Siberians Are Using Bitcoin Mining to Heat Homes in the Winter

Megalith

Megalith

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Two entrepreneurs have figured out how to heat their homes for free: bitcoin mining. Bitcoin transactions require a lot of processing power, which creates a lot of heat, so Ilya Frolov and Dmitry Tolmachyov built a wooden cottage in the Russian Siberian town of Irkutsk and are heating it with two bitcoin mines. The men pocket about $430 a month from bitcoin transactions, while keeping the 20-square-meter space warm.
 
Great solution if you want to live in a 215 sq ft hut along side high power computing hardware you can't use while surrounded by a desolate tundra.
 
Powerage said:
Great solution if you want to live in a 215 sq ft hut along side high power computing hardware you can't use while surrounded by a desolate tundra.
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Is there fast internet? This would pretty much be my only worry.
 
Also my DC isn't fully heating my apartment so it looks like its time to buy a new computer maybe.
 
My gaming computer does a decent job of warming my room in the winter time, however I still need to occasionally use a heater if I am not gaming on it.
 
What about the noise? I have two servers in my basement - one runs a bunch of VMs, the other is pfSense (which I should virtualize...). They are pretty loud. I can hear them on the second floor of my house if I listen for them. I don't spend much time near them - loud ass fans.
When i was younger, I had a few computers in my bedroom. I thought they were plenty loud. Probably a 486dx2 66 and maybe a P90 if I remember right. One had an annoying LED that I eventually put black tape over - the dame thing was like a laser beam to the eyeball if you looked at it the wrong way.
 
If their only choice for heat is an electric heater, then this would make sense.

Wouldn't make sense here in Southern California, since the electricity rates are so high, and it's much cheaper to heat with natural gas.
 
nutzo said:
If their only choice for heat is an electric heater, then this would make sense.

Wouldn't make sense here in Southern California, since the electricity rates are so high, and it's much cheaper to heat with natural gas.
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Here in N. Texas - I have both electric and natural gas in my house. Gas is generally cheaper BUT there are conditions like BTC mining when it's not. , problem is the gas company is fucking themselves out of customers with their high "base" rates. Only things I have in my house that are gas currently are the water heater and gas starting fire place. Even in the summer when I almost use zero natural gas, my bill is still 20+ dollars.

On the other side of the coin, I have a 3 year contract for 7 cents per kWh *delivered* from a 100% renewable source... currently have 19 GPU's mining away in my 1600 square foot house. And they do a fantastic job of keeping things warm while generating money. I've looked into going 100% all gas and 100% all electric and unless an appliance breaks, it's just worth it to keep on truckin' as it is.

Summer time sucks though as you can imagine :-p
 
At this point for what it costs me to heat using sealed oil heaters, it would take me years of mining to offset the massive cost to purchase a mining rig.
 
collegeboy69us said:
Here in N. Texas - I have both electric and natural gas in my house. Gas is generally cheaper BUT there are conditions like BTC mining when it's not. , problem is the gas company is fucking themselves out of customers with their high "base" rates. Only things I have in my house that are gas currently are the water heater and gas starting fire place. Even in the summer when I almost use zero natural gas, my bill is still 20+ dollars.

On the other side of the coin, I have a 3 year contract for 7 cents per kWh *delivered* from a 100% renewable source... currently have 19 GPU's mining away in my 1600 square foot house. And they do a fantastic job of keeping things warm while generating money. I've looked into going 100% all gas and 100% all electric and unless an appliance breaks, it's just worth it to keep on truckin' as it is.
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My summer/fall gas bills are $17/month which is a huge bargain when compared to my normal $100+ electric bills.
After a $300 electric bill 2 years ago, I replaced my 40 year old central air.
I had been nursing it along the last few years and it was only a mater of time before it died, and with all the newer regulations it would have been impossible to fix if anything major went out. Decided it made more sense to replace it off season when I could work a deal. Highest bill this year was $200, and that was due to the worse heat wave (100+) in several years.

I pay a tiered electric rate that tops out at 31 cents/kwh. I usually manage to stay in tier 2 which is only 25 cents/kwh (more than 3 times your rate)
So, gas is cheap by comparison.
 
nutzo said:
My summer/fall gas bills are $17/month which is a huge bargain when compared to my normal $100+ electric bills.
After a $300 electric bill 2 years ago, I replaced my 40 year old central air.
I had been nursing it along the last few years and it was only a mater of time before it died, and with all the newer regulations it would have been impossible to fix if anything major went out. Decided it made more sense to replace it off season when I could work a deal. Highest bill this year was $200, and that was due to the worse heat wave (100+) in several years.

