I’m not knocking this idea, but it seems like a common misconception that all heating is just waste. A heat pump, for example, gives more heat per unit of energy than just the basic one to one of resistant heating.

100% efficient electric resistance heating (including computing) is somewhere around 1/5 to 1/3 as efficient as a heat pump. It's also not necessarily better than gas heating, although that's harder to directly compare.

if you’re actually using the waste heat from a PC does that mean its basically 100% energy efficient?

It is exactly as efficient as an electric heater, yes, but an electric heater is one of the least efficient ways to heat a home.

Bitcoin bros actually did this at one point by making a space heater that was also a Bitcoin miner.

You get heat at similar energy efficiency to just running a regular space heater, but it pays back part of the energy bill with Bitcoin it mines. You could see how this could probably be adapted to other things, like what's mentioned in the article (distributed cloud compute).

The main issue is that space heaters and other in-home heat generation units are still infinitely less efficient than things like heat pumps in many circumstances, since those can reach over 100% efficiency since they only transfer heat, rather than having to generate it from scratch.

if you’re actually using the waste heat from a PC does that mean its basically 100% energy efficient?

Yes, but there is a big caveat: Heat pumps are much greater than 100% electrically efficient.

No, that doesn't violate thermodynamics. We don't count any of the thermal energy input into the "source" side of the heat pump, but it ends up on the "sink" side anyway. We are only comparing electrical input to thermal output, and the thermal output is much greater than the electrical input: Heat pumps are much more electrically efficient at heating your home than any form of resistive heating, including the waste heat from your PC.

A mining rig might be able to exceed the economic efficiency of a heatpump, but we would need much more data to attempt that calculation.

I dont need heating on weekends where i game a lot, so yeah this absolutely works. If your PC pulls 500W from the wall then its exactly like having a 500W space heater. Thats also why i play less compute intensive games during the summer or lock them to 60fps. Playing Palworld on 60 instead of 144Hz makes a roughly 100W difference for me.

its why i was jokingly saying back during covid winter, that at the time, while frowned upon, gpu mining is less wasteful than heaters. one heats a room something in return. the other intentionally wastes energy only to heat a room.

I thought the same thing, jjst in a different way:

If thr only thing electronics are 100% efficient at is producing heat, then why not think of a Raspberry Pi as a heater that just so happens to be able to do calculations as a byproduct, as opposed to heating elements which can't?

My gaming PC noticeably helps heat up one of the rooms in my place during Winter.

In the Summer, however, that's a downside rather than an upside.

Well sure, if the electricity is powering something you already need and the waste heat is beneficial, then awesome, I guess that's free heat. But it's actually pretty rare that people need to be using that much electricity for anything as consistently as you would need for heating a home. And if you don't actually need to be using that electricity, there's really no way around the fact that electric heating is really pretty expensive.

I guess if you are stuck with electric heating as your only option and a heat pump is out of your price range, then mining crypto could be a nice way to offset the cost of electric heating... But then the equipment costs would add up and you'd probably be better off with a heat pump anyway.

Yes, a computer heating system would be just as efficient as an electric wall heater at near 100% effective whereas heat pumps effectively ranges from 300% to 500%: for 1w used to operate the pump you will pump 3 to 5w of heat into your home.

If the Pi melts, it won't be much use for heating, now will it?

GPU server rentals (AI) "from home" have a payback of about 1 year from some utility supplies. Solar brings it down to well under 1 year, and works well with no utility export ever, and can support up to near constant 80%/amps power draw. Averaging 50 amps will look like a grow op.

A smallish 5000w server/utility room (same as electrical/battery room usually designed to be large enough for a boiler/furnace + hot water tanks, and a bit extra storage) will heat room well above 35C. A cheap(est) air source heat pump can make 85C water at 2+ COP, and normal 65C hot water at 4+ COP. Simple CPU/GPU watercooling systems that blow towards the air source heat pump can bring input air to 45C.

What "rentable home server" functions provide is allowing maximum solar to support an EV off grid, storing up hot water in fall for hydronic floor heating, and helping top it up on sunny winter days. Turning off the servers for the worst 2 solar months of the year. Using EV to reverse charge home in worst winter conditions a better option than a gasoline generator.

If the grid goes down, how do you expect to power the Intel space heater?

Probably not worth it.

That's how I heated my university dorm that only had a boiler for heating. Figured it was safer than a space heater and wouldn't require me to haul an additional object home every summer, plus funded my lavish college diet of ramen and "how many soda refills can I get with my 99 cent McDonald's cup'.

Built a script to monitor the rooms air temperature and throttle mining accordingly to ensure that the room stayed within a few degrees of what I wanted. Would start up automatically after a few minutes away from my machine and stop if I was using the machine.

There's a next to zero percent chance this wouldn't run on its own network.

A dedicated network connection at each site in being installed, so householders don't have to worry about HeatHub eating all their broadband bandwidth, the company told us

TLDR

Summer hot tub.

You could maybe do it in some environments that want year-round heating, but yeah, the UK doesn't seem like the best place for that.

For some uses, there might also be physical security concerns for the servers.

it's ... hot