Unlike many air purifiers that only activate when there are air quality issues, the Heatbit continuously pushes air through its HEPA filter while the miner and heater are active. While Heatbit recommends changing the filters once every six months, in practice, the app showed that the filters were being used about 1 percent per day. For whatever reason, my Heatbit app refused to recognize that I wasn’t in Seattle, and so my outdoor air quality readings were tied to King County, Washington.
Initial quirks aside, the ease of onramp is commendable for a device not targeted at crypto-savvy engineers. At current prices, if I ran my heater/miner non-stop, that would save me $70 to $100 on my heating bill once every two months. Very nice, isn’t it?
Why doesn’t math work with pencil on Heatbit?
Heatbit via Matthew Korfage
But here’s the problem with that math. I also have to make a down payment of at least $1,500 (the current discounted price of the Maxi Pro) before I can access these savings. That’s about $1,350 more than the best space heater I tested. That’s also about $900 or $1,000 more than Dyson’s combination purifier-heater. So your money-saving math needs to take this upfront cost into account.
At this rate, assuming my energy costs and Bitcoin prices remained stable, it would take me five to eight years to “earn my money back” in Bitcoin if I ran this thing 24/7 for four months a year. This is on a device with a one year warranty. (Heatbit’s founders say the failure rate after three years for the first-generation Heatbit Trio has only been in the “low single digits.”)
These numbers assume that I would otherwise run a space heater at full speed non-stop for months as a primary heat source – which is not how most people use space heaters. I turn on the space heater only when I’m in a room, and direct it toward me. For whole house heating, natural gas or a heat pump, if available, are both far more cost-effective options.
But let’s say you only have electricity for heat. And you’ll always have the space heater running. And let’s assume the Heatbit continues to run at the same efficiency for at least five years. Is Heatbit the best option financially now? Well, still probably not.
Every Crypto Miner is a Heater
Every crypto mining rig will heat your home, whether its manufacturer advertises it as a space heater or not. Each miner will release heat according to how much electricity it uses, with 100 percent efficiency. This is because one way or the other, all the power wasted will eventually be converted into heat.
The most efficient combination space heater and bitcoin miner will always be the one that mines bitcoins most efficiently. At that time, you could just pick up a Canaan Avalon Q ($1,900) and get 50 percent better hash rate and generate about the same amount of heat. Newer-generation ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) miners can give you even better efficiency. Almost anything you use, with the same amount of power, will release that much heat.
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