The Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast - Bitcoin News With a Canadian Spin - Get PAID to Heat Your Home with Bitcoin Mining?! 🔥 ft. Toine from HEAT Inc. | The CBP

Episode Date: April 23, 2025

FRIENDS AND ENEMIESTired of high heating bills? What if you could turn that expense into an income stream?In this eye-opening episode of the Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast, Len the Lengend sits down with Toine from HEAT Inc. ([https://x.com/TronMonGone](https://x.com/TronMonGone), [256heat.com](https://256heat.com/)) to discuss a revolutionary concept: using Bitcoin mining to heat your home and get paid for it!Discover how the heat generated by ASIC Bitcoin miners can be efficiently recaptured and utilized to keep your living space warm during those cold winter nights. This isn't just a futuristic idea; ASIC mining for heat recapture is quickly becoming one of the biggest trends in the space.Toine from HEAT Inc. brings expert insights into the technology and practicalities of implementing such a system. With increasingly accessible ASIC options available to homeowners, there's never been a better time to explore how you can turn wasted heat into valuable satoshis.Whether you're a seasoned Bitcoiner or just starting to explore the possibilities of this technology, this conversation will provide you with a fresh perspective on energy efficiency and earning potential.*Don't miss out on learning how to potentially slash your heating costs AND earn Bitcoin!*Tune in to understand:The basics of Bitcoin mining for heat recapture.How homeowners can get involved.Why ASIC mining is suitable for this application.The future of this innovative trend.*Like, subscribe, and hit the notification bell* so you don't miss more episodes from the Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast exploring the exciting world of Bitcoin!*Find Toine on X:* [https://x.com/TronMonGone](https://x.com/TronMonGone)*Learn more about HEAT Inc.:* [256heat.com](https://256heat.com/)#Bitcoin #BitcoinMining #HeatRecapture #ASICMining #HomeHeating #EnergyEfficiency #CanadianBitcoinersPodcast #LenTheLegend #HEATInc #Toine #Crypto #PassiveIncome #SustainableBitcoinJoin us for some QUALITY Bitcoin and economics talk, with a Canadian focus, every Monday at 7 PM EST. From a couple of Canucks who like to talk about how Bitcoin will impact Canada. As always, none of the info is financial advice. Website: ⁠www.CanadianBitcoiners.com⁠Discord:   / discord   A part of the CBP Media Network: ⁠www.twitter.com/CBPMediaNetworkThis show is sponsored by: easyDNS - ⁠⁠www.easydns.com⁠⁠ EasyDNS is the best spot for Anycast DNS, domain name registrations, web and email services. They are fast, reliable and privacy focused. You can even pay for your services with Bitcoin! Apply coupon code 'CBPMEDIA' for 50% off initial purchase Bull Bitcoin - ⁠⁠https://mission.bullbitcoin.com/cbp⁠⁠ The CBP recommends Bull Bitcoin for all your BTC needs. There's never been a quicker, simpler, way to acquire Bitcoin. Use the link above for $20 bones, and take advantage of all Bull Bitcoin has to offer.

Friends and enemies welcome to yet another edition of the mighty came Bitcoiners podcast. I'm Len the legend taking this one away from Joey and today I'll be talking to Tuan and we'll be talking about is he's a bitcoin mining enthusiast and specifically he's doing services where you can install your asic into a central heating unit into your central uh system there so you're able to heat your home at the same time as earning satoshi so you're mining and you're reclaiming the heat that is being generated from these asicss. This is rather cool But before we could talk to Tuan and really dive into the topics that I wanted to discuss a couple of sponsors I gotta talk about a couple of things off my list that I have to ensure that I check off Number one, we have easy DNS. It's a based company. We only deal with based companies here at the CBP, right? we don't deal with anybody that's not based.

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Not sure what you want to do, but you have different options you could do over there. On-chain Lightning. Last I checked a couple of days ago, on-chain was cheap. Let's assume it still is. So, continually do your buys buys on chain, but lightning is there in case there's a spike in fees nonetheless. But rather than just simply buying or selling, there's other things you could do with your Bitcoin. You could buy some gift cards through Bold Bitcoin. You can start spending your Bitcoin indirectly like that. So you could buy like a Home Depot or Starbucks gift card with your Bitcoin and start spending that in the real world. So you're kind of living on a Bitcoin standard. The second thing you could do is pay your bills. Price of Bitcoin spiked today, so might as well pay off those credit card bills or delinquent card payments,

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All right, with the formalities out of the way, let's bring in Tuan and discuss Bitcoin mining. Tuan, how are you, buddy? Doing well, man. Thanks for having me on. It's a pleasure. You and I, we have indirectly been dealing with each other. We are in a chat and we'll call it unhinged.

We won't go too much further into that, but I think for the most part, that's been our communication with each other. It's through that chat. So it's good. I mean, we have met in the past very briefly in an informal setting, but it's good now that we could sit down and have a chat.

So I'm happy to bring you on here to discuss Bitcoin mining. But before we go any further, Twan, I wanna hear your background before we even get into Bitcoin, because this is gonna help make the basis of who you are and why you got into what it is you're doing. So give me a little bit of background of who you are. Let's educate the audience. Yeah, I think you could summarize me in one word. I'm a builder. I like to build and create things. I have a background in like design and engineering. I've worked in architectural visualization. You know, I've done a lot of

3D modeling and manufacturing engineering. That was kind of where I started after school. Pivoted to architectural rendering, which kind of introduced me to computer hardware, which was a really cool gateway into Bitcoin mining. Yeah, so I guess the whole backstory there is I like to use my hands, like to build things and interacting with Bitcoin was fun financially, but I really kind of got a lot out of it when I started interacting with the hardware. Building things, running a node, playing with Bitcoin miners. That's kind of what sparked my interest there. Bitcoin mining, like, why is this something that interests you?

