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I only mine during late fall and winter, when heat is not wasted. I wonder if they took that into account.

Most mining are centralized factories where such thing is not even possible, so I believe it would not even make sense to put your case into account.

Well, it could be possible (district heating is a thing in many places)

Resistance heating is still pretty wasteful.

How so? Do you just mean electric heating in general?

A heat pump (a reverse air conditioner) is more than 100% efficient at heating a building.

Modern ACs can be used to heat - they "pump" thermal energy from the cold outside to the warm inside (against the thermal gradient). For 1W of consumed electrical power they deliver 5W (for example) of total heating power to the room.

On the other hand, resistive heaters deliver 1W of heat for 1W of consumed electrical power.

This is the difference between "waste heat" (e.g. resistive heating) and heat pumps.

Heat pump also costs thousands of dollars, while I already have a bunch of GPUs sitting idle.

More like $250 at the lower consumer end.

I live in a 3250 sqft house. $250 ain't even gonna make a dent.

I'm sure 8 kW worth of GPUs are cheaper.

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