Home Heating With Bitcoin Miners Is Now A Real Thing

If you were reading this post a month ago, you could have been forgiven for thinking it was an April Fools post. But we assure you, this is no joke. A company called HeatBit has recently opened preorders for their second generation of Bitcoin miner that doubles as a space heater.

The logic goes something like this: if you’re going to be using an electric space heater anyway, which essentially generates heat by wasting a bunch of energy with a resistive element, why not replace that element with a Bitcoin miner instead? Or at least, some of the element. The specs listed for the HeatBit Mini note that the miner itself only consumes 300 watts, which is only responsible for a fraction of the device’s total heat output. Most of the thermal work is actually done by a traditional 1000 watt heater built inside the 46 cm (18 inch) tall cylindrical device.

This new Mini version appears vastly different from the original HeatBit, a towering machine that combined outdated application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) miners with a turbine-style fan to produce heat. In doing a bit of research on the older model it seems like results were very much mixed, with several reviewers complaining the last-generation ASICs used by the $1,200 heater would take far too long to mine enough crypto to pay for itself.

In comparison, the $299 Mini seems more like a traditional heater with a secondary Bitcoin mining mode. We’d say that at that price it’s probably worth giving the concept a shot, if it wasn’t for the fine print…if you purchase the Mini at this “early bird” price, HeatBit will skim off 50% of the Bitcoin your device cranks out. If you want to keep all the coins for yourself, you need to shell out for the “Full Ownership” version that has an introductory price of $549 and climbs to $749 once the heaters are available at retail.

If that’s not bad enough, the specs for the Mini show a hashrate of up to 10 TH/s. We ran that through a few calculators, and combined with the stated 300 watt energy consumption, it appears the device isn’t even capable of breaking even at current BTC prices. So if you were hoping to make a profit, forget about it.

Assuming the current rate of approximately $26,800 USD to 1 BTC, the Mini would bring in about $22 a month if you ran it for 24 hours a day. But with the average electricity cost in the United States (0.16 $/kWh), it would have cost you around $35 just to power it. Factor in the 50% that HeatBit takes off the top, and the math just doesn’t work. Sure you could make the case that it’s cheaper to run than a traditional electric space heater, but the payoff for the hardware is simply too far out when you consider you’ll only be using the thing a few months out of the year to begin with.

Bottom line, if you want to try and warm your office with Bitcoin, you’d be better off picking up a second hand ASIC miner and building the thing yourself. It still wouldn’t be the money-making scheme it might seem like at first glance, but at least you wouldn’t have some company taking half your profits every month.

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• Source: https://hackaday.com/2023/05/13/home-heating-with-bitcoin-miners-is-now-a-real-thing/