I mean, you're a builder, you're getting your hands dirty. Like, why specifically that? I mean, it's a very niche market. So what's the doer for that? So it was funny, it was described this way at the Denver Conference, the Undermined Conference. Yeah. So it was funny, it was described this way at the Denver Conference, the undermine conference. So if Bitcoin is a niche in the financial markets, Bitcoin mining is a niche of the niche and Bitcoin mining for heat reuse, which is what I specialize in is a niche of a niche

of niche. So what I liked about it was solving problems. I love solving problems. When I first got a minor in 2021, I thought I could just run it on the kitchen counter. I quickly realized the heat and noise more than anything made that not feasible. So I started solving problems around those parameters and a few years later, you know, out of necessity for myself trying to solve my own problems, I feel like I came up with some really cool designs, services, products that I thought would help a lot of other people. So about a year ago, that's when 256 Heat was born. And

yeah, that's what I specialize in kind of helping people transform their miners into heaters that automatically adjust to conditions, pay them to heat their homes. In many cases, there's no justification to run them unless you're using them for heat reuse. So that's kind of the idea there. I love the idea of the efficiency gains in turning junk into treasure, and turning things that are not profitable

into something that allows you to either heat for free or getting paid to heat, which is in Ontario, that are not profitable into something that allows you to either heat for free or, you know, getting paid to heat, which is in Ontario, that's actually possible if you do some clever things with timing. But yeah, that's what it feels to me the most. We'll get into that. And I'm going to give you a shameless plug. We'll do this again after Heat Inc. And that's www.256heat.com. Is that correct? That's correct. Yep. And you're the owner of that.

But before we go any further, 2021 is when you bought your first Miner. What did you buy that you thought that you could plug in on your kitchen counter and run? Was it an S9 or something more powerful than that? It was a What's Miner M30 S++. So it was like, I think it was 111 terahash and 36. Yeah, 3600 watts. So back then, you know, yeah, feed a lot of watts to get that kind of output. So and you know, before there was no firmware to really play around with. And so the thing was just always on at max. So super loud, super hot. Yeah, but you know, big heavy unit and and, you know, I like the design, I always

thought like the aluminum extrusion kind of cases and things were cool. And, you know, everything was very modular. So my mind was kind of going on like, maybe there's some 3d printed things that could be done here, initially, but yeah, seeing all the things the community's done was really inspiring. And that's kind of what inspired me to take that leap and get into this full time.

And yeah, you're right. Brains didn't provide, I don't know if they do now even. They didn't at the, and Lux OS, I don't think was available. So you really were stuck with the stock firmware. Yeah, still are. I think it's all for those companies, yeah. I want to just hear like when you plug it in, what was your first reaction? Were you expecting it to be rather quiet

and not get off a lot of heat? I knew it was loud. I think what's deceiving is the decibel scale, because it kind of works exponentially. So like 100 decibel isn't twice as loud as 50 decibel. It's like exponentially louder. So when you go, oh, you know, 60 decibels is like background traffic noise, 80 can't be that bad. And then you plug in 80 and you're like, my ears are bleeding, this is crazy.

I can't do this anymore. So yeah, it's a lot of realizations that happened that week. It reminds me of a very old Simpsons episode. And I think it was Dr. Nick Riviera went on a talk show and he was showing off his juicer and it was so loud. They're turning oranges into orange juice. And he's like, he's yelling, it's whisper quiet, trying to show off how quiet the equipment has been in reality. Just like an ASIC, it's motherfucking loud. So yeah, yeah. All right. The problem that exists, let's talk about this is people that want

a home mine, they plug in their unit, and it's doing this thing. But they're not taking advantage of one of the products, one of the waste products, which is heat, you are trying to capture that and to capture that and to try that make usable for the homeowners. Explain this. Yeah. So after the halving, I kind of identified an opportunity. A lot of miners right after that day, that April 19th last year, they immediately became unprofitable. And I was racking my brains as to like, how do we get these things plugged back in?

What's the best way to do it? You saw the price of the miners get dropped too. They were like a third of what they were even a few months before that. So I was looking for how do we turn the heat, which is a problem, into a product? And a big part of that was trying to, you kind of have to just ditch the stock fans.

And once you do that, and everything kind of adjusts to like a standardized eight inch HVAC ducting components. And once you get onto that standard, you've got any number of flanges and three-way valves and wide distributors, wide pipe distributors, and a number of things you can use to kind of manage that heat and run it. And then the next logical step was understanding that, according to building code here in North America, every house that's built since like 70 something has to have some sort of forced air HVAC system. So by leveraging the existing

infrastructure in the home, the HVAC system, you can essentially pump your exhaust air into your return, your air return plenum, which is a negative pressure. So it's helping pull the heat away from the chips, and then redistribute that heat with your your standard HVAC system, your fan. Once I figured that out, it was like, aha, okay, this this actually makes a lot of sense. Because I was I was heading towards immersion mining and using water cooled to liquid cool as my base, because immersion mining and using water cooled or liquid cooled as my base because once you have a liquid medium to transfer that heat it's a lot more manageable but there was no way to do that as far as I could tell without increasing the cost substantially which impacts ROI and that first year of operation ROI was you know it was a problem because miners were expensive. You kind of had to have 100% uptime systems where you were just diverting because you couldn't justify taking a $5,000 miner and running it

