So a couple months ago i made this post
I was downvoted pretty heavily by lemmy standards but there were a decent amount of constructive comments so i deduce that there is some interest in this topic, so thought i would update.
I’ve gotten through the coldest months of the year here in the UK and i have been mining less and less as a result now that spring is springing.
This isn’t a professional set up at all, I have an AMD 3900x processor and a Radeon 6800X GPU running Manjaro. I decided to mine Raven on the GPU (seems to be a dead coin tbh) and Monero on the processor. I also have an old quad core intel media server that runs Ubuntu server with Folding@home in the same room, so generating heat, but not crypto income. As far as actual crypto earnings are concerned it didn’t really yield a whole much; i am the proud owner of 546RVN (current market rate about $6.74USDT) and 0.033 XMR (approx $6.84USDT value). so not even going to bother selling it, will just hold it and hope it pops one day.
The real return though is the reduction in electricity usage. The flat was kept not quite as warm as previous years but still warm enough to be comfortable so long as you wear socks and occasionally put on a jumper on the really cold days. With this experiment i was for the most part only heating a single room. As a result my power usage plummeted for the normally heaviest months.
2024 peaked at around 1,100kWh in Jan normally heating my flat with its in built resistive element electric heaters (no gas here)
2025 peaked at 800kWh in Jan
Costs are generally averaged out over the course of the year here in the UK and my energy supplier has told me they’re reducing my Direct Debit by -£30.48 a month, i’ll assume this holds for the rest of the year.
So with that in mind my net gain was (£30.48 * 12) + (13.58USDT converted to GBP at current rate of £0.77… £10.48)
£376.24
Admittedly there are other variables i’m not really controlling for, the cost of power peaked in 2023ish and has been reducing since for instance.
i had fun though, will try again next year
In theory, the only difference between an electric heater and your computer, as far as actual heat goes, is the dispersal pattern. They will generate exactly the same heat: 1W of heat per 1W of electricity used. That’s thermodynamics for you!
You said:
So I don’t think it makes sense to assign any of the savings to using your PC vs your usual electric heaters. It’s because you kept your place a little cooler, which makes an absolutely huge difference. When heating in winter, every additional degree of air temperature is more costly than the last, since heat loss is relative to the temperature differential between indoors and outdoors (i.e. a warmer room will lose more heat to the outdoors than a cooler room, so you need to generate more heat to maintain it).
This sounds to me a lot like dieting. Most of the time, the success of a diet has less to do with the actual diet and more to do with the fact that dieting has made you more mindful and changed your behavior in other ways.
The two biggest things you can do to save money on heating in winter are:
Not possible where i am. i live in an apartment above a shop in a busy UK town. Attaching anything to the outside of my property requires expensive permission from the freeholder.
Plus i want to move in the next year or so, so economically it wouldn’t make a lot of sense for me to do it