What mining does is convert electricity to heat, but not just any heat... specifically something between 90C to 120C, or heat around the boiling point of water. This heat density is too low for most industrial uses, except possibly things like water purification. It cannot be used for smelting, semiconductor processes, or anything that requires very high heat density without a heat pump.

This is from a 2014 reddit post. The post goes on to speculate that Bitcoin mining will always be an unprofitable business because so many people can use the waste heat from miners that there will always be miners willing to mine with negative returns. He uses the water heater industry as an example.

Fast forward to 2026: in reply to a recent post about bitcoin mining heat reuse in water heaters, @Undisciplined expressed interest in learning about who was building such things (#1499435). How is it that we are still wondering if anyone is working on this?

The Beginnings of HeatpunkingThe Beginnings of Heatpunking

As early as February 2011, a user on BitcoinTalk was posting about using Bitcoin miner heat to heat water that heated his bathroom floor. Sadly, I haven't been able to retrieve the pictures from this post:

In the same thread, another user suggests using miners for water heaters:

There were other threads about it in 2011, too. With a user asking pretty much the same question as Undiscplined: who's doing this and how can I help?

Throughout 2011, there are quite a number of threads about heatpunking on BitcoinTalk and reddit. On YouTube, a user named storky16 uploads a video about dehydrating fruit with bitcoin miner heat.

And someone on reddit posts about buying BitBerries -- strawberries that were dehydrated via waste heat from bitcoin miners.

The story even made it into a local newspaper:

The strawberries are apparently sold at the local grocery store and can be paid for with bitcoin; the back of the package says: “These berries were produced using filtered, recycled heat produced by computers that perpetuate Bitcoin: the world’s first alternative, decentralized currency.”

The bitberries are not available online, but the strawberry farmer is looking into ways to put up an online storefront. Golden berries and goji berries are also available for bitcoin.

Heatpunkery getting professionalHeatpunkery getting professional

Also in 2011, Microsoft published "The Data Furnace: Heating Up with Cloud Computing." The paper describes how servers could be sent to homes and office buildings to be used as primary heat sources.

A fellow named Matt Fisher liked the idea so much he started a project called The Data Furnace. It's website described it as:

a project started by Fisher Innovation to test if it is possible to heat a standard size city apartment during the cold winters in Canada with only distributed computing as the source of heat.

I don't know how long the project lasted. It seems like the wayback machine crawled it as late as the end of 2014, but the crawl doesn't return anything. At some point though it seems that Fisher was heating his apartment with bitcoin miners:

The current Data Furnace setup generates its heat from working in a distributed network. Most distributed networks on the internet today give out no rewards for donating your computing power, you're simply just helping out a good cause. However the Bitcoin digital currency network does payout the workers, the payouts are small but overtime add up to usually be more then the cost of hydro to run the machines.

A mining company called Hotmine claims to have been founded in 2013 and

In 2014, we have developed a model of the miner based on immersion-cooling for the heating of residential premises based on a 55 nm ASIC chip, with a performance of 81 TH/s

I found some YouTube videos from a channel they had in 2015 showing these systems:

You can still reach the hotmine.io website, but it doesn't look like it's been updated since 2019 or so, although I found this reddit post about one of their heaters from late 2019.

Throughout the mid twenty-teens, there were a smattering of posts about using miner waste heat as a consumer product. A guy named Alex Waters posted about heating his NTC apartment with miners in 2014. And in 2015, a guy named Joseph Lindley published a somewhat strange academic-ish paper about a fictional world a UK Ministry of Crypto Currency promotes residential mining as a heat source. Apparently Lindley built a working prototype as part of his project:

The main element of the exhibit is a fully working Crypto Heater prototype. This device is (in the fictional world,and the real world) part of the distributed network of Bitcoin miners. Through computation, it converts electrical energy into cryptographic currency. Uniquely Crypto Heater dissipates the heat energy (a by-product of the computational effort required to be a Bitcoin miner)through a standard household radiator. By offsetting the value of the cryptographic currency produced, against the cost of electricity used, the heater provide subsidized domestic heating.

There were also a couple of faddish articles about people who used bitcoin miners to heat their homes (and even an ethereum miner?)

In 2017, a company called Heatmine (yes, Bitcoin suffers from a lack of naming imagination) was offering a heating solution for individuals and commercial buildings. Although their website didn't mention Bitcoin or cryptocurrency, a FastCompany article about them says the founders began by heating their own warehouse but quickly moved on to greenhouses and other buildings. They show up in the news again in early 2019 but unfortunately, by 2021 the website was no longer live.

Qarnot Computing introduced a "Crypto Heater" in 2018 (featured in TechCrunch). They had been selling a distributed computing product as a heater since as early as 2013. Sadly, their Crypto Heater was a shitcoin heater:

The default configuration is setup for mining the most profitable asset among 3 Ethereum, Zcash and Monero (Ethereum being the most profitable one at the moment).