like 50-40% of the time. So yeah, just kind of like innovation through necessity, trying to turn garbage into gold and landed on the current system that I have, which kind of, it articulates, the miner kind of articulates to its current need. So the colder it is, the higher the wattage, higher the tera hash output, the warmer it is, the lower the wattage. And by doing that, there was a huge light bulb moment like, ah, okay, I can increase efficiency, which increases profitability, it can increase uptime, I can increase efficiency, which increases profitability. I can increase uptime. I can decrease noise. So there are all these things that

fell into place to land on the current system. But it was a couple of years of experimenting and kind of like hitting my head against the wall, and redesigning, going back, redesigning. And yeah, that's kind of how I ended up here. So you have some experience dealing with dielectric fluid? I don't. I actually, I was starting to dabble and I had a fog hashing C6 tank in my cart ready

to check out and something kind of pulled me away from it. I think I was running some numbers and I was like, oof, it's a hard sell. If you're not a Bitcoiner, it's almost impossible to sell a $12,000 system, unless you have the need for a large scale heating operation. My focus is on small scale residential. I think that's kind of, the distributed nature appeals to me and the ability to help the individual,

I think appeals to me. I know there's a few companies out there that do like Amazon warehouse heating and it's extremely lucrative because these things, you know, if it works with one, you scale up to a hundred and you know, it works even better. But meeting cool Bitcoiners and you know, helping out people individually has been really gratifying for me. And I'm going to just stick on this immersion heating quickly or immersion cooling, just probably last question. Do you know if it's gotten any cheaper over time given the fact, you know,

more there's been more R&D involved in the whole sphere plus maybe economy of scale could take a, could bite into the cost of it. So over time, do you know if it has gotten any cheaper? It has, yeah. There's a whole bunch of builders I met in Denver that are doing awesome stuff that are able to cut costs considerably from what I've even seen a couple years ago when I first started looking. Dane from Hashrate House, Nick from Constellation, Bob from Home Bitcoin Mining, these guys have kind of custom designed their own enclosures in some cases and have kind of plug and play systems. So if you want to heat your pool or your hot water in the house, they do have systems that I believe are more affordable than like the fog hashing units. But I haven't checked prices of those in a while. But yeah, it's cool to see like things as people build more defining ways to bring you know prices down and

and as miners come down in price because they get older you know you can maybe justify using one of these in a residential setting. So the company which you are an owner of heating and that's once again it's www.256heat.com what services can you provide to a homeowner if they come to you and say, I want to heat my home with an A6. So what it is that your company does to help them out? Yeah, so the first way I interface is like on a consulting basis. I'll do like a free heat audit just to understand like how viable hashrate heating is for that customer. Knowing things like the square footage of the house, what the current heating fuel is,

whether it's electrical, like electric resistive heating or natural gas or propane or diesel heating oil, all of these inputs kind of affect the validity of my solution. So understanding that, then designing, if everything looks good, if there's the price for electricity is low enough or the substitutes costs are high enough,

then I can make a case for designing a system, which usually at that point, we go into something called the scope of work document, which outlines everything from requirements from the client side, schedule, cost, payment plan, all that and then if everything looks good. If it's somewhere local I will install it personally. I'll show up and bring everything needed to install it. It takes you know four to six hours to install a couple of miners straight into the air duct return. Most of my clients are actually not within driving distance,

as you would imagine. And 80% of them being in the U S so what I do there is I pre-assemble everything at house, test it, run it for about a week just to tune all the profiles. And then I will pack everything up, ship it to client. And then, there's like a four to six hour video call or phone call that I run them through the assembly process. What's cool about it is I've got it down to like an Ikea level now where you just need a screwdriver to do it, except for cutting the hole

in the duct, but there's a quick and easy tool that just zips those holes out, perfect eight inch diameter hole. So yeah, that's kind of the majority of the client relations that I have. So the free heat audit that you provide, what area of coverage do you provide in the, I guess, Southern Ontario or like maybe even more local than that? I'm wondering where it is you cover. The heat audits for, I mean, all over North America, like I've done these heat audits for clients in as far south as Savannah, Georgia,

as far north as I think Thunder Bay is my furthest North client or maybe Montreal. But for the local installs, it's the same kind of heat audit, just try to, the heat audits just to kind of justify or like to validate if hash rate heating is right for that client. And if it is like in Ontario and Quebec, it's probably like some of the best. I mean, other than like Wyoming and parts of Texas, we have really cheap electricity, but we also have variable rates and our cheapest rate coincides with when it's coldest. So it's an overnight rate at 2.8 cents per kilowatt hour. So almost every miner is profitable at 2.8 cents Canadian. So the systems I've designed are really good to increase profitability in the case that you have like variable rates. They, so yeah, for Canadians especially, they make a lot of sense, these systems. I know like they're, you could take an old machine

like a J-Pro and basically have break-even cost on your electrical bill. So $100 of electricity, $100 worth of Sats every month. So that's a nice place to be where you're getting free heat, you're stacking Sats passively, you're not increasing your overall expenditure. And with respect to the rates themselves, you're going to be asking the homeowners to change their billing with the local company, the local electric company, because I think in Ontario, there's two different options. There's one, it's just a standard rate where you have

high payments, mid payments and low payments, but what you're referring to is the ultra low payments that apply, I think, between the hours of midnight and six. Am I correct on that? So there's three tiers now. There's tier, there's time of use, and then there's ultra low overnight. Ultra low overnight is from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. But basically only on peak, which is 28 cents per kilowatt hour, is not profitable. Yeah. So if you curtail five hours a day, Monday to Friday, which is basically if you look at it on a monthly basis, it's just an 80% curtailment, or sorry, 20% curtailment, your 80% uptime, you can improve profitability by about 35 to 40% just by cutting out that ultra expensive time of use rate.

