Heat Reuse
An ASIC turns everything it draws from the outlet into heat. You can throw those kilowatts out the window, or heat your home, water or greenhouse with them.
How much heat mining gives
The physics is simple: an ASIC at 3.3 kW is a 3.3 kW heater running around the clock. Every last watt of electrical power becomes heat, the only question is where it goes.
With an air-cooled model the options are few: the hot exhaust either heats the room or gets ducted outside. One miner keeps a garage or a workshop warm through winter, but noise and dust come along with the heat.
Heat is easiest to harvest from hydro and immersion tanks: there it is already in the liquid. A warm loop at 50 or 60 degrees suits underfloor heating, a boiler through a heat exchanger, a greenhouse. Past that point it is plumbing, not mining.
The economics adds up two lines at once: mining earns coin, and it also replaces heating you would have paid for separately. In the heating season an ASIC in the house works better than the same watts in a heater, because a heater earns no coin.
The short version
| How much heat | all the power from the outlet, watt for watt |
| Easiest to harvest | from hydro and immersion tanks |
| Loop temperature | around 50 or 60 degrees |
| Where to send it | underfloor heating, boiler, greenhouse, workshop |
| Downsides of the air option | noise and dust along with the heat |
Where to start
Count the need: how many kilowatts of heat and how many months a year you actually want them. In summer the heat has nowhere to go, and that is half the answer.
Start simple: an air-cooled ASIC in a non-living space that needs heating. Zero rework, and you see right away whether the idea lives.
For a house look at hydro: the heat is in the liquid, the noise stays out, and the loop connects through a heat exchanger, not directly.
Do not build your heating entirely around mining: the ASIC can go in for repair, the market can make mining unprofitable, and the backup boiler has to stay.
An example from practice
A hydro ASIC at 5.5 kW heats the underfloor loop of a country house all winter. The house would have burned those kilowatts on heating anyway, now they earn coin along the way. In summer the loop switches to the outside, and the miner runs as usual, just with free cooling.
Related terms
Where to go next on the site
Hardware
- ASIC Miner knowledge base
- Antminer S21 tool
Numbers
Questions and answers
Does an ASIC heat worse than a heater
Exactly the same: a watt is a watt. The difference is that the ASIC pays for those watts, while a heater only spends them.
Can you heat water directly with the ASIC's liquid
No, the loops are separated by a heat exchanger: coolant and household water must not mix.
What to do with the heat in summer
Duct it outside through a dry cooler or accept that the benefit is seasonal. The honest math is done over the heating months, not the whole year.
How the terms connect
Every link in the chain is clickable. Orange marks where you are now.
Looking for an ASIC miner
The catalog holds 212 models. You can compare them by hashrate and by joules per terahash, then plug your own rate into the calculator and see what stays in your pocket.
Page written and checked by Denys Klimchuk. Updated .