Is cryptomining the smart way for Europe to warm their homes this winter?

[Yoinkerman]

I didn't read the thread but if you live in an apartment or similar multi unit dwelling with halfway decent insulation you can totally do it.

 

Is it smart?  I wouldn't buy new cards to do to it since payouts aren't great and stand to get worse with eth 2.0, but if you have some gaming card(s) already and are using electric heat, it's no worse.

 

Source: I heated my townhome 2 winters in northern BC with mining cards in 2017 and 2018 

[Montana One-Six]

It will definitely work. I used to heat my room in University with my PC, which worked fairly well. But don't expect to be able to run a round in t-shirt and shorts doing that. Apart from that it generally is not a good idea to solely rely on electricity for heating, especially if there are expected to be blackouts. A mix of various heating sources (electricity, gas, wood,...) would be ideal to minimize the chances of having a cold home this winter. Plus don't heat your home to 25°C when 18-20°C would suffice with the right clothing.

 

17 hours ago, 8tg said:

but places like Germany, France, other meme nations inferior to America, it barely touches freezing there.

Barley touches freezing? Good one. Central Europe usually has snow and temperatures below 0°C every winter. With extremes especially at night reaching -15 to -20°C. Sure depending on region that may vary but saying it doesn't get below freezing is just straight up wrong. I mean a few years back the river in a German city I used to live in was completely frozen over and you could walk on it no problem.

[Needfuldoer]

16 minutes ago, Montana One-Six said:

Barley touches freezing? Good one. Central Europe usually has snow and temperatures below 0°C every winter. With extremes especially at night reaching -15 to -20°C. Sure depending on region that may vary but saying it doesn't get below freezing is just straight up wrong. I mean a few years back the river in a German city I used to live in was completely frozen over and you could walk on it no problem.

Sounds like last winter in my neck of the woods. (Highs in the 20s F, lows just below zero F.) My heat pump was working hard, but still well within its rating. It could’ve still run at 100% capacity if it dropped another 10 degrees F from that low.

[Heliian]

On 8/21/2022 at 7:04 AM, Kilrah said:

PC's consumption is 100% converted to heat

 

On 8/21/2022 at 7:04 AM, Wh0_Am_1 said:

Quite literally 99%+ of the power that a PC uses in one way or another released as heat,

 

It's not 100% efficient.   Yes,  they output waste heat but it's not efficient heating. 

 

Especially since enough computer hardware to heat your house would sound terrible. Not to mention capital and maintenance costs of non traditional heat sources.   

 

Also crypto scams are becoming more worthless by the day.   

[Spindel]

On 8/21/2022 at 1:53 PM, Needfuldoer said:

No. Resistive electric heating is one of the most energy intensive, least economical ways to heat a space. 

 

Going to need a citation on that one. 

 

I'm in New England and my Mitsubishi H2i system hasn't missed a beat. It replaced electric baseboards, and my winter power bill dropped by more than half while keeping my place noticeably warmer. Even when it was below zero (Fahrenheit) and working hard, it still had a coefficient of performance of around 2.5. (Basically meaning it was running at 250% the efficiency of resistive electric heat.)

 

As I understand it, heat pumps have been common in Europe for years but are only just taking off in 'Murica.

 

EDIT: There's still a lot of hearsay FUD around heat pumps because the ones they had in the 70s weren't great. (Apparently technology can't improve over the course of 50 years?)

Heat pumps are really common here in Sweden with heat pumps both air/air, air/water or ground source (water/water) coupled with a bore hole (average single family home needs a 150-200 m bore hole). 

 

[OrdinaryPhil]

20 hours ago, 8tg said:

Anyone who thinks the solution to anything is crypto mining should be gently placed somewhere in the middle of the ocean.

 

My solution to Europe being cold is to just suck it up nerds, what’s the coldest it even gets in Central Europe?  I can maybe understand Northern Europe since it can regularly drop below freezing there but places like Germany, France, other meme nations inferior to America, it barely touches freezing there. Just put a hat on.

What?

... While this did make me laugh it really just shows what a joke our education system is. Our tax dollars at work teaching people about geography.

 

Europe is colder on average than the US... the central longitude of Europe lines up with the USA-Canada border.

 

[tkitch]

On 8/21/2022 at 8:46 AM, fUnDaMeNtAl_knobhead said:

My brain has literally 1 brain cell or even none if my theory of me being a knob is correct but isnt heat generated by pc componets a product of inefficencies? SO the leftover energy gets converted into heat? I may be wrong but if a pcs consumpiiton is 100 percent converted into heat i dont get why laptops over the last 5 years have gotten slimmer (but again im a knob)

 

Pls validate me i have a huge ego for a knob

laptops have gotten thinner because that's what consumers want.

Laptop CPUs are also much lower-powered than desktops to help with that, but there's a reason it's very common for laptops to thermal throttle when hitting them with a heavy load:  Their coolers can't keep up, so the CPU downclocks to prevent hardware from dying.  

[tkitch]

3 hours ago, Heliian said:

It's not 100% efficient.   Yes,  they output waste heat but it's not efficient heating. 

 

Especially since enough computer hardware to heat your house would sound terrible. Not to mention capital and maintenance costs of non traditional heat sources.   

 

Also crypto scams are becoming more worthless by the day.   

