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Comment by GuB-42 | Hacker News Reader

I remember at the time that donating CPU time was considered trivial. Not so much today.

At the time of SETI@home, a typical CPU used maybe 20W at full load, fans usually ran at constant speed, and power management was much more primitive. So you barely noticed the difference between idle and full load, both on your electricity bill and on the noise the PC made.

Now hundreds of watts is not uncommon if you also use the GPU, and people are much more conscious about how much power computers use. And at full power, fans spin up loudly, laptops get uncomfortably hot, etc... It means you are not going to do it as easily. It probably didn't help the "@home" projects.

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My homelab is in a closet that has the water meter for my above-garage apartment. Before I put a heater in the garage itself, I needed to make sure that that closet didn't freeze. I rigged up a temperature sensor to start mprime on a server if the temperature got too low, but higher than the electric heater that's also in that closet. I figured I might as well contribute to research if I'm just burning watts for heat anyways.

Where can I buy a compute-for-heat home system?

Edit: I have a heat pump, which is more efficient for heating of course

You might prefer a heat pump.

I do and have one actually. I have no idea if a kWh of compute could be worth more than eg. a kWh/(heat pump COP) though. Probably not...

My understanding is that for most residential heat pumps, the temperature needed to make the heat pump less efficient than resistive heating is so low that it enters a range that the pump doesn't even work anymore.

However, that's only a measure of efficiency. It could still be that the throughput isn't enough. A 30 kW resistive heater can ALWAYS output 30 kW of heat. But my 7 kW heat pump could produce anywhere from 14 to 30 kW depending on outside temperature.

Does that mean the heat pump gets less efficient as the outside warms? Because that would be fine. 7kW to make you home a constant temperature seems wonderful.

No, they get less efficient as the outside gets colder.

A late model Intel MacBook from eBay and pretty much any Electron app from 2020 should do it.

I remember some startups trying to install cryptominers in people homes, the idea was to use the electricity that would be spent heating the space anyways. The company would pay for the mining hardware while the customer would provide the electricity, and the profits would be shared.

I don't know how it worked out, but the idea was there.

I know of this one [1], a 1000W space heater with integrated cryptominer. Looks kike you can actually buy it now. Not sure how much the mined crypto offsets the heating costs though.

[1] https://21energy.com/products/ofen-2

I generally run BOINC during the winter in place of a space heater, but that's only a cold month or two of the year.

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