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Comment by layer8 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe we’ll be able to heat our homes with self-hosted AI in a few years.

With district heating technically you can heat your home with AI quite easily.

Here is an example of large scale project from Finland. https://www.fortum.com/media/2022/03/fortum-and-microsoft-an...

I am - literally - heating my condo with my ML training workstation right now. Works great! I have electric wall heaters, so I might as well get something out of burning 1000W of electricity.

but can we bolt heat pump on that to make it even more efficient?

Ah, the winter AI training season.

And in the summer months here in the northern hemisphere we'll send our training jobs down to the southern hemisphere.

A spa in Brooklyn is opening which is going to heat its pools with bitcoin miners.

https://fortune.com/crypto/2023/12/21/bathhouse-nyc-bitcoin-...

You can already heat your house with bitcoin mining rigs. (Hm, that's actually not such a bad idea!)

If you're going to run an electric space heater anyway, might as well do some mining instead. :P

The more I think about this the more I think there could be a real business model here. Make a device that looks and acts like a space heater but is in fact a miner loaded with your private keys. Market it as a "smart heater" that requires a wifi connection to operate. Sell it as a loss leader, or maybe even give it away for free. It doesn't have to be state-of-the-art hardware, so it can be cheap to make. Hmm...

It's been done. Space heaters are like 200 bucks. Hard to compete with that.

Space heaters are $20* at Walmart for basically as much energy draw as a typical household socket can handle.

Mining hardware is really expensive still, and they are constantly replaced by better models.

I have a massive surplus of solar in summer, and on my local auction sites some old miners became available. I considered picking them up and putting them to use using up my surplus "free" electricity.

I gave up when the mining ROI calculation came back with multiple years, even when you factor in a $0 electicity cost.

This might've worked 3-5 years ago (maybe more), but I don't see that happening now to be honest.

There are already such products, just search for "bitcoin heater" .

Your bitcoin mining rig will need three times as much power as a heat pump to produce the same amount of heat. I doubt it would be economical for most people.

That means the electric cost of the mining rig is essentially 1/3 "subsidized".

That isn’t anywhere close to enough based on what I pay for power. I think you probably are always better off somewhere with plentiful cheap power (that likely isn’t where you want to live)

Heating with electricity is a profound waste though when natural gas is a fraction of the price. And if you do have to heat with electricity, a heat pump is going to be far better than mere resistance.

Unless you were going to spend that electricity on compute anyway. In that case might as well reuse the waste heat.

However a heat pump doesnt yield you any money.

Even purely from a perspective of self-interest, you're unlikely to make any money mining bitcoin even with free electricity, let alone if you're supposed to do it with just the power a heat pump uses.

This idea has been around - here is a Microsoft paper from 2011, they dub it the "data furnace"

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/the-dat...

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