Here's the thing:
If your 1000W PC is running full tilt...  990W of that (give or take) is being exhausted as heat.

 

It doesn't feel like a space heater because it's not being directed straight at you like a space heater would be, but it's absolutely spitting out just as much heat as a 1000W heater.

 

It doesn't normally work that way, because computers are generally idle and outputting  a tiny fraction of their possible heat load.  But if you're mining, and it's running at 80% draw?  That can be 300W or more per GPU if you've got the $ to get them.  And yeah, they'd do just fine as a heater.  

[OrdinaryPhil]

Does it really matter how efficient the PC is? Heat is a by-product of the current, regardless of what % was lost as excess or what was spent directly perform a compute task.

[Rauten]

I use my gaming PC as a heater during winter.

Close the door to the hall, play a demanding game and let'er rip.

 

I suppose crypto mining would be better than a normal heater, because at least that way you can sell whatever bits and pieces of crypto you've mined.

Not great, specially with the huge crash, but I guess you could at least make back part of the power bill.

 

Personally I'll stick to gaming.

[Montana One-Six]

21 hours ago, OrdinaryPhil said:

What?

Yes he definitely has no idea what he is talking about.

 

21 hours ago, OrdinaryPhil said:

Europe is colder on average than the US... the central longitude of Europe lines up with the USA-Canada border.

Yes in terms of averages but most northern US states still get colder weather in winter than most of Europe.

The reason for that is location on earth is not the only factor that determines climate. The US generally has a more continental climate. While Europe on the other hand has a more oceanic climate especially western Europe. Continental climates generally have higher highs and lower lows than oceanic climates which is why the US usually gets colder in Winter despite it being closer to the equator. Another factor that keeps Europe relatively warm in winter for its location on earth is the gulf stream. Which unfortunately is slowly dying so the winters in Europe are going to be much colder than they used to be in the future.

 

 

[Isuck Assimov]

You're probably better off heating with candles or a dumpster fire (careful with the carbon monoxide)

[fUnDaMeNtAl_knobhead]

On 8/23/2022 at 1:34 AM, tkitch said:

laptops have gotten thinner because that's what consumers want.

Laptop CPUs are also much lower-powered than desktops to help with that, but there's a reason it's very common for laptops to thermal throttle when hitting them with a heavy load:  Their coolers can't keep up, so the CPU downclocks to prevent hardware from dying.  

yeah i thought i was wrong 

[tkitch]

9 hours ago, Assimov said:

You're probably better off heating with candles or a dumpster fire (careful with the carbon monoxide)

why?

[Needfuldoer]

33 minutes ago, tkitch said:

why?

Because carbon monoxide is a colorless, odorless gas that your hemoglobin likes better than oxygen.

 

Oh, you mean from a thermodynamics standpoint? Resistive electric heating (space heaters and GPUs) is 100% as efficient as electric generation in your area. Accounting for transmission losses, that's usually only around 40% efficient. Burning fuel on-site in even a clunky old appliance can almost double that, and modern condensing furnaces can capture around 95% of the heat energy in a combustible fuel. 

 

Burning that fuel in a 40% efficient power plant and using it to run a run-of-the-mill heat pump with a coefficient of performance of 2.5 is back to 100% efficient, beating the best condensing furnaces. If the CoP goes up further from there, it's effectively giving you more useful heat than the fuel itself contains. (Remember, a heat pump is just a slightly modified air conditioner. The only work it's doing is compressing a gas.)

[matthew-bairstow]

i am in Scotland and the price of electricity is so high it is cheaper to get a heater 

 

[RoseLuck462]

Well I’ve heated my apartment before with just a 5 GPU rig so I know it can work.

 

It’s not as fast as using a gas furnance though. 

[An0maly_76]

On 8/21/2022 at 7:04 AM, Kilrah said:

A PC's consumption is 100% converted to heat, just like a space heater. 

Space heater might be more powerful, sure, but you can just add more PCs if that's what you need.

1000W PSU with three or four GPUs isn't likely to be as efficient as a 500W space heater though.

Edited August 25, 2022 by An0maly_76
Revised

[Kilrah]

5 hours ago, An0maly_76 said:

1000W PSU with three or four GPUs isn't likely to be as efficient as a 500W space heater though.

It's going to be exactly as efficient and if fully loaded twice as powerful...

[An0maly_76]

1 minute ago, Kilrah said:

It's going to be exactly as efficient and if fully loaded twice as powerful...

Interesting. Any data validating this? Not a challenge, I'm just curious to see real numbers. The question is, with bitcoin in the toilet recently, does it really help with the electric bill?

[Kilrah]

7 minutes ago, An0maly_76 said:

Interesting. Any data validating this?

Basic thermodynamics, since a computer produces no energy other than heat it's 100% efficient at producing heat, any energy taken from the plug ends up as heat.

 

8 minutes ago, An0maly_76 said:

The question is, with bitcoin in the toilet recently, does it really help with the electric bill?

Something regardless of how low is always going to be better than nothing. Wouldn't be worth buying hardware for nowadays but if you already have it...

[venomtail]

On 8/21/2022 at 12:20 PM, LWM723 said:

Well, when it's -30 I'll be nice and warm with my heater and you'll be freezing you ass off with your pc.

I wouldn't trust any heater at -30. Maybe a Gas boiler but pretty much a wood furnace only.