Every winter, you eagerly watch negative temperatures pay your heating bill. Dan van der Steyr (whose name does not indicate that he is an engineer living in France) has another problem: It’s too hot in his apartment.
And this, despite the fact that it may significantly reduce gas heating. Explanation? The 40-year-old is actively using his computer to mine cryptocurrency and play video games with his son.
Dan van der Steer isn’t the only person heating Bitcoin. With confinement, an increasing number of miners are taking advantage of the heat released from their activity to turn off their radiators or recycle it for other uses.
The Wall Street Journal He recounts the case of a photographer who built a small greenhouse in his fully heated garage thanks to mining. There, he grows cherry tomatoes and fragrant herbs and is now planning to heat a yard in his garden to raise two chickens. His concern: the computer is so hot that he fears poor poultry will die from the heat.
The heat emitted by a computer varies greatly depending on the cooling system and the tasks performed. Video games, bitcoin mining, or tasks that require a lot of maths tend to overheat your equipment.
Most of the time, experienced gamers use computers equipped with super-powerful or even super-powerful fans Water cooling (Reserved for insiders because we know water and electronics don’t mix.)
Radioactive encryption
But the heat released is also a great opportunity when it comes to restoring it. Thus, the French start-up Qarnot Computing has developed “digital heaters” that use heat from data centers to heat offices and apartments.
In 2018, the small shot was developed A coded radiator called QC-1 With two graphics cards for heating a coin and cryptocurrency.
According to the company, the process makes it possible to generate 1,200 euros of income per year (accounts based on Ethereum mining) while eliminating the heating bill (it is still necessary to calculate 300 to 400 euros in electricity expenditures per year).
The same benefits for the players. “My computer is much better than a cooler, because the cooler can’t be used to play video games”Jokes, young Chicago-based Kyle Burger. Suddenly, he didn’t replace his eight-year-old computer with the most efficient cooling system for the world.
Of course YouTubeWe can even see a smart kid enjoying cooking an egg on a computer at work. A tech but not recommended by the concerned YouTuber … who ended up burning his computer by cutting off his cooling system.