In 2023, Qarnot raised a new round of $38m but didn't mention bitcoin or crypto in its press release.

The modern heatpunk era...same as the old era?The modern heatpunk era...same as the old era?

Not every Bitcoin heatpunk pivoted to crypto and data centers: in July 2020, Jesse Peltan posted a video on Twitter of his SPA-256 hottub heated by bitcoin miners:

Erin Malone also published a very detailed substack with step by step descriptions of heating a hot tub with waste heat from bitcoin miners.

In early 2021,a French company called WiseMining announced their Bitcoin miner boiler called the Sato Boiler that cost $8990 and was compatible with Antminer S9, S17, S19, S19 Pro, S19+ (mining equipment sold separately).

WiseMining later turned into a company called Hestiia, still advertising their Sato Boiler in 2022. By 2024, Hestiia was marketing a product called myeko pro that still used waste heat from some sort of computing, but the website no longer mentioned Bitcoin.

Hestiia is not to be confused with the French-Canadian company Hestia, which was founded in 2022 and also seems to do waste heat recovery from Bitcoin miners specifically aimed at commercial heating situations.

They also don't say much about Bitcoin on their website, referring to heat from data centers. But just because it wasn't good marketing to talk about Bitcoin mining, doesn't mean that the heatpunks had given up.

In June 2021, CoinHeated showed off his 17k gallon swimming pool heated by bitcoin miners:

Prefiguring the spa in New York City which uses Bitcoin miners to heat its water and still stacks sats in self-custody as far as I can tell.

In November 2021, a guy going by StateFall published "A Bitcoin heated house" on Medium.

He also published a thread on Twitter that had a bunch of pictures:

The most recent thing he posted about mining was a company called Bee Evolved combining Bitcoin miners with a honey bee hive:

The same company now seems to be producing a miner-powered incubator for chicks.

It seemed like heatpunking was really going to take off in the early 2020s: the city of North Vancouver announced a Bitcoin heating pilot with MintGreen in 2022. Unfortunately, it looks like this project has not yet gotten off the ground. As of 2026, the MintGreen website still lists the District Energy project as "coming soon."

Heatpunkery seemed fairly widespread during this time -- there are more projects than I can mention here. Some notable highlights are BitcoinBrabant heating greenhouses in the Netherlands, Hashing2Heating, and Hashlabs heating a small town in Finland. The [256 Foundation] was also started around this time.

Also in the early 2020s, Heatbit announced a Kickstarter for their first product and started shipping in October of 2022. 21energy also got started around this time and we have @denlillaapan's excellent review of using one of their fine products (#1466211).

One of the most thorough descriptions of heatpunking comes in April of 2022, when Schnitzel (aka Michael Schmid) started posting about his build of a bitcoin miner water heater...

Which ended up looking pretty awesome:

Prior to this, he was using an S9 to heat his Airstream in winter:

There's a great interview with Schnitzel on YouTube:

Schnitzel did an excellent job documenting his build and the project generated a lot of buzz. Both Schnitzel and CoinHeated ended up speaking at Bitcoin conferences. It looks like Schnitzel was also involved in an endeavor called Nakamoto Heating which produced a number of detailed threads about Bitcoin space heaters and water heaters as well as very detailed build videos.

In 2023, Nakamoto Heating installed a bitcoin miner powered hot tub at Bitcoin Park in Nashville. I'm not sure what happened to Nakamoto Heating (the website no longer loads), perhaps they have been rolled into the Denver heatpunk gravity well.

The Denver Bitcoiners at The Space have really taken on the heatpunk mantle. There, Tyler Stevens heads up the heatpunks movement, publishing Bitcoin Mining Heat Reuse and founding the Hashrate Heatpunks (ebook). Stevens also started a company called Exergy Energy whose mission "is to decentralize mining by trojan-horsing the heating industry with electric devices powered by hashrate. Heaters powered by bitcoin mining are insensitive to network metrics."

The Hashrate Heatpunks also operate a forum for heatpunkery, which is worth checking out.

So, where can you get a Bitcoin water heater today?So, where can you get a Bitcoin water heater today?

There was a project called [Hashrate House])https://www.hashratehouse.com/5kw-hydro-system-main) that seemed to be selling a Bitcoin miner water heater in 2023, but they have since pivoted to hot tubs, making the Hashtub (#1493061).

Heatbit, 21energy, Canaan makes Bitcoin miner space heaters, but not water heaters. There is a project called [asic dip] that makes boilers, but I've had trouble with their website.

A Bitcoin miner powered water heater called Superheat was announced earlier this year (#1407813, #1455560) so, perhaps they are taking up the torch.