挖 Ethereum 加熱房間...

大家都好像有過類似的想法,只是實際去做的不多 XDDD

有人把整個作法寫出來,挖 Ethereum 加熱房間:「How I heat my home by mining crypto currencies」。

從網站上的「About me」這邊看起來應該是住在奧地利?

I am a tech geek from Austin TX (USA), living on the country side in Austria and devote most of my time to my girlfriend, my company, my students and different projects.

不確定是哪個城市,先抓了首都維也納的溫度來看,看起來一到三月的平均氣溫都在個位數 (攝氏),可以理解暖氣應該是常備物品:

作者之前就先搞過一個可以一路接到 Grafana 的電錶,然後也有裝太陽能電板,但因為暖氣用電的關係而不夠用:

After building my own smart meter using 4$ in parts I started checking my electricity usage every day, which made me realize how expensive it is to heat your home. Especially since all heat and warm water in my low-energy house is made with electricity. I do have 4.8 kwp solar panels on my roof but in winter they don't cover too much for obvious reasons.

順便查了一下電價,在「Austria electricity prices」這頁可以看到奧地利的每一度要 USD$0.248:

而同一份資料上,台灣是 USD$0.101:

回到他的暖氣機,他是屬於中央空調大台機器的類型:

這種機器會恆溫輸出,所以是進風溫度愈低,就需要使用愈高的電能加熱。所以他想到的解法就是針對進風口預先用顯卡挖礦加熱 (四張 AMD 的 R9 390),這樣就可以降低暖氣機的電力消耗 (不過整體的消耗會提昇):

I had 4 older AMD R9 390 GPUs laying around (for the nVidia crowd that's basically on a level with a GTX 970) and I thought it could work.

後面就是改裝過程了,最後的結果雖然整體的電力使用量上升,但因為暖氣機的電力消耗降低,加上礦機挖到的 ETH 直接 cover 暖氣機的費用,反而讓暖氣機變免費了:

Success! I was able to lower my heat pump's electricity needs by ~50% and half of the costs are also paid for by the mining earnings

台灣的氣溫應該是用不太到 XDDD