The initial concept developed by the company involved using heat generated by Bitcoin mining rigs, according to Heata Co-founder and CTO Chris Jordan.
“We literally put a Bitcoin miner in a barrel of mineral oil and plumbed it up to a radiator,” he told The Register.
Edit, because I think folks may be confused due to the quote I put in. They are not installing crypto miners into water heaters. That was just their original inspiration. Sorry for the confusion.
“We’re not looking at serving real time workloads, we’re not doing websites, databases, message queue servers,” Jordan explained. “Our ideal job is; here’s a chunk of data, go and process that for some hours. And here’s the result,” he said.
This could still prove useful for 3D rendering workloads, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, and others where there is a lot of CPU or GPU processing, he claimed.
The specifically using BTC is a bit wild, but generally speaking storing excess solar energy in your hot water system is a great idea: https://www.catchpower.com.au/green-catch-power
That was just how they got the original idea. They aren’t installing crypto miners into water heaters.
Hell, why not? If you have something which generates heat, why not capture that heat and put it to use?
There is a temporal demand mismatch I guess. You can only make the water so hot, and you can’t delay the workload until you need to top up your water.
Crypto is a constant workload edit
I personally don’t see a problem with the idea of doing something like that, but doing some sort of widespread rollout like they’re proposing, I’d rather see “useful” work be done. But yeah, at the end of the day, if we can better utilize waste heat then that’s good.
Someone shared this article with me after I mentioned the idea of crypto mining space heaters lol.
… Who’s paying for the electricity to run the crypto miner?
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This is funded by the British government. So that hot water isn’t so much free as funded by the British people.
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From the article, it sounds like they’re going to be using the customers Internet service.
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This is not sending 100% of the heat into the hot water. You will be responsible for that excess heat. That’s why these trials are being run during the winter time. Expect the cost to run your AC in the summer to go up.
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Why would you wantonly let a billion dollar corporation into your home. When does that ever work out for people.
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They are cutting a hole into the side of your hot water heater. If you or they decide not to continue with this who pays to repair that hole, I doubt it’s the company.
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Fuck this.
Late-game capitalism is really giving us the dumbest ideas.
On the long list of dumb ideas, this doesn’t even begin to qualify. Almost all the energy that goes into a computer comes out as heat. If you can dump that heat into a tank of water that you wanted to be hot in the first place, you are saving almost all the electricity cost (assuming the hot water heater is an electric tank style heater, not a natural gas or tankless version).
Those tankless versions are brilliant.
I just don’t see this as anything different from other “green measures” that pretend they’re doing something great and glossing over the major thing they’re doing to contribute to waste in the first place.
The key in this case would be finding somewhere to put the waste heat from the computer, where you would normally be paying to add heat in the first place. That’s why you need to specify electric tank water heaters to make this idea work. You would be using energy to keep the water hot anyway, might as well do some additional work with that energy first.
