Some Americans Are Trying to Heat Their Homes with Bitcoin Mining

The Heatbit Trio is basically a CPU with a radiant-heating coil stacked on top of it. On “eco” mode, it uses just 400 watts of electricity to power that little internal computer, which simultaneously runs the cryptomining calculations and also cranks out roughly the same, equivalent heating power.

Using the excess heat from those computer processes as a radiant-heat source is not entirely unprecedented. For example, a spa in Brooklyn uses recycled cryptomining heat in its pools, and a whole community in Finland gets its heat from a cryptomining server farm.

But the Heatbit Trio does offer the added advantage of that heating coil, which you can switch on if you’re still feeling chilly. In that mode, it can run at up to 1,400 watts, while the cryptomining rig below continues working as normal. (Most standard space heaters can run at up to 1,500 watts.)

Of course, you may be wondering what “normal” even means in this context—which is fair.

For at-home cryptomining, your hard drive connects via Wi-Fi to a “pool” of other cryptomining rigs spread around the world. Each of those machines contributes a bit of computational power to the pool, and they work together to try to complete a complicated equation.

“It’s basically a race to solve the next math problem,” explained Molly White, a former software engineer who runs the popular newsletter Citation Needed and the blockchain-commentary website Web3 is Going Just Great. “Whoever comes to that solution the fastest is awarded the opportunity to add the next ‘block’ to the blockchain. In order to incentivize people to do all of this, a small amount of Bitcoin is released and given to the miners as a reward.”

That reward then gets distributed across all of the computers in the pool. If your Heatbit Trio is included, well, congratulations: You’ve just earned yourself a (very) small slice of Bitcoin! (While also keeping yourself warm and without wasting any additional energy.) You can then potentially use those earnings to help offset the electrical costs involved with running your cryptomining space heater in the first place.

Potentially.

As a space heater, the Heatbit Trio is pretty good. It comes with all the crucial safety features that we tend to look for in a space heater, including a tip-over switch and overheat protection.

It doesn’t make too much noise, either; we measured it around 53 decibels, about as loud as our long-running budget-pick space heater from Lasko, and a fraction of the volume of an actual industrial cryptomining facility.

When I put the Heatbit Trio through the same trials that I do for every space heater, it performed well overall. It did take a little longer to boot up than other space heaters because of that CPU inside. It also took some time to really get the heat going; the temperature barely changed for the first half hour of the test.

But the Heatbit Trio ultimately pulled through, raising the overall room temperature by nearly 13 degrees over the course of two hours, a result that made it almost as powerful as some of our current picks. (Almost.)

Even more impressive was that we measured only about a 2.4-degree difference across our temperature sensors, which means it was more even and consistent than a lot of other space heaters out there.

To my surprise, the Heatbit Trio didn’t dry the room out, either. Most space heaters tend to obliterate the humidity, producing a desiccated warmth as a result. But the Heatbit Trio kept the humidity strangely consistent, which felt more comfortable overall.

If I were judging the Heatbit Trio based solely on its heating prowess, it wouldn’t quite earn a top-pick nod, but it might garner an honorable mention.

But I suspect that you’re less interested in the heating coils than in the other part.

The first thing worth noting in that regard is that the Heatbit Trio is surprisingly easy to set up for cryptomining. All you need to do is download the app and enter a phone number, and you’re pretty much good to go. It’s already hooked up to a mining pool, and as soon as you turn on the heat, it starts earning.

Well, technically.

During an average eight-hour workday, I spent about 75¢ on electricity and typically earned a total of around 0.0000014 Bitcoin (BTC) per day. Based on the current value of Bitcoin, that’s roughly the equivalent of 14¢—slightly less than the estimates provided by the calculator on the Heatbit website, and hardly the high-rolling cryptoculture life you may have heard about.

Even if I were to let the Heatbit Trio run 24 hours a day for an entire month, adding about $67 to my electrical bill, I would earn only around 0.0001246 BTC, or a whopping $12.50, assuming I were to cash out right now.

