those who consume the most resources is
| a terrible idea.
|
| Given the cost of electricity and that it's a scarce
| resource, often subsidized etc. - BTC mining should probably
| be illegal unless you make your own electricity.
|
| My local government is actively trying to court BTC miners,
| with what is subsidized electricity - I can't think of a more
| directly wasteful thing to do.
| exdsq wrote:
| Bitcoin mining is still wastes half of the electricity of
| dormant (plugged in but unused) electrical devices in the US --
| it's bad but we do other things that are worse
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| Just because the house is on fire doesn't mean you let the
| shed that is on the side burn too. All you're saying is that
| there's an easy fix to save all that energy by just stopping
| mining bitcoin.
| foobar33333 wrote:
| One of these is a minuscule amount of waste over an entire
| population which is very hard to reduce. The other is a very
| small group using a very large amount of power for very
| little gain which would be easy to stop.
|
| Regardless, the solution to all is pretty simple, a carbon
| tax. If bitcoin miners want to build their own solar farm,
| let them.
| cgufus wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand the principle.
|
| A heat pump achieves a COP (coefficient of performance) of
| approx. 3-4 (e.g. by investing 1 kWh of electricity, a heat pump
| generates 3-4 kWh of heat by extracting from the surroundings,
| air or sole, 2-3 kWh). In this example, by pre-heating the air,
| you supply the heat pump with ~0.9 kWh of thermal energy (the
| miner will convert 900 watt directly to heat I would assume). So
| instead of 1 kWh of electricity consumption from the heatpump,
| you have 1 kWh of electricity for the heat pump, plus 0.9 kWh for
| the mining, and you end up with a bit more than 3-4 kWh (since
| the COP of a heat pump increases if the source temperature is
| higher).
|
| So in a nuthsell: before: in 1 kWh, out 3-4 kWh after: in 1.9
| kWh, out 3.5 - 4.5 kWh
|
| so you lose 0.4 kWh?
| bdcs wrote:
| IIRC my thermodynamics classes correctly, the heater would be
| optimally placed on the hot effluent out of the heat exchanger
| (HE) going into the house. This is because the COP is improved
| (similarly to heating the cold side) because the hot side of
| the HE doesn't need to be as hot to get to the same T, but also
| the HE doesn't need to move the heat through it, increasing
| efficiency. (COP decreases with increasing heat flux [Q] in
| practice.) For well-mixed air in a house (a poor assumption),
| this is the same as throwing the miners in a closet. I would
| suggest to the author to move the miners to the hot side the HE
| going into the house's rooms. Simulation or measurements (over
| the course of a week, not just instantaneous measurements)
| would be helpful here .
|
| If I were a HVAC company with WiFi thermostats, I would look
| into including miners in heating solutions.
| shoo_pl wrote:
| On principle, yes. There are quirks - the COP is different for
| lower temperatures, and becomes 1:1 at around 5F (-15C). So
| preheating the air could improve the effectiveness at low
| temperatures, and I am guessing it might look like this:
|
| - before: 1kWh in, 1kWh out - after: 1.9kWh in, > 1.9kWh out
|
| However, if it was that simple, I suppose heat pump
| manufactures would include a pre-heating as built-in feature.
|
| It's very likely that he reduced the energy consumption of heat
| pump by 50%, but at the same time he uses more than those 50%
| for mining and has a negative total result that is being offset
| by the profit from mining itself. Which probably nice for him,
| but not really for environment :)
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _There are quirks - the COP is different for lower
| temperatures, and becomes 1:1 at around 5F (-15C)._
|
| It depends on the unit. Some (Mitsubishi FE12NA) have a COP
| of 1.75 even at -10F / -20C. See Table 6:
|
| * https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy11osti/52175.pdf
| illustriousbear wrote:
| The thing I find funny about HackerNews is how you see plenty of
| wasteful hobby projects hit the main page.
|
| Yet someone using a crypto miner to generate heat / side money is
| somehow a terrible project.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| It's almost like there are different scales of waste and
| contributing to a system that burns about as much energy as
| Argentina to secure a paltry number of transactions is on the
| higher end of that.
| [deleted]
| timdaub wrote:
| > terrible project
|
| I think that's a terrible comment. I salute everyone that tries
| to make the incredible inefficient third law of thermodynamics
| more efficient.
|
| Sure, you can say that crypto mining is superfluid. But so is
| all human invented technology to a degree. I rather have
| someone building a cool heating system than enormous data
| centers wasting it.
| jcpham2 wrote:
| Takes me back to 2012 and the 600$ power bills
| simon_000666 wrote:
| How about just building a simple compost heap under the heatpump
| and using the hot air generated by that to ease the energy needs?
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| Added feature is the smell and rats.
| pstrateman wrote:
| This makes sense unless you have the option of natural gas
| heating, then not so much.
| shawnz wrote:
| You could run a gas generator to power the miners and all of
| the waste heat could still heat your home.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| How so? He says "on sunny days the miner and whole heat pump
| are running fully on solar energy collected on my roof", hard
| to beat that with gas. I would say that moving more houses to
| all-electric heating, water heaters, clothes dryers etc. is
| future proofing - right now, a lot of that energy would be from
| fossil fuels, but swapping in renewables is easy.
| rblatz wrote:
| Most electric heaters are heat pumps which are significantly
| more efficient than heating via resistive or mining.
|
| In fact a heat pump's efficiency is about 300%.
| Aachen wrote:
| Just to be sure, you're not talking of those EUR20-50
| electric heaters right? Because you say "most" and afaik
| those are pretty much the only ones people have unless
| they're in some fancy new building or have a fancy AC and
| paid extra for that option.
| oconnore wrote:
| Natural gas heating contributes significantly to climate
| change, and if you're in an area with significant renewable
| electric (or if you expect you will eventually over the
| lifetime of your system), you can lower your carbon footprint
| by heating with electric heat pumps.
| idlewords wrote:
| I heat my home by shorting crypto futures. Together we have
| created a true _perpetuum mobile_.
| coold wrote:
| I hope he uses a large air filter before GPUs.
| geek_at wrote:
| even pollen filters since I'm allergic to everything outside
| noxer wrote:
| Someone clearly doesn't understand thermodynamics at all if he
| seriously thinks putting that thing outside and let the warm air
| be sucked in, is more efficient that running it inside. for
| obviously reasons (isolation loses/heat radiation) more energy
| (heat) is lost outside than inside (inside has zero loses because
| even the heat that doesn't go where you want it, still is inside
| the house.)
| dang wrote:
| Ok, but can you please post to HN without supercilious disses?
| The information here is good but we don't want a culture of
| putdowns here.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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