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
A bit off topic… Ever thought about getting a heat pump? Even the cheap, loud air-air ones (with two hose mods) could save you a noticeable amount of money.
For the monero mining, did you solo or pool mine? Also p2pool+xmrig ?
pool mining on the lower difficulty pool
and yeah used gupax for the cpu so p2pool+xmrig is built in
Need a chart for temps as well.
not something i recorded this time. may do it next year.
i observed usually around 83 to 93 degrees celcius on the GPU. although i did see it drop to 53 degrees a few times whilst still mining. not sure what that was about as there’s no way that was a true figure.
i did override the gpu fan once or twice manually and set it to full flat out and got it down into the 70s. i found the interface for that to be kinda complicated to deal with though so i didnt do it routinely
wasnt watching the CPU
Is folding at home still useful when we now have Alphafold 2 ?
never heard of it tbh
Fun little project. Sure it is probably impractical, but you decided to try out an idea you had.
Honestly that’s exactly what I come to the internet for, to see little personal projects. Who cares if they work or not.
I am sure you were at least entertained through the cold, and that is something a heater would not of done.
i was for the most part only heating a single room
Have you made sure that your other rooms are not getting moldy? Cold air can’t carry as much moisture so your walls, furniture, etc. might be getting damper than they should be.
airing those rooms would solve that problem. With no heat to lose, you can keep those windows open all day if you like 😁
You’re making just enough to cover the cost of the new GPU when they break due to being used as a heat source. 👍
approx $6.84USD
Huh. So definitely not worth it then. Just buy a space heater instead. When I did it a few years ago I got $500 out of it, but it cost me a $350 video card which died soon after.
could have bought yourself a £500 gpu after and mined even more then
That is so awesome! I’ve been thinking of the exact same thing for years. I already have a cheap source of heat, so there’s no need for a project like this. However, if I did live in a house with electric heating, mining crypto is exactly what I would do.
I would probably make a dedicated server room, blow the warm air to other rooms through pipes etc. it’s a bit of a gamble though, because mining hardware costs something, and I don’t know if the coins would really be worth it. As long as it costs less than traditional electric heating, it should be fine.
As long as it costs less than traditional electric heating, it should be fine.
It would not. All work puts out an equal amount of heat for the amount of power drawn. A 1500 Watt electric heater will put out 1500 Watts of heat, and a 1500 Watt computer puts out 1500 Watts of heat, but only if it’s putting in enough computing work.
That computing work might be worth something if you’re lucky, which is where the actual savings are. OP ended up saving much more money from heating less than from earning any crypto.
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:
The flat was kept not quite as warm as previous years
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:
- Keep your place cooler. Wear warm socks, long sleeves, etc. instead.
- Improve insulation. Plastic window insulation kits are cheap and easy to install/remove. For doorways, you can get adhesive insulating foam to fill side gaps and a slide-on door sweep to cover any bottom gaps.
- Upgrade to more efficient heating methods, such as heat pump system instead of resistive heating.
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
Hi OP, I do the same thing during winters.
For XMR,
you can increase the profits a bit with XmrVsBeast + GupaxxIf the primary benefit was reduced electricity usage, then that’s not a function of crypto mining, that’s just less heating. You would get the exact same results with an electric heater maintaining the same temperatures. You have demonstrated that turning the heat down by a few degrees can save a noticeable amount of money.
You got some crypto out of it, about $13.50 worth, at the cost of whatever wear and tear and reduction in life your computer systems may have suffered, but in the end all you did was just put in a whole lot of effort to turn down the thermostat.
I keep space heaters in every room (except kitchen and bathrooms). Why heat the whole place when I’m just one person in one spot? (She bundles under blankets because the space heaters dry her skin, but similar end result.)
There is an actual reason to heat the whole space. But it depends on a number of factors including the size of the space heater, interior wall insulation, and external temp. If the exterior was -20F then using a single room space heater would not work and might be more expensive than bringing the whole floor to 58F in the long run.
The gist is your home has a thermal envelope. When you’re only heating that one room, without insulation, the heat is evacuating to neighboring rooms. So you’re still heating everything just poorly.
On top of that, a well insulated home drops heat slower than it take to heat up. If the home is built correctly all the heaters would work in tandem to bring the base temp up to a set point then shut off and allow it to slowly drop.
But again. There’s a ton of factors here (heater size and type are huge).
Very interesting. Cheers!
was fun tho. and if those coins do pop in future then i stand to make a decent amount of money.
I’ve spend more on the lottery for worse odds
Honestly, thank you for posting the details and results. Regardless of anyone’s opinions, it’s a fascinating thought experiment.
distraction/diversion are little pieces of heaven that make life worthwhile in this painful and difficult world if you’re not born into wealth or lucky circumstances; keep doing it no matter what other people say if it works for you and doesn’t cause harm or loss to others.
i got downvoted heavily for creating my own home router based on linux; but it works well (most of the time) and it has given me a project to focus on when i’ve needed the distraction myself many times.
haha i also have my own homemade linux router. debian based on an orangepi r1
thinking about replacing it with openwrt on some more application specific hardware soon though
Given you essentially made no money of this would you stick with crypto if you did this again or go with a more altruistic project such as folding@home as that would provide essentially the same heating effect?
I was folding@home on my media server as part of this experiment.
I did try and do this a couple years ago with folding@home on both machines but didn’t make it all the way through December, although i did have different hardware at that time.
I did briefly look at doing it again this year but setting it up to work with an AMD gpu seemed to be unsupported. the mining software seems easier to script with too
That’s kind of what I was thinking.
I used to run Folding@Home, as well as others, as a screensaver. It’s been a while, but I think you had some control of how hard to work the computer. As someone who regularly works with 30 year old computers that run 24/7, it seems weird to kill a GPU by running it,but if it runs cooler maybe it will last longer? Although that defeats the purpose kind of.
Now you need to use the money you saved and the $15 in crypto to buy two identical computers, then run one flat out and the other at around 50% and see how long they last. Report back every couple of years.
Excuse me while I look at extreme uptime posts.
Seems like not heating at all may have been even more lucrative, though. Would the temperatures have dropped intolerably low if you did so ?
Yes, it does get below freezing quite a few times during that time of year. if i allow the temperature in the flat to get too low i risk pipes freezing which can cause damage.
Plus i have the girlfriend factor to think of. She likes to be warm and is loud about it when she isnt
We have a battery bank for our solar that was getting too cold in the freezing weather, and we used a little mining rig (that’s designed and marketed as a heater miner, to preempt the “it’s not designed for that” comments), and while it found exactly fuck all of value, it did keep them warm enough to keep our power on
how much was that?