I pay a tiered electric rate that tops out at 31 cents/kwh. I usually manage to stay in tier 2 which is only 25 cents/kwh (more than 3 times your rate)
So, gas is cheap by comparison.
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whoa, yeah at those electric rates gas makes total sense. My central AC is pretty old (came with the house I bought several years ago) and it needs to be replaced for sure as it sucks down quite a bit of juice but has trouble keeping up with Texas summer. Only thing that's allowed me to skate by the last few years is the dirt cheap electric rates. The great part is with the money I'm making mining, it means I'll be able to essentially replace the whole system for "free" if I put my profits into it.

Last time I did a general profitability test for cost of electricity vs mining, right about 25 cents is the cut off point for profitability. Last month I used about 3,000 kWh and my bill was right around $250, high for anyone, but that's with 95F days and altcoin mining on top of it. I'm looking forward to winter time personally as I won't need AC (and since our winters are mild, won't neat central heat either) since the rigs are distributed around the house.
 
Wow you guys pay 7 cents a kWh. I'm at 12 cents and my usage is at 11.374 kWh a month give or take. I'll admit it. I went nuts with the hardware as of late :D
 
collegeboy69us said:
Last time I did a general profitability test for cost of electricity vs mining, right about 25 cents is the cut off point for profitability. Last month I used about 3,000 kWh and my bill was right around $250, high for anyone, but that's with 95F days and altcoin mining on top of it. I'm looking forward to winter time personally as I won't need AC (and since our winters are mild, won't neat central heat either) since the rigs are distributed around the house.
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I splurged a little on an efficient dual speed unit & then redid some of the duct work myself to get more cool air upstairs.
It runs at the lower, more efficient speed most the time (like having a 3.5 ton unit).
It only runs at full speed on really hot days or when we turn it on after being gone most the day and it's over 80 in the house.

Our September was pretty hot this year, and we used 782 kwh for a bill of $167.
With my old system it would have been probably been over $300, and the house wouldn't have cooled nearly as good/even.
 
Ok they are heating... the size of two small bedrooms.

Using electric heat isn’t news of any sort. Not even using computers to heat a room (the distributed mining water heater was similar and interesting article). I’ve used F@H and SETI to heat my bedroom for years now.

It mentions something about pocketing $400+ a month - I don’t mine, but with bitcoin, I thought you pretty much had to run ASICS to be anywhere near electric efficient and turn a profit, and $400+ I imagine would take a good bit of hardware (and power) as it’s been around for a while and the difficulty has cranked. It also doesn’t make clear if that money is before or after expenses of electric and hardware and such.

I could see DC in general become a dual-purpose creation: computation plus waste heat put to something useful (industry has been doing this for a long time with heavy equipment - combined cycle and co-generation).
 
steakman1971 said:
What about the noise? I have two servers in my basement - one runs a bunch of VMs, the other is pfSense (which I should virtualize...). They are pretty loud. I can hear them on the second floor of my house if I listen for them. I don't spend much time near them - loud ass fans.
When i was younger, I had a few computers in my bedroom. I thought they were plenty loud. Probably a 486dx2 66 and maybe a P90 if I remember right. One had an annoying LED that I eventually put black tape over - the dame thing was like a laser beam to the eyeball if you looked at it the wrong way.
Click to expand...

I was thinking the same thing. It would be wise to put the mining machines in a separate room, and then circulate the air to move the heat around. Not sure how efficient that would be though.
 
steakman1971 said:
What about the noise? I have two servers in my basement - one runs a bunch of VMs, the other is pfSense (which I should virtualize...). They are pretty loud. I can hear them on the second floor of my house if I listen for them. I don't spend much time near them - loud ass fans.
When i was younger, I had a few computers in my bedroom. I thought they were plenty loud. Probably a 486dx2 66 and maybe a P90 if I remember right. One had an annoying LED that I eventually put black tape over - the dame thing was like a laser beam to the eyeball if you looked at it the wrong way.
Click to expand...

You can quiet those servers very easily. I have 2 servers running 24/7 and rackmount networking equipment all in my basement. With the application of several quiet 120mm fans and larger HSF for the server CPU's = happy low noise environment. Surprisingly Rosewill (yes really) makes a decent quiet inexpensive case, slap some low noise high CFM fans in there and Bob's your uncle.

