[webignition]

I live in a house house exclusively warmed by electric heating (underfloor downstairs, wall-mounted upstairs). The heating system takes electricity as an input and provides heat as an output with no other direct benefits. As a whole the heating system can be quite power-hungry during cold periods.

A crypto mining rig takes electricity as an input and provides heat as an output with the possible benefit of creating some valuable digital assets. Serious crypto mining setups can be quite power-hungry.

Crypto mining for the sole purpose of making money is often considered an egregious and possibly wasteful use of power resources.

Is crypto mining for the purpose of using the heat to warm my house, with the possible benefit of generating valuable digital assets, similarly egregious, wasteful or inconsiderate in some way?

[fifilura]

Heating your house with direct electricity is wasteful.

You should get a heat pump. You will get your money back in no time.

This changes the equation.

[GaryNumanVevo]

Seriously, I want to know where OP lives, having an all electric heating setup anywhere in the world where it gets cold enough is incredibly inefficient

[webignition]

I'm in the UK, a small town in Wiltshire.

The town I live in is bisected by a MOD railway and, from what I understand, permission was never granted for whatever was needed to supply natural gas on my side of the tracks. This rules out some of the more common traditional heating systems found in these parts.

We bought the house ~two years ago. The building itself was (and still is) quite sound but was a wreck in terms of features (no heating system at all, no flooring at all, and in terms of a kitchen and bathroom facilities it was quite ... minimal).

My partner had long hoped for underfloor heating downstairs as she loves the feel of walking on warm flooring. I have to agree that it is a delightful luxury and we don't otherwise have too many vices.

Direct electric underfloor heating felt like the least hassle in the long term and the easiest for self-installation. The alternative was a wet underfloor heating system (water filled pipework set in screed). The wet system is capable of leaking and eventually failing with expensive repairs, the electric system less so.

We use infrared wall-mounted heaters upstairs. As far as direct electric heaters go they're quite efficient. They heat the objects in the room rather than the air and it feels like the warmth of the sun on your skin.

I agree wholeheartedly that heat pumps are a more efficient option and could indeed be used as a direct replacement for our upstairs wall-mounted heaters. This is something we hope to put in but was not previously affordable when we were re-working the entire of the inside of the house from nothing.

As far as I understand, we would need a wet system for underfloor heating if we were to utilise heat pumps and at this stage that would be a prohibitively expensive re-work of what we already have.

Hopefully roof-mounted solar and a battery of some sort should even out the costs a bit.

[fifilura]

Thank you for answering!

Yeah there are lots of reasons to not get a heat pump, floor heating is one of them.

And your gp post was not unreasonable, and food for discussion.

But what part for your setup would you replace with GPU heating?

[webignition]

For my setup, absolutely none of it! Wholly incompatible with what I have.

My original question was purely hypothetical and not a practical consideration for me or, probably, anyone else.

[ef3w3wfdw]

> I'm in the UK

I knew it!

[ef3w3wfdw]

Maybe the UK? (their housing standards and heating solutions are some of the worst I've ever seen in the developed world)

[wkjagt]

Most Canadian houses (at least around where I live) are like this. And it often gets to around minus 20 Celsius here.

[_whiteCaps_]

Interesting. In my suburb of Vancouver, pretty much everyone is natural gas furnace, although people seem to be replacing them with heat pumps.

[wkjagt]

I’m in Montreal area and I don’t know anyone with natural gas.

[JumpCrisscross]

> want to know where OP lives, having an all electric heating setup anywhere in the world where it gets cold enough is incredibly inefficient

I'm in Wyoming. My heat is direct electric. The house doesn't have ducting and Wyoming power is cheap.

[webignition]

A bit of a tangent, but do you mind saying what you pay per kWh?

I'm currently on £0.36 GBP per kWh (about $0.45).

Just wondering what counts as cheap!

[wscott]

https://www.globalenergyinstitute.org/average-electricity-re... us average: $0.18 Wyoming: < $0.09

yeah, cheap. But cold so a heat pump would still totally pay for itself.

[kasey_junk]

Fwiw the estimate for IL seems high to me. I spend about 7c delivered in Chicago.

Tons of nuclear supply keeps costs down around the Great Lakes. Perhaps downstate is raising the average.

[_whiteCaps_]

In British Columbia:

9.75 cents per kWh for first 1,350 in an average two month billing period (22.1918 kWh per day).

14.08 cents per kWh over the 1,350 Step 1 threshold.

[JumpCrisscross]

> do you mind saying what you pay per kWh?

5.604¢ for my last bill. (About 6¢ after taxes.)

[tdeck]

It's pretty common in the Pacific Northwest. Heat pumps are unreasonably expensive here in the US so they're still fairly uncommon and the PNW has abundant, relatively cheap hydro power.

[GaryNumanVevo]

Hydropower make sense, it's very very cheap

[kraftman]

I'm not OP but I live in france and all our heaters are electric. I'm renting so I don't have a choice other than to use our wood fire.

[mrguyorama]

It's been tried and it doesn't work because hardware designed for crypto mining needs to be utilized 100% 24/7 or it won't ever pay back or be meaningful, and it that case you either size it to be such a small heat contribution that you don't mind a small heater on during the hot months, or so big that it is impossible to offset in the summer.

Nevermind the fact that resistive electric heat in this day and age is wildly stupid except for maybe the northernmost parts of Siberia. Why pay X to get A heat plus almost no bitcoin, when you could pay X to get 3A heat using a heat pump?

[Liftyee]

I've always wondered about this. I think, if the cost is no issue, replacing electric heaters with powerful computers (or crypto miners) is justified and actually beneficial. If you don't like supporting the crypto world you can always run Folding@home or your favourite distributed computing project to contribute to research and heat your home, all with the same amount of electricity.

Of course, buying heat pumps probably has higher ROI than buying crypto miners for heating...

[o39245o9qw34u5]

I will admit that is an interesting argument, but it doesn't hold up when applied in the real world.

First off, heating your house directly with electricity is a bad idea. A heat pump could be as much as 4x as efficient as direct heating. Improving the insulation in your house so you don't need as much heating is even better.

After those problems are solved I started to say "If you want to then do the remaining 1/10-as-much-as-before heating by mining bitcoin, then go ahead", but honestly that's still a bad idea because it supports and grows this insanely wasteful industry and that will incentivize other people to build more of these ridiculously wasteful and destructive mining operations.

The nerd part of me thinks bitcoin is super cool. The responsible adult who cares about people other than myself part of me hates it.

[tdeck]

This is actually a product: https://heatbit.com/

[itscrush]

Likely wasteful when you can overcome efficiency with heat pumps instead of GPU.