Recently, a French startup Quarnot introduced a cryptomining heater that is capable of paying for itself at some point through harnessing huge reserves of heat that get generated while CPU is busy mining for the cryptocurrency.
Labeled as Quarnot’s QC1, the heater is said to keep your house warm during the torturous winter season and also earn you some extra income. It is marketed as the first computing heater made for cryptocurrency mining as it has a passive computer installed inside that can perform crypto-mining.
Quarnot has termed it as a decentralized data center; the cryptomining heater mines for Ethereum by default at a 60 MH/s speed. It is also equipped with conventional heating conductors in case you need extra warmth. Miroslav Sviezeny, COO, and co-founder of Qarnot stated at a press conference that:
“We provide computing capacity with an extremely hard constraint, which is the heating needs of consumers; the heat of your QC-1 is generated by the two graphics cards embedded in the device and mining cryptocurrencies or blockchain transactions: While heating, you create money.”
QC-1 is the result of an on-going research project from Quarnot, which started in 2010 to find productive edge computing solution for data centers. The French startup has so far developed three generations of computing heaters equipped with multiple CPUs. These were sold to construction firms in need of heaters for their new buildings while firms like BNP Paribas, Blender, Air Liquide and Société Générale are renting them.
The device is quite impressively designed with its slick appearance and amazing capabilities powered by two AMD GPUs Sapphire Nitro and Radeon RX580 with 8GB of VRAM Radeon. The only downside is its high rate of $3,600 (€2,900 TTC), which is fairly high for a space heater even if it can mine cryptocurrency.
The device cannot be used to play games or checking emails although it can be controlled from your cell phone. To set it up, you need to simply plug in the device to an Ethernet cable and add your Ethereum wallet address in the mobile app that is used to control it. Gradually you will start receiving Ethers on your wallet while Qarnot itself won’t be receiving any commission. Therefore the mined amount will be totally yours. If you want to mine for other cryptocurrencies such as Litecoin, you can access the computer and mine for it since it is a Linux server based device.
But, for such high price one can easily buy a high-end gaming PC that too with two comparable cards inside and then use it for cryptomining as well. After all, the cryptomining heater would return the investment amount in around five and a half years of non-stop crypto-mining (@ $120 or €100 per month) if we consider the latest Ethereum exchange rate. So, why block your money for a space heater.
However, using extra heat from crypto-mining for keeping your indoor environment warm and cozy is definitely a ground-breaking idea since crypto-mining produces a massive amount of heat. This way, you can put the excess heat to good use. But it also makes passive crypto-mining much more approachable for users. The company is planning to start selling these heaters from next year onwards.