You also can’t use the app to control the heater from your phone. To be clear, you can use the app to monitor the Trio’s current status—it allows you to check your air quality or the current temperature and settings—but you can’t actually control the device remotely with it. The company says it’s planning to add that feature in an upcoming firmware update. But the omission still seems like a strange oversight for something that’s already connected to Wi-Fi.

The onboard controls are strangely oriented too. While the user interface on the Trio is slightly different from what you’d find on other space heaters, it isn’t that difficult to parse. The problem is with the directional fins, which point the heat in the opposite direction of the control screen. So if the controls are facing you—so that you can read the temperature—the heat shoots away from you. The designers could easily remedy that by just flipping the digital interface.

Let’s be clear: I’m not here to give you financial advice, nor would I be qualified to do that. But I can assess the technical value of a $900 space heater that also doubles as a Bitcoin miner.

In that regard, you’re better off spending $70 on the Vornado VH200 than buying a Heatbit Trio. Heatbit has even acknowledged that its heater is not designed to pay for itself. Our long-running Vornado pick is smaller, quieter, and capable of warming the room faster, and it comes with a five-year warranty that’s not incumbent upon a continued subscription. On top of that, in going for the Vornado model, you’ll keep an extra $800 or so in your pocket to do with as you please.

I shared my experience with crypto enthusiasts and skeptics alike, and they all agreed. “If you’re hoping to accumulate Bitcoin, you’re not going to do it in any substantial fashion by running a space heater,” said Molly White, the crypto critic. “You could just go buy Bitcoin.”

In fact, if you were to take all the money you saved by buying the Vornado VH200 instead of the Heatbit Trio, you could potentially buy around 0.008 BTC at the current exchange rate—the equivalent of about 64 months’ worth of mining income, assuming the Heatbit Trio could last that long.

Keith Russell, a software engineer who built his own cryptomining rig to heat his home office, had a similar perspective. “I don’t know any home miners who do Bitcoin, because it’s really not profitable,” he said. (Russell used his home setup to mine Ethereum, and said that he usually grossed around $1,000 each year.) “The fundamental idea of replacing resistive electric heat with cryptocurrency mining is a good idea, in my opinion,” he told me. “Just don’t spend a thousand bucks to get set up on Bitcoin.”

“If you want to break even with this thing, you’re going to need Bitcoin to go to half a million dollars,” said Roger Strukhoff, chief research officer at the International Data Center Authority. (As of January 2025, Bitcoin is currently valued around $100,000.) “Though we’re still going to be mining Bitcoin for another hundred years, so in that sense, I guess it works.”

That long view might make sense for a financial investment, but not for computer hardware. The way Bitcoin is designed, the mining calculations become exponentially harder over time—so the longer you mine, the more computing power you need (and the more wear you put on your rig).

“Your device will become less profitable over time unless the price of Bitcoin goes up faster than the difficulty of mining,” said Russell, the home cryptominer.

As it stands, the Heatbit Trio has a maximum speed of 10 terahashes per second. In contrast, you can buy a dedicated cryptominer on Amazon for roughly the same price that runs 10 times faster—and meanwhile, there are entire industrial cryptomining factories with enough processing power spread across multiple machines to work 100,000 times faster than that one.

That’s like trying to race a Honda Civic against a jet plane. Except in this case, you’re racing in a circle, and still cranking out the same amount of carbon, even though you’re not actually going anywhere. So why are you wasting all that fuel on a race to stay warm when you can just buy a space heater?

The Heatbit Trio also has a built-in air purifier that uses HEPA-12 filters. That’s not quite as good as some of our dedicated air purifier picks (which mostly use HEPA-13 or HEPA-14), but it should still be enough to capture 99.5% of particles with a diameter of 0.3 micron. You don’t earn any crypto in its air-purifying mode, though—that mode simply doesn’t pull enough energy to run the miner.

The company also offers a limited lifetime warranty—but only if you sign up for the air-filter replacement subscription service, which costs you $30 every three months or $120 for the year. Otherwise, the Heatbit Trio’s warranty coverage lasts only six months. The rationale here, as Heatbit founder Alex Busarov explained to me, is that proper air filtration will help prolong the life of the hard drive that runs the cryptomining rig. There is one other catch: If you want to take advantage of that warranty, you