Has there been any talk about during the ultra high cost cost of $0.28 per kilowatt hour to power those units with solar? Because that's going to be the time of the day where the sun is most prominent. Granted, in wintertime, we don't get a lot of sun, but I'm wondering if that's one way to offset that. Have you explored that option? Yeah. So I have some clients in the Northeast, the US, and they have extremely expensive electric rates like in New York, Connecticut, Vermont and a few of my clients in those parts of the world do use solar to kind of, you know, accompany their total like they can basically use solar during the day and battery. Here in Ontario it's not as popular because our winters are quite long and dark and once the snow falls you'd have to have a pretty vertical pitch on the

panels to avoid them getting you know kind of clad with snow. So I've looked at it. One of the things I've also looked at is just getting the battery bank and then charging them up during the 2.8 cents per kilowatt hour then discharging them. But the batteries are so much more expensive than the solar panels. It's kind of, you know, you have to be pretty sure, it's going to be like a long payoff for those systems. So what I look at is kind of, I'm more of a pragmatist, like those are great systems and even just for personal use they're awesome in case the power goes out you can be you know more self-sustained but pragmatically they will increase the ROI if they're included in like a build to the point where it's going to be really you know you're not looking at a year or two you're looking at five

or ten years to to make that back And then you probably have to justify newer miners because of the higher uptime. So it's one of those things where, you know, if you've got money to burn, go for it. But, you know, I'd rather live in Texas or Wyoming or some, you know, even in Canada, Alberta or Calgary, where they have more sunny days to justify a large solar. And it has to be a lot, if you're mining,

you need a lot of panels just to keep up the three kilowatts per miner. And Boondus is saying use a Tesla home battery or a car to feed those S-19s. That's, if you're not driving around, just leave that car parked in the garage, charge it up overnight and take advantage of the power that's been stored in it

to power your A6 through the daytime. I'm wondering if that's a possibility, but it may degrade the battery over time given how much it's gonna be used and... Probably. Who knows? That customer that you talked about in Savannah, Georgia, what happened with that without giving too much details?

Did this type of setup actually work for them? Because I don't know exactly where Savannah is in relation to, I mean, Georgia typically is hot in the summertime, humid and so forth. But in the winter, I don't think it gets that cold, but maybe Savannah does. I mean, what did you do with that customer? Yeah. So he had a couple old S-19s that he couldn't really justify running unless he used them for heat. So Savannah gets about four to five months a year where the heat is on. It's not freezing,

but it's cold enough to justify turning the heat on. So what he does is he heats in the winter and then diverts those ducks to mine that or to throw that exhaust air straight out of the house through the, I guess it's a gable vent in the roof. So some people, it depends on their goals, right? Some people put a high price on KYC-free Sats. Other people, they do it as like a fun experiment.

Some people, they do it altruistically. They just wanna, you know, help the network and strengthen the security budget. So everyone has their own reason why they mine, but it's cool to see how it, for those who are like curious, engineering minded people, it's cool to see how they can use these things

to solve different problems, dry their firewood or make beef jerky. I've seen so many cool applications. There's a guy on the chat group that is doing maple syrup extraction. If you have excess heat, there's almost countless opportunities you could do with that. So it's just simply being blown out into the atmosphere and redirected to something else and take advantage.

That's the one beautiful thing about the ASICs is that they generate tons and tons of heat that could potentially be repurposed into something or purposed, nevermind repurposed, purposed into something. Who's this for? Like the people that wanna have an ASIC installed in your home and it's gonna be providing heat to their central HVAC system.

Who's gonna be the home user? Who's gonna be the customer that you're trying to target? Bitcoiners or just the average Joe? It's mostly Bitcoiners. I'd say large majority of my clients are Bitcoiners, but there are a few who aren't. Most of them are at least Bitcoin curious and that helps because what they're receiving in return for their electric bill is novel to them and they're watching it grow in many cases. Almost all my clients are just using it as a way to kind of passively stack Sats

because it's not increasing their overall expenses. So it's kind of just like you're displacing one expense with another, but that other expense kind of gives you a return. In my experience, if you don't have to sell those Sats, then you can take advantage of long-term capital appreciation, which it's a lot easier if you're replacing existing costs versus the mega miners who are basically not reusing heat. Heats a problem for them, so they're paying to get rid of it, whereas my clients

are getting paid to use it. So it's a huge reversal in how it's done in the past. Any particular pool you recommend people use? I'm sure they're not using, they're not solar mining, so they're joining a pool. So what's your recommendation for people to point their hash rate to? Hands down, Ocean Mining. I mean, they're the only one I've found

that actually has approvable payouts. They've been paying way more. I've been doing some tests and spreadsheets on them versus the other FPPS pools and Bitcoin Mechanic has a really good YouTube video on why FPPS kind of fails. They also have Datum, which lets you create your own templates. So for me, that's important. I'm not a huge fan of Ordinals of Rune, so I can express that worldview with Datum. And then the Lightning Payouts was just kind of like the, aha, this is awesome because now they're not a custodian of your Bitcoin. Every time they hit a block, you get paid.

