It is easy to forget, but innovation in Bitcoin is not purely digital.
Most see our “magic internet money” as something purely esoteric, but there is one aspect of our ecosystem that squarely straddles the line between the digital and the physical: bitcoin mining. To the layperson, bitcoin mining is an alien phenomenon — you buy a strange looking metal box, put it in a warehouse somewhere and consume significant amounts of electricity. However, to tinkerers, hobbyists, entrepreneurs and adjacent industry professionals (in the farming, real estate and oil and gas sectors, for instance), bitcoin mining is an opportunity to add efficiency and margin to highly-competitive spaces while recapturing costs and waste.
In that spirit, what follows is a simple framework for using bitcoin mining to add warmth to a residential home, keeping in mind that the concerns of a warehouse or a hash hut are different from those of a home. Where you would try to squeeze every terahash from a machine in a hosting facility, our concerns in a house revolve around safety, sound, convenience and cost recapture in residential heating.
A Simple Framework
We are going to integrate bitcoin miner heat output (a Bitmain S9, in this case) into our HVAC air return. The general thought is that it will accomplish two things: One, it will constantly “drip” heat into our HVAC system, which should, in theory, constantly push a low volume of warm air into the house without spinning up the HVAC system, and two, when the heating system and HVAC fans spin up, our miner should supplement the heat production of our heating system, requiring less energy use (gas in our case).
Of course, a home miner can use a new-generation machine for the same purposes I’m detailing above, but for the sake of accessibility
