Bitcoin mining is often criticized as an energy-wasting activity that’s harmful to the environment. In fact, that’s the reason why Elon Musk decided to remove BTC from the list of available payment methods at Tesla. However, there might be a way to put the negative impact of bitcoin mining to good use.
One Bitcoin miner has already done it. Jonathan Yuan, a BTC aficionado from Minnesota, has come up with an out-of-the-box way to make use of the excessive heat created by his Bitcoin-mining setup. He is using it to heat his swimming pool.
What prompted Yuan to do it was that his kids love swimming but couldn’t do it too often due to cold weather in their state. By taking advantage of the “waste” heat, they now have the luxury to use the swimming pool throughout the year even when the air temperature is very low.
How to Heat Your Swimming Pool With a BTC Miner?
As you can see in the video above, Yuan wasn’t the first one to come up with the idea of using the heat produced by Bitcoin miners to heat a swimming pool. However, he didn’t follow the guidelines of other BTC enthusiasts; instead, he did everything by himself.
In an interview for Cointelegraph, Yuan explained that he bought a heat exchanger and set-up some ACICs (application-specific integrated circuits), which enabled him to heat the swimming pool, keeping the water temperature at over 90F throughout summer.
According to him, this method works better than traditional pool heaters. Yuan’s been tracking the water temperature in his pool for a while now and was able to come up with the conclusion that the temperature swings are usually only 1-2F per day. This goes even for days when the ambient temperatures change by as much as 40F within a 24-hour period.
Canadian City Planning to Harness Bitcoin Energy
Making us of “waste” heat might be the future of Bitcoin mining. In addition to individual examples of people like Jonathan Yuan, some companies are also working on similar projects. The best example is the crypto-mining company from Canada called MintGreen, whose plan is to harness the BTC energy to heat homes in the city of North Vancouver.
As reported by Independent a few months ago, the company will be joining forces with the local government, which will provide the city’s heating network to transfer the heat from Bitcoin miners to end-users.
According to the plan, MintGreen will use its Digital Boilers to turn the energy created by Bitcoin mining into heat used for heating local commercial and residential buildings. The company claims that about 96% of all the energy that’s been going to waste will be recovered.
MintGreen believes that this way, they will be able to provide heating to more than 100 buildings in North Vancouver throughout the year.