So for me, those three things kind of were a no-brainer. Like that was why I Switched to ocean. I've got a lot of clients on ocean Everyone's super happy with it and the lightning chaos just kind of feels like magic like it's yeah If you're used to waiting for like a threshold Getting paid every day which is it's kind of happening lately. They got I think they had a block every 22 hours on average now. So Yeah, that would be what I recommend for my clients. That's a steady stream of and you could watch your wallet and

see it, you know, there's growth there. So it's it's a wonderful way of getting paid. If you're doing it on a small scale, if you're large scale, you don't give a fuck because you're going to reach that minimum threshold, but somebody that's doesn't have a lot of hash rate, and they're pointing it to a pool that that lightning stuff is just amazing and there's at least two people in the chat that heat their their homes or the areas of the home with um a6 and one we got narwhal he's using an s9 and so it's only two of three working boards was able to do it it's thing to keep some areas of

his home nice and warm. And yeah, he's dealing with extra heat, opening up the windows. That's awesome. So it's manual. But what you're proposing or what you're doing, this is all automatic, right? The ambient temperature in which it's inside the ducting itself is throttling or the input of the energy is being varied by the ambient temperature, is that correct? Yeah, exactly. That was the big aha moment for these systems because it turns it into like a thermostat controlled heater that pays you instead of a Bitcoin miner that you can use the heat.

It's really prioritizing the heat first which was the big aha moment and then once you do that you're basically you're capitalizing on the fact that you can run down clock for let's call it 60 to 70 percent of the duty cycle. So you can take these old machines that are let's call them like a J-PRO, it's like 30 joules per terahash, so not profitable at current electric rates. But if you run it at 1500 watts, 1600 watts, you're in the profitability range of like a K-Pro, which is like triple the price and will give you a slight profit mark. Like, so there's, you know, there's some interesting synergies with a system that automatically down clocks according to ambient.

And it's really interesting how these machines are designed to target a hash rate and then modulate wattage and fans to suit that, so your steady hash rate. If you let the hash rate take a back seat and you're looking at ambient temperature and then you use the ambient temperature to drive the fan speed, which drives the wattage, it's like a reversal of how it's typically done, but it's the best way to kind of have like an appliance grade heater from a Bitcoin miner. There's so much more programmable than a propane HVAC system, which is just fire, no fire, fire.

Even some of the newer ones, they have like, you know, two out of four burners on and then four out of four burners on. It's still kind of like overkill, which creates the need for like a 15 to 30 minute duty cycle where it's bang on, bang off. This is very different from that. And what it lets you do is like, like a 2,000, 2,500 square foot home will have like a 60,000 BTU furnace. The rule of thumb for me is you can get away with a third of that by increasing your duty cycle three times. So instead of a half an hour duty cycle, your minimum duty cycle is like an hour and a half,

two hours, which allows you to do that extra long run time at lower wattage and just use the electricity that you need, which is huge. You're not mining more than you need and then blowing out the heat that you don't need. You're actually tuning down so that your electrical bill doesn't grow to what a mining bill would be. It's still a heating bill. So I guess the anecdote here is at my home here, before I went to heating at Bitcoin miners, I had two utility bills, two main ones, I had propane, which is about $200 a month. And then I had electrical, which is about $200 a month. After heating with Bitcoin miners, now my electrical bills about $400 a month, but I'm getting just a little

bit more than $400 a month back in Bitcoin. So that's, you know, that's attracted to me that I really liked. So let's use that example at 2000 to 2500 square foot home. And say somebody calls you and asks you for your recommendation, what needs to be installed? What type of ASIC, which variant, which model would you recommend for that type of setup? And secondly, what would be the cost to have it all installed? Like we're talking purchasing it, the cutting of the ductwork, all that shit. What would be the final cost to get that installed? So that depends on the

particular electric rate. For this example we'll just use Ontario. I think it's if you're curtailing on peak, you're about 12 cents a kilowatt hour. So for the US listeners, it's about just under 10 cents per kilowatt hour. US. So for that, you can actually get away with like a J pro, which is, you know, you can find them for five, six hundred dollars used typically. That's Canadian or US? Canadian. But again, like that's today. If the price is going up, you know Bitcoin price keeps going up, the A6 will keep

going up as well. So timing the buys is kind of important for someone like me. So I can keep stock because you know if the Bitcoin price quickly goes to 200k that's gonna be really hard to find these things So but but the justification for installing one will be you know so much more valid so Sorry, what was your original question again the what's the typical process? Oh, yeah, so Once I you know know your electric rate, and I can tell you which minor works best then Typically one minor per thousand square feet. So 2000 square foot home, two miners. Then it comes down to designing them and that comes to some preferences. Did you want

filtered air, which is a recommendation of mine. You can filter the air going into the miner so it keeps the hash boards cleaner, less chance for fire and it filters your air. It's like an air purifier on steroids because of the amount of CFMs that are moving through these things. So there's all these additional benefits. So then yeah, design the system, show up, install it. As far as pricing, there are some advantages to, there are some economies of scale.

So two miners can fit on one PDU, one PDU switch, one fan controller, and one L630 outlet. So one miner is about $3,000 for an S19J Pro with, you know, all the shrouds and filters and the whole kit basically, ducting flanges. Two miners is only about $4,200 because again that you can economize by having two on some of the same infrastructure. And I always recommend overpowering a system versus under because two miners underclocked will run more efficiently than one severely overclocked. So the idea here is you run very efficiently most of the time, most of the year, and then on those minus 30 days, you can keep up with it by having the miners automatically

overclock when the demand is there. In terms of the setup, it sounds like it's going to be in parallel. Sorry, in series, right beside each other, is that correct? That's right. Rather than being a... So, okay. So, two right beside each other.

