UK Power Networks trials Thermify’s HeatHub boilers, swapping gas flames for clustered compute
Reusing heat from servers has gained momentum recent years, but UK Power Networks (UKPN) is taking an unusual approach: installing mini datacenters powered by Raspberry Pi hardware in customers homes to provide heating for families struggling with energy costs.
UKPN, which manages the “last mile” of cables and substations delivering electricity from the National Grid to customers in the South East of England, is piloting the project as part of its SHIELD (Smart Heat and Intelligent Energy in Low-income Districts) program.
This will equip participating households with solar and battery systems, while one-third will also receive the “HeatHub” system - a compact datacenter roughly the size of a large heat pump that replaces traditional gas boilers. […]
Why not any gpu mining any coin?
That’s how I heated my university dorm that only had a boiler for heating. Figured it was safer than a space heater and wouldn’t require me to haul an additional object home every summer, plus funded my lavish college diet of ramen and "how many soda refills can I get with my 99 cent McDonald’s cup’.
Built a script to monitor the rooms air temperature and throttle mining accordingly to ensure that the room stayed within a few degrees of what I wanted. Would start up automatically after a few minutes away from my machine and stop if I was using the machine.
Probably not worth it.
If you need heat, mining anything is free money.
Nothing is free. Your equipment depreciates, so you need to account for that. Might be worthwhile if you have solar panels, a battery and use dynamic pricing. So you can charge the battery with solar and when electricity costs next to nothing, so you can run the equipment for heating of the battery when you get home in the afternoon which is usually when electricity prices go up. But end of the day it’s cheaper to just burn gas or use a heat pump if you just want to heat your home. And the heat a GPU array generates is probably not enough. The more efficient the GPU is with mining the less heat it generates, so the heat output per dollar input goes down. Not to mention the cost of a single GPU or ASIC miner.
That’s only true if we’re comparing GPU mining to resistive heating. Both are equally efficient at converting electrical energy to heat: 100%.
The numbers don’t look nearly as good when we compare GPU mining to a heat pump. Heat pumps utilize an additional, uncounted source of free energy (outdoor heat). Since we aren’t counting that additional energy, the electrical efficiency of the heat pump is much greater than 100%.
If you don’t have enough GPU power to meet your heating needs, there’s a capital cost to get more (and depending on your existing setup, likely even more capital costs for other components to be able to run it in a separate system).
Not to mention electricity