Get Bitcoins for Turning on the Heater? A Real Review of the Internet Celebrity "Mining Electric Heater"!

When writing this article, BlockBeats specifically checked the meteorological data of previous years. 2018 was not only the coldest year in the cryptocurrency world in the past decade, but also the year with the fastest cold wave and temperature drop in Beijing since the beginning of winter in the past decade. On the day of writing the article, the lowest temperature had dropped to minus 10 degrees Celsius.

As the saying goes, "In a bull market, everyone makes money, but in a bear market, everyone huddles together for warmth" - the official website of BlockBeats (TheBlockBeats.com) launched not long ago aggregates high-quality content from home and abroad in the blockchain industry, hoping to spend this cold winter together with everyone.

On the eve of the official website launch, BlockBeats received a special product - the Avalon A851H "Mining Heater".

This mining heater, which looks very much like a household electric heater, is produced by Canaan Creative. In fact, as early as March this year, a French technology company released a concept map of the mining heater, which made the mining heater a phenomenal product of Internet celebrities. We are even more interested in it. At the Canaan Creative 7nm chip launch conference in August this year, Canaan Creative unexpectedly released their own mining heater. We finally got the real mass-produced machine not long ago. Today we will use real practical experience to evaluate this Internet celebrity product for everyone.

This mining heater integrates 104 16nm Avalon A3210M chips, with a rated computing power of 14.5Thash/s and a wall power consumption of 1450w/h (-5% to +20%). It is called a "mining heater" because Canaan has built a water circulation system in this mining machine, which can transfer the heat generated by the chip when performing hash operations to the room, thereby achieving the effect of heating the room. In this cold winter, the heat dissipation problem of the mining machine, which has been criticized by people, can finally be transformed into a house-warming artifact.

According to Canaan Creative, this mining machine can blow out hot air in about 5 minutes after the configuration is completed. In the actual experience of BlockBeats, the configuration process is a bit cumbersome for ordinary users, and there are still many details that need to be improved, but with the help of customer service, we finally succeeded in getting it to work. Let's talk about the configuration process and usage experience.

Step 1: Find the air conditioning socket in your home

As a high-power electricity-consuming device, the wall power of the "mining electric heater" is 1450w/h, which is equivalent to a two-horsepower indoor air conditioner, so a dedicated air-conditioning socket must be used.

Many office spaces or commercial and residential buildings will install air-conditioning sockets in a relatively high position during decoration, which requires the purchase of several meters of high-power socket strips to power them. This takes into account the safety of the lines when the power consumption is high.

In addition, the mining heater can only be configured via wired mode for the first time, so it is also necessary to prepare a sufficiently long network cable in advance.

Considering that the usage scenario of this mining heater is home or office use, you need to calculate whether the power consumption of household appliances used by the whole family will exceed the maximum power of the meter, such as the power consumption of TVs, air conditioners, heaters, computers and other equipment. If it exceeds the maximum power, it may cause unsafe power use and tripping problems.

When using BlockBeats, I encountered the problem of tripping due to power overload when multiple air conditioners were running at the same time. Students who want to try it must first make sure that the operating environment at home is sufficient to load such high-power appliances to avoid causing unnecessary trouble to yourself and your neighbors.

Step 2: Get your router

The "electric heater" is also used with an AUC and a Raspberry Pi, which are connected to the mining machine via a USB cable. You only need to follow the instructions in the manual to complete the assembly.

The next step is to connect the Raspberry Pi and the router with the prepared network cable, and then we will move on to the classic router management page.

Since Canaan Creative sets the default subnet address of the Raspberry Pi to 192.168.0.100, you must change the router's subnet address pool to 192.168.0.xxx before you can enter the Raspberry Pi configuration page.

When the above changes to the route take effect (it takes a few minutes to wait), the browser visits 192.168.0.100 and you can see the "Avalon Miner" configuration page as shown below. (You can find more detailed configuration tutorials online, so we won't go into details here)

Step 3: Register and configure a mining pool account

The factory configuration of the Raspberry Pi defaults to Canaan Creative's own mining pool. Of course, you can also change it to your favorite mining pool address!