It's not creating any noise, because you're having two units right beside each other. I do know that it's being driven by the ambient temperature, the fan's being driven by that, but still in a whole, depending on what the clientele, is it noisy enough that it's gonna be noticeable by people, or is it just quiet, you won't even tell it's on? It's less noisy than when the furnace kicks on for its regular duty cycle. Okay.

It's actually, like one minor is less noisy than one of the air purifiers I have sitting on the counter beside it downstairs. And that's than one of the air purifiers I have sitting on the counter beside it downstairs. And that's because most of the time you're running at fan speed 4 or 5. Now that's 4 or 5 out of 10. Fan speed 10 out of 10 is 806 CFM, which I think is double what the 4 computer fans, the stock computer fans, are able to produce on a Bitcoin miner. So the idea here is everything's super overbuilt. I look at how appliances are generally built

with all the redundancies and layers of, basically, yeah, safety redundancies. And the idea here is it's gotta be super overbuilt because if you wanna run it like an appliance inside of a house, you have to take some extra precautions and things to do that properly and safely. What was I going to mention? The fans are designed for industrial HVAC applications, so they're spec to run, I think, seven years

straight at 100% duty. industrial HVAC applications so they're spec to run I think seven years straight at a hundred percent duty so you know that would that's that's like where your I guess most critical point of failure is if your fan dies while your miners on and you've got you got overheating problems the firmware does you know automatically shut down but you never want to test that so the whole idea here was just figuring out ways to design this in a way that's as, I guess we'll use a Bitcoin critics terminology here, anti-fragile as possible. Favorite firmware? Lux OS has been, I've tried so many and Lux OS has just been the best for me because of

how responsive it is in overclocking and underclocking. What I like about it is, so I have a couple clients who have garages, like automotive garages, and I love that application because you have large bay doors that are constantly opening and closing and they're letting all that heat out. So the idea here is the miners will kick on real high when the doors open to try to get the ambient back to comfortable. And then, you know, once the doors are closed and the machines have been running on high for a bit, it'll automatically downclock. And how responsive the miners are to those, you know, minute by minute changes. And you can set the increment for how often it's taking the temperature of the chips.

So you can set it to one minute so that, know every minute you're making sure you're you're not under or overpowered as to what the demand is. As for maintenance on the machines what's required by the homeowner? So it's basically just changing the filter every like three to four months a filter should be changed. Now I would say you know to just pop off the shroud and clean the miner out every year but I was curious if that was even really a necessity so I've had a couple miners in my mining shed at a property up north go for like three years without a single cleaning. You know they seem to be

pretty good. There's a couple other people on X that are like yeah the dust doesn't do anything and then you hear stories of people who are cleaning their miners frequently and then like breaking them because they're too vigorous with their cleaning. So I think if you have a filter, you're pretty much just getting like visual inspection, making sure there's no, you know, chunks of fur in there, which I received used miners that had things like that in them. But I say once you filter that intake air the hash boards kind of look how you know after a year of use they look how they did on day one so it's really cool to see how those things work. And when it gets warm say for the late spring summer fall it's

not running at all is that correct? Yeah so that's where the Wi-Fi PDU switch kicks in. If the firmware can't lower the wattage enough to keep you at a comfortable temperature, for example, this would happen if your outside ambient temperature is above your desired interior ambient temperature. So it's 25 outside, you want 22, miner's on. Once you get up to your desired off temperature, the Wi-Fi PD switch cuts the power to the minor and then you can have your you know bang on temperature where if it gets under so there's there's periods where like actually around now we're during the day it's warm enough not to have them on but

then at night it'll dip down so if it goes below your let's in my house I have it at 20 degrees Celsius if it goes below 20 they'll just automatically turn back on and then down clock until they get to I think I have them off at 22.8 and then that 22.8 bang off wait again, so it's you do duty cycle, but the the firmware allows you to really lengthen that so you're not on off on off on office as a traditional HVAC system does. And in terms of the I guess the ROI what do you get daily on given today's hash rate and if it's a colder day what would typically a homeowner get in terms of sats per day? Yeah so I don't know I know it's a variable question depending on the temperature I'm just curious what somebody would be expecting.

What I did was I did a calculation at like 75% duty which is pretty typical if you're looking at it throughout the year. So at 75% you make just under like $200 on like a J-Pro like 175 Canadian, 185 depending on the day and the electricity expense is around there. It's about 170, 180. So if you are replacing that existing cost, you're not forced to sell. So essentially you make 180 a month, 200 a month. I mean a few weeks ago it was over 200 a month. So you know, as you know, things change, hash price changes and it changes frequently.'s a really volatile metric, but over the long run, it's, you know, I feel like it's really worth it. And about 18 months to 24 months is the typical ROI. Now, I started mining in like the depths of the bear market.

