Getting a return on investment from your heater through crypto mining.

I come from the land down under. We are known for our beaches, and our warm summers. Loved (or hated) for our drunken behavior around the world. It is winter time here, and while not as cold as say Canada, you'd think that our beach going populace were about to lose limbs to frostbite.

Yet, the lowest temperature for my city is forecast to be a mere four degrees science. That's Celsius, for those in Imperial lands, that's about 40 Fahrenheit. It is hard to get out of bed in the morning without central heating. My partner, she feels the cold much more keenly than I. She brought a tiny fan heater, a little 2000W unit to warm up the room before braving the cold new dawn each day this week.

(Image sourced from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology)

I don't know how much it cost. I know how how it will cost, in its raw power consumption. It will inefficiently convert electricity to heat. That's how a heater works. It made me remember the days when I used to mine crypto currency. Winters were never cold in the mining room. The R9 270x put out 200 watts of heat and a modest amount of scrypt based currency, and the various USB ASICS I had churned out bitcoin until it become more profitable to mine alt coins on the ASICS as the difficulty of bitcoin increased.

My old ButterflyLabs Miner, some usb ASICS and the R9 270x cranking away.

I was thinking this morning, why not use all this old mining equipment to make a heater? The power comes in, generates heat, and also mines currency. Instead of paying a packet of money to run a heater to cut the chill from the air, I can, in words repeated around the Internet everywhere "WHY NOT BOTH?"

Then I thought about the market in the future. Imagine a day when current gen Radeon graphics cards are $20 each. That new asrock motherboard with 13 pci-e slots. Combine this with a metal fin heater type arrangement, put an IOT router in it, linux, and sell the heater very cheaply to those who want a heater. Start your own vigilante mining farm. Or, do good, and let the owners of these 'heaters' get a little return on their power bill, and stay warm in the winter.

The engineering would be simple, but the biggest challenge would be the same as that of building a regular heater, making sure it didn't burn the house down. This idea has probably been thought of before, but if you were to combine it with winter solar panel power, and enough battery storage, you could maybe break even on your heating. If you didn't break even, it would be a hell of a lot of fun to build, and market, I'm sure. At least you'd be warm! :)