I Tried to Offset Horrible Heating Bills With a Bitcoin Miner

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But once you’ve set up your device, Heatbit will track and file your mining revenue to your phone, even if you don’t yet have a bitcoin wallet set up. After you reach the transfer minimum of 100,000 satoshis, or one thousandth of one bitcoin ($66 at April 2026 prices), you can transfer this to your wallet and, presumably, spend it. Heatbit’s app is compatible with the Lightning networks and most major exchanges (Coinbase, Binance, OKX, BitFinex).

Unlike many air purifiers that activate only when there are air quality issues, the Heatbit continually pushes air through its HEPA filter while the miner and heater are active. While Heatbit recommends filter replacement once every six months, in practice, the app showed that the filter was being used up by about 1 percent a day. For whatever reason, my Heatbit app refused to believe that I was not in Seattle, and so my exterior air quality readings were all tied to King County, Washington.

Early quirks aside, the ease of onramp is admirable for a device not aimed at crypto-loving engineers. At current prices, if I run my heater/miner nonstop, this would net me about a $70 rebate on my heating bills once every two months. Pretty cool, right?

Why the Math on Heatbit Doesn’t Pencil

Heatbit via Matthew Korfhage

But here’s the problem with that math. I’d also need to pay at least $1,500 upfront (the current discounted price of the Maxi Pro) before I get access to these savings. This is about $1,350 more than the best space heaters I’ve tested. It’s also around $900 or $1,000 more than a combination purifier–heater from Dyson. So your money-saving math needs to take this upfront cost into account.

At this rate, assuming my energy costs and bitcoin prices stayed constant, it would take me between five and eight years to “make my money back” in bitcoin if I ran this thing 24/7 for four months a year. That’s on a device with a one-year warranty. (Heatbit’s founders say there has been a failure rate only in the “low single digits” after three years for the first-generation Heatbit Trio.)

These numbers assume I would otherwise run a space heater nonstop at full blast for months on end as a primary heat source—which is not how most people use space heaters. I tend to turn on a space heater only when I’m in a room, and direct it toward myself. For heating a whole house, natural gas or a heat pump are both far more cost-effective options, if available.

But let’s say you have only electricity for heat. And you would always be running a space heater. And let’s assume the Heatbit keeps running at the same efficiency for at least five years. Is the Heatbit now the best choice, economically? Well, still maybe not.

Every Crypto Miner Is a Heater

Every crypto mining device will heat your house, whether or not its makers advertise it as a space heater. Each miner will release heat with 100 percent efficiency, according to how much power it uses. That’s because one way or another, all power waste will eventually get converted to heat.

The most efficient combination space heater and bitcoin miner will always be the one that mines bitcoin most efficiently. At that point, you could just pick up a Canaan Avalon Q ($1,900) and get a 50 percent better hash rate and produce about the same amount of heat. Newfangled ASIC Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) miners might net you even better efficiency. Pretty much anything you use, with the same amount of power, will release this much heat.



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Ariel Shapiro
Ariel Shapiro
Uncovering the latest of tech and business.

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