What to do with mining residual heat #241: de-ice your kitchen freezer

This week I met a guy working for an energy research institute. He told me the wind energy department had to let 20% of the people go because they had to cut costs and this particular department was not profitable enough anymore. The industry is mature and has taken over. Then I suggested that they could be focusing on enhancing the profitability of renewable energy sources by operating mining equipment in tandem, to stabalize the grid and as a buyer of last resort. I think I made his day because he was literally laughing out loud. We are still early so it seems. In this tempo it will cost Europe years to catch up when they get it finally.

Let's share the results of my home miner project of this winter. I was wondering if I could package a S19J Pro miner into a usefull piece of furniture. It became a mobile sidetable with a miner inside. Because it is a prototype i created enough room for electronics. This can be much more compact, but since I didn't know upfront what I needed I made it flexible. An esp32 is used for reading temp and humidity in the room, as well as the start / stop button, which state it sends to Domoticz. The esp32 also controls the fans through pwm. That way we don't have to suffer from the noise when the miner boots. It makes it also easy to make it run efficiently when nobody is around, by incrceasing the fan speed. A timer in Domoticz starts the miner in the morning with a high fan setpoint, and switches to a lower fan speed when the first person in the house wakes up. It has a 230V socket for a laptop for example, and a USB port for charging a phone. The miner is fully remote controlled through Domoticz but also has a local on / off button for convenience. It features a 5m power cable for increased mobility. Various values are sent to Influxdb and shown in a dashboard. One of which is the BTC cost price, which is on average 3M/BTC. So not really profitable yet, but the costs are offset by a slight reduction in heating costs and a huge increase in comfort. The house is heated through floor heating which is quit slow, the miner can quickly heat up the room when requested.

Finally a real usecase for bitcoin ;-)

Hello test nostr Rob here