If you want to get your own income, you need to fill in your own mining pool address information. Here, take F2Pool as an example. After registering an account, you can add three digital currency wallet addresses: BTC/ETH/LTC. Then fill in your username and F2Pool address in the Worker and Pool URL of the mining heater respectively. The password can be left blank or left blank.

(Courageous people, could you please change the name of your mining machine worker to the above?)

During the configuration of the mining machine, the Raspberry Pi that came with it encountered some problems. After we contacted Avalon's official customer service, we obtained the flashing files, flashing tools, and flashing tutorials. Unexpectedly, the customer service was online all the time on Sunday afternoon.

After the equipment was reconfigured, the mining machine stopped working. The customer service told me that I could just restart the mining machine if I encountered such a problem. The problem was then solved. However, this configuration and experience are still too complicated for ordinary home users.

Step 4: Add water and feel the "temperature" of mining

The mining electric heater has a built-in water circulation system. If it is turned on for a long time, you need to remember to add water in time to avoid dry burning.

There is a special water inlet on the right side of the mining machine. It should be noted that you should not add water too quickly, otherwise it will not be worth it if it spills on the non-waterproof Raspberry Pi or seeps into the mining machine of the heater.

After mining started, the air from the mining machine outlet was undoubtedly cool. After waiting for about 7-8 minutes, you can vaguely feel some warm air. Of course, if compared with the vertical air conditioner of the same power, these warm air pales in comparison, but for my Bitcoin, it is still acceptable. At this time, the mining machine's computing power shows 14.8~15T, which is relatively stable. The overall noise is relatively good, and there is no roaring sound of the mining machine in my impression. The anti-noise treatment is done well.

In the BlockBeats office, we placed the mining heater in a separate room of about 16 square meters and closed the door. After an hour and a half, the room temperature began to rise gradually. We compared it with another office connected to this room, which was equipped with a vertical air conditioner. The temperature difference between the two rooms was at least 5°C.

How much money can you make and is it worth it?

On the Avalon mining machine statistics page, the computing power of this electric heater is stable at 14.9~15.0T, and the operation process is relatively stable. The fish pool shows that the profit after one day is 0.00065BTC. According to the current price, this mining heater can earn 15.4 yuan a day.

The BlockBeats office is subject to the civilian tiered electricity price, and normal use has entered the third tier electricity price, 0.788 yuan per kWh. According to the 1500W power of the mining machine, it consumes 36 kWh of electricity in 24 hours, and needs to pay 28.4 yuan for electricity.

After a day of driving, the house is barely cold, and I still need to pay 13 yuan for electricity. The main reason why I have to burn money to run the mining machine heater is the low price of Bitcoin. If the price returns to the level of 6K, I can basically break even. If it is higher, I can make a little money after paying the electricity bill. Of course, because BlockBeats is located in Beijing, and the area where the office is located does not have winter heating subsidies, the cost is relatively high.

According to the payback forecast, considering that the price of this built-in mining machine has dropped to 1,300 yuan in the market, it will take 87 days for the Avalon A851 to pay back its investment. When Canaan Creative launched this mining electric heater in October, it was priced at 4,000 yuan, which can be reduced to 3,600 yuan when purchased from channels, and now it can be bought for less than 3,000 yuan. Because the cost of the mining heater itself is more than 1 times that of the mining machine, the payback period also needs to be doubled in proportion.

In another three months, winter will be over. It may not be easy to get back the money in such a short time, but if the Bitcoin output is used to subsidize the electricity bill, it is equivalent to spending less electricity in the winter, plus a belief in Bitcoin.

In general, if you are a Bitcoin or technology enthusiast, you can definitely buy one to play with, but it is not realistic to use it to completely replace the home heating and air conditioning as the main heating source. Of course, it is not ruled out that upgraded accessories will be released in the future to enhance the heating effect. In commercial office buildings or areas without heating subsidies, the cost of electricity is still relatively high. In addition, the electricity environment must be carefully examined to avoid excessive power and electrical safety issues.