Computers don't have to be noisy to be effective or powerful.
 
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Here in michigan the temps have been around 40F lately. I have not turned on my heat yet, house hoovers around 69-71F thats with 7 1080s, 3 cpus mining on nicehash. My last electric bill was $262 but we also have an electric car.
 
nutzo said:
I pay a tiered electric rate that tops out at 31 cents/kwh. I usually manage to stay in tier 2 which is only 25 cents/kwh (more than 3 times your rate)
So, gas is cheap by comparison.
Click to expand...

Imhotep said:
Wow you guys pay 7 cents a kWh. I'm at 12 cents and my usage is at 11.374 kWh a month give or take. I'll admit it. I went nuts with the hardware as of late :D
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You guys are pretty damn lucky.

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We have a fucking celebration if we get a power bill that is only 3-digits.

I used to run SETI@home on my computers but stopped because of the power.
 
Domingow said:
You can quiet those servers very easily. I have 2 servers running 24/7 and rackmount networking equipment all in my basement. With the application of several quiet 120mm fans and larger HSF for the server CPU's = happy low noise environment. Surprisingly Rosewill (yes really) makes a decent quiet inexpensive case, slap some low noise high CFM fans in there and Bob's your uncle.

Computers don't have to be noisy to be effective or powerful.
Click to expand...
Good point. I've looked at a Rosewill case before - it looks nice and is fairly cheap. Might be a winter project - the one server I have is stupid loud (and it just runs pfSense - don't need a 2 Xeon's and 32 GB ECC ram for that :) )
 
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^^
Only thing to keep in mind is not all enthusiast HSF's will work on server MOBO's. Buy from Amazon as they have a very liberal return policy. I had to return several before I found 2 that worked, some of the mounting brackets were just a tad to big and were hitting caps around the sockets.
 
GotNoRice said:
You guys are pretty damn lucky.

pgenolube.jpg


rank100.jpg


We have a fucking celebration if we get a power bill that is only 3-digits.

I used to run SETI@home on my computers but stopped because of the power.
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Just wait, PG&E is going to transition from 5 tiers to 3, and then to 2 tiers. Basically "normal" usage and "high usage" ... better get ready for a change of lifestyle.

Although I will say I always hated the way tiers worked just on a personal level of "baseline" quantities. I'm sorry for you people that absolutely NEED air conditioning, I decided to live in a more climate friendly area but I get penalized if I want a little extra comfort in my house, whether it's an air conditioning unit or a big screen tv (or in my case a few hundred gallons of salt water kept at 80°F with more light over it than what naturally occurs here :D ). That said my first tier maxes out at about 210kWh, but I have solar panels that really offsets that a ton.
 
Imhotep said:
Wow you guys pay 7 cents a kWh. I'm at 12 cents and my usage is at 11.374 kWh a month give or take. I'll admit it. I went nuts with the hardware as of late :D
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about 8.6 cents per kWh here in Vancouver..
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so about 260kWh total per month here, except for July/August when we need the AC at night... no mining rig here, 650 sqft apartment !
 
We're at $0.113/KWh in Parker, a suburb of Denver, under IREA, but most of the Denver area is under Xcel Energy, which shows a rate of $0.15/KWh, and then they have a tiered system which doubles the rate if it goes above a certain usage level, but then they have this "electrical commodity adjustment" that more than doubles the bill in most areas. The last year I lived in SE Denver, it was 60% of my bill, and even without using my AC, just one person, a computer that got used about 14-16 hours per week, and no TV, I still managed to hit the rate doubling usage level. My electricity bills were in the $300-400 range per month in the summer and $250/month in the winter. After moving to Parker, and running my AC constantly and my computer on all the time, my bills still stay down in the $130-160 range.

Xcel Energy is a total ripoff, and a government enforced monopoly. It is literally illegal to cut your home off from the electrical grid and run it off home generators. It would be cheaper, and probably more efficient, to run generators with propane or natural gas, but the state has made that illegal to even try.
 
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I have my mining rig in the same room as my hybrid water heater. The water heater uses a heat pump to pull the heat out of the air. So, basically my mint heats up my water indirectly through airflow.
 
GotNoRice said:
You guys are pretty damn lucky.

pgenolube.jpg


rank100.jpg


We have a fucking celebration if we get a power bill that is only 3-digits.

I used to run SETI@home on my computers but stopped because of the power.
Click to expand...


Ouch. PGE, even worse than SCE.
If I decide to move futher south when I retire, I might have to invest in solar panels.
 
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