And what's interesting about that is my profitability was about the same as it is now. So, you know, it's kind of funny, it allows you to take advantage of long term appreciation only if you don't have to sell it. So I was thinking, okay, what's the best mechanism for having me not have to sell it? Like, what's the best way to not become a for seller? And by replacing an existing expense, I thought was a really cool way to do it. And what sort of power input are you generally using? Is it low key with 120 or 220 with the the stock power? So the typical installs are 220 or 240 just because you can get a lot more out of the miners. So I'll usually try to tee off an existing appliance,

like an oven outlet, which usually has more than enough headroom to run miners on. The other thing I've done is had like a licensed electrician come in and just install the L630 outlet to beside the furnace, so where I need it. I grab Wi-Fi with like a range extender so as long as there's Wi-Fi available I can grab it and use it for the miners. What I have recently got on

to is the low-key stuff the 120 volt. It's a whole idea of guerrilla mining is really appealing to me being able to just plug into any North American NEMA 15 wall outlet and mine sats while using the heat. And you can use your cell phone as a router. So as long as you could be mining sats in a hotel room. So that's really appealing to me. And I've kind of become like a 120 volt junkie. I'm building stuff and I'm getting stuff 3D printed.

And yeah, going down that rabbit hole pretty hard lately. And you were talking about the wifi signal. Does that get interrupted within the ducting itself? Is that something that you don't get a very strong signal inside the ducting or am I wrong? No, the miners don't go in the ducting. What I do is I integrate them with like an eight inch duct flange. So the miners are outside of the ducting.

The wifi PD switch, I use a polycarbonate case so that the signal for that wifi component isn't interrupted. I was looking at metal boxes originally and enclosures and I was like, oh wait, that's not going to work because of the wifi. So yeah, and I took it into consideration and never had any problems. The cool thing about mining is you can have hundreds of miners on like a dial-up connection because of the block size is so small

and so infrequent that your data packets are, you don't need any real intense throughput. You could, this is something I should look at more because I could essentially have like an eSIM on an old phone running the whole site up north instead of paying for like Rogers and then never you know not using all of it so yeah the throughput requirement super low so you can just get any range extender and as long as you can get like a 2.4g gigahertz connection yeah works great. It could also repurpose my old 2400 bod modem, right?

I could probably put that to, you're probably too young to even remember the 144, 336 or 56K modem. But yeah, back in the day, that's what we used to connect to the internet. We used to use the old dial up modem. Dial up, so I remember the noise. And it was slow as fuck, man. It was slow, slow as fuck. If someone picked up the phone, there goes your internet.

Yeah, done. So whatever you're downloading, you gotta guys start from scratch unfortunately, let's get a download manager No, I mean it's the games we used to fucking Oh my fucking god Anybody that does not have central heating with HVAC and all that shit like what options do they have available to them if they call You and say I want this type of setup? So if they call me they have a need, they don't have central HVAC, but let's say they're using like baseboard heaters, which is typical if you don't have, then there's a really good justification for running these as just like a space heater. The challenge becomes distributing that heat, so this is why I've been looking more

and more into like the 120 volt low keys. You can, instead of having one really powerful miner centrally in the house and then unable to kind of distribute the heat, you could have two or three or one per floor but have them, you know, as low key rigs where you're kind of tapped out at like 1400 watts, but 1400 watts times three, if you have three floors, it should do the job. So, yeah, that's what I'm looking at more and more, trying to figure out cost effective ways to build these. And then I really want to create something that's like plug and play, where I set it up before I sent it to client with their desired mining pool, their payout, everything set up so that they just plug it in when it arrives and then they see their balance going up every month.

What do you think is gonna happen in the future with this? Where do you see this transforming in the not too distant future? Because there's gotta be some sort of change in this, right? To make it easier for the homeowner to do this and will bitmain create its own unit that you could just simply plug it into your into your ducting and go from there like where do you see this moving forward because yeah it's very exciting stuff maybe I think I think I think people move away from bitmain just because of

their concentration with the pools and their constant like I think people move away from Bitmain just because of their concentration with the pools. And I think over 70% of all of the hash rate is derived from some sort of Bitmain product. Which again, that's a bit of a metric that you don't like to see. So I've been following what Block has been doing pretty closely. They're looking at like a modular kind of free open source hash board project. So yeah, I really like that idea where you're not kind of chained to a form factor. You know, if it becomes Lego, then you can really design something that's application specific. And you can probably do it at a lot less cost

because when I buy one of these things and I have to modify them, you're just throwing parts out. I'm getting like a box of bin of fans because I use all the AC Infinity fans. So it'd be cool to be able to kind of look at it as like a buffet and pick and choose from a menu and kind of Lego at it as like a buffet and pick and choose from a menu and kind of lego everything together. Do you notice there's an uptick in people asking for this type of service? Not because it's cold outside, but just in general because of interest with mining and repurposing the heat from those mining equipment?

Yeah, judging from the metrics on my Twitter engagement and others who are in the space, it's cool to see how it's becoming more and more mainstream amongst Bitcoiners. A few of us were invited to speak at the Bitcoin conference on the mining stage about heat reuse. So that's really cool. I'm looking forward to that. That's the one in Canada or the one in the States? No, the big one in Vegas. Yeah, there's a few kind of heat reuse people that I've met in Denver actually that are Canadian or the one in the States? No, the the the Vegas, the big one in Vegas. Okay. Be.

