Heading into winter, save money on heat with Bitcoin

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@Shoutout to cryptocoinsnews.com giving me my first byline and picked up piece :D - https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/mine-bitcoin-save-money-heating/

Here in NY, heat is a big thing in the winter. It can get bitterly cold, and heating costs add up. Let's do some back of the envelope math to see if we can save money on heating those NY apartments. In a typically NY apartment we're talking 500-1500 sq/ft of living space. So for the purposes of this demonstration, let's use 1000 sq/ft as the magic number. Given that New York is a pretty cold climate, we're going to need about 4,000,000 BTUs per month of heat to keep that apartment warm. Here are the current rates for the common energy sources:

Electricty - $.20/kWh Oil - $3.60/gal Natural Gas -  $15/MCF

This gives us a very approximate cost per million BTU as follows:

Electricity - $60 Oil - $34.60 Natural Gas - $18.75

Which shows natural gas as the clear winner for heating our apartment at approximate cost of  $75/month during the coldest months. But what if electricity is our only option? (There have been several times where I have rented and the only available heating source was electricity. )

In that case it's a clear home run for the next contender: the bitcoin ASIC.

Bitfury ASIC

I won't go into too much detail, but essential it's a machine capable of producing bitcoins for the cost of electricity. The initial purchasing price of the device is also a factor.

From my own personal experience, it takes a gen I 100gh/s Avalon miner (600-1000w PSU) to heat that 1000 sq/ft apartment. It uses 14.4kWh of electricity per day - giving us a monthly cost of ~$86.4. This is without using optimization like thermostats to keep a consistent temperature. My method was to adjust the openness of my window.

Surely $86.4 can't compare to the $60 cost of electricity alone? Surely. But that's not all. The ASIC producing 100gh/s would have bestowed upon us some BTC during that month period. At the current price ($380) we're talking $15/month. It starts to get interesting.

On top of which, that gen 1 100gh/s ASIC is somewhat outdated. We can find used Avalons  on ebay that output 200gh/s for the same amount of electricity or less.  On top of this, there are or shortly will be chips on the market capable of 1W/Gh - which would offset the cost of heating entirely and then some (beating oil and natural gas.)

I believe we're now in the territory of ASIC heat being more efficient than traditional electric heating elements from a cost/btu standpoint. Play this out for a few years and we see the cloud moving to our baseboard heaters.

If you pay for your heat in NY - it probably pays to buy some ASICs. The value of bitcoin will go up or down, the hashrate similarly, but so does oil / gas. Right now it makes sense to heat with ASICs.