Presenting: #BitcoinHouseHeater
Based on the #BitcoinWaterHeater, this system can fully heat House, Water and HotTub with Bitcoin Miners, and this cheaper than the original heating costs (possibly completely free) 1/10




I always approach the design of my systems utilizing permaculture to guide me which often means my initial implementations look makeshift and messy.
There are a few key principles I'm leaning on in this hot water heater build. First is small and slow solutions, I want the hot water heater to be able to function normally if things don't work out, I want to have a minimal investment in the components for the same reason. This leads to the principles produce no waste and use/value renewable resources, basically I wanted to use stuff I already had. Using heat productively from Bitcoin mining naturally utilizes the integrate rather than segregate permaculture principle.
The design utilizes the side arm recirculation technique, which takes cold water out of the drain port of the tank and returns heated water to the top of the tank through the pressure relief port. The recirculation loop of the hot water tank is driven by a cheap pump through a plate heat exchanger.
On the Bitcoin mining side of the hot water system, an s19 is placed vertically in a 10 gallon plastic cooler immersed in 8 gallons of canola oil. There are two fans in the intake side of the miner at the bottom of the cooler and I tried to keep the control board and PSU out of the oil (less to clean up if it didn't work). There is some pex pipe drawing hot oil off the top of the tank driven by an identical pump as the hot water side of the loop. The hot oil passes through the plate heat exchanger in an opposing flow as the water. The cooled oil is returned to the bottom of the cooler through the hole where the water spigot was.
I've done a few initial trials of the system and it works! However, the biggest downside is that after heavy water usage like drawing a bath, it takes a few hours for the water to get back up to the top temperature. I think the slow recovery time is due to the size of the plate heat exchanger. The miner can put out heat more quickly than it can be exchanged into the water so I'm finding I have to keep the miner running at a lower wattage to avoid overheating.