Yeah, there's a few kind of people use people that I've met in Denver actually better, it's gonna be cool to see them again. And so yeah, it's it's even unlike the more kind of financialized or financial focused audiences and what's called conferences, it's becoming more and more like I don't think a year ago, it would have been viable. But in the last year, you know, it's becoming more and more like I don't think a year ago it would have been viable but in the last year, you know, it's like again innovation through necessity, it becomes harder and less profitable. So it's forcing people into, you know, finding ways to capitalize on that heat instead of

just have it as a waste product and get rid of it and you know have it as a problem. So a lot of the stuff that hydro and immersion mining is doing it's cool to see that now some there's some air products out there that allow you like there's a there's like a little baseboard heater from Canaan out there there's a mini miner from them. I think what's minor just came up with a hydro unit that runs on 220. So it's a most of those are three phases. Fun just runs on a single phase. So there's a cool whole bunch of options out there. And I think some of them even now have higher chip temps. So better for like helping boil the water and things like that. Yeah, I think we're

just gonna get an explosion of products in the next couple of years because like you had a necessity, it's gonna go to the cheapest places for the cheapest power unless you have like a justification for the heat and using the heat as like an input to a product, that's like the real dream. I was thinking about zoos the other day, all these tropical animals.

There's so many ways. And then you could use the revenue to improve the conditions or the food quality for these animals. So there's so many ways that you could just plug and play miners right now and benefit the end user, whether it's a person or animal right away Have you talked to the people to the Canadian Bitcoin conference because given the clientele over to people attending obviously It's gonna be a majority canucks that are very cold in the winter

So have you discussed with them to maybe do a presentation at the Canadian Bitcoin conference in Montreal? You know, I reached out they were looking for someone to heat a large space with Bitcoin miners I was like, oh, I wonder if they're actually gonna keep the venue I reached out, they were looking for someone to heat a large space with Bitcoin miners. I was like, oh, I wonder if they're actually going to heat the venue. I reached out, but I haven't heard back. I'd love to talk there or to connect with somebody to talk about it there, or even to help them heat their space. I'd be happy to bring, you know, low key units or whatever it is, because there's a huge impact when you physically interact with the hardware, I think. And you see, you know, sounds the hardware. I think and you see you know Sounds this loud. It's this big it makes this much Bitcoin every month It costs this much to run if you can just get those four boxes checked a lot of people they get the fever

And they're just like how can I get one like how can I get to what once one's installed? They're like how can I do the garage now? How can I do the basement? So that's cool to see like it kind of makes me feel like i'm on the right path. Narwhal as said in the chat he didn't directly ask this question but he says he's not familiar with the low-key kit and we talked about low-key and we referenced it many times maybe you just give a brief over you what is a low-key kit. Yeah sorry I should have gotten into that more. So a really genius builder named Zach Bomsta who owns a company called Pivotal Pleb designs a whole bunch of really cool components that allow you to modify your Bitcoin miners that allow you to, you know,

it allows you to modify them so that you can bring them in the home and use them for heat reuse or just to quiet them down or whatever it is. The low-key chip is a chip that lets you ditch the APW-12 power supply which is a 240 volt, 220 volt power supply, grab an old S9 power supply whether it's an APW-3 plus plus or an APW-7 and then just basically have that you know plug in 120, 110 volt standard outlet power supply power the Bitcoin miner. It kind of tricks the control board into the correct voltage.

So it limits your overall hash power. So usually you'd have to remove one or two hash boards. But what it lets you do is use those other two hash boards in their own modules. So you can kind of decentralize, you can take one miner, decentralize it into three miners, one per floor and one per outlet. So, you know, most homes don't have, in North America, they don't have NEMA L630s.

They have the NEMA 15s, but they have them everywhere. So this lets you kind of take advantage of those outlets just being everywhere. Now every outlet is available to you. And with the Wi-Fi on board, you don't even need Wi-Fi. You could use your phone to mine. So yeah, I see these things being extremely effective, like for mold remediation or bed bug remediation.

In the summer, there's a whole bunch of things you could do with 120-volt versions, because you could just bring them anywhere. In terms of anything we didn't touch upon, it we should be touching upon. I'm going to throw this out to you. Is there something else that you wanted to talk about that we didn't? Something I missed in this whole conversation.

No, I think that was a pretty good overview. I think we hit on all the major points and just looking at my little cheat sheet here. Yeah, no, it's... Those are the kind of the main... It's just for me the incentives. I guess the overall thing here is the incentives just made so much sense for me that

I would have regretted not pursuing this. So I'm getting a lot of good feedback in the form of clients coming back for additional liners in other homes or other areas of the house. So yeah, if you're curious, reach out to me. I love chatting about this stuff. And if I can help you out, I'd love to do it.

How can I reach you? Best way is through my website. There's a little online form you can fill out and it goes to do it. How can I reach you? Best way is through my website. There's a little online form you can fill out, and it goes to my email. And also read it up. What's that again? That's 256heat.com. Also on Twitter, at Tron Mon-Gon.

It's a weird name. I really didn't think too hard about it before I typed it out. Tuan, sorry to interrupt. Just to give everybody here a heads up, it's in the description below. I put a link to your Twitter account and also your website just in case you want to just do easy click. It should be there in the description below.

So didn't mean to interrupt you, sorry. Yeah, no worries, thanks a lot. Yeah, anything else? Any final thoughts? Anything that you just want to get off your chest before we wrap this one up and tie a bow on it? That's it, Ben. Really appreciative of you having me on and

hopefully we can do it again. Yeah anytime there's some more activity more movement involvement at this let me know I'll be happy to bring you on. So with that hope you enjoy this and Tuan appreciate you taking the time to come on to the Canadian Bitcoiners podcast on a rare Tuesday edition for me because normally I do this on Wednesday, but I have a birthday tomorrow, not mine. Very, very close person. Oh, that's having a birthday. So that with that, we'll be back at this in Monday. So take care. Thanks.