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Comment by ced | Hacker News Reader

I live in a cold climate. In the winter, I heat up my house by passing electricity through the resistor in my radiator. This is dumb; the electricity could be doing something useful instead. Why couldn't we have BTC-mining radiators, that emit heat as a by-product of their computations?

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They do have those, they just aren't a super good idea.

If you care about heating efficiency, spend the money on a heat pump, which will get you 300% efficiency.

Some guy on /biz/ has a bunker full of server racks that mined XMR. He got the bunker from a military auction. He said that he did not require heating for the bunker because the heat produced by the mining was enough to keep the entire buker warm. All he had to do is have good ventilation.

They do https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Z_bvYNWR4k

I still wonder if heating a house with transistor is efficient. Gotta ask a scientist I guess. I mean there must be energy spent switching transistors back and forth.

What do you mean by "efficient"? That word is usually used to describe the fraction of energy that goes into a machine and is then not lost to heat. Since the purpose of a heater is to produce heat, it's pretty much impossible for it to waste energy.

Some things produce more heat than others.

For passive heating, anything puts out exactly as much heat as it consumes electricity; there's no way around thermodynamics to gain or lose power there.

Yes, there can be heat pump systems with e.g. underground connections, and pumping heat can be more effective than generating heat; but for pure heating, generating heat, the simplest resistor heater is just as 100% efficient as any complex electronic device, all the electricity spent results in just as much heat.

And you know what happens to that energy when it's done doing its useful work? It's dissipated as heat :)

Some energy gets turned to light inside ba MOSFET but that quickly turns into heat too.

It's exactly as efficient as heating is with a resistor. That energy spent switching transistors is spent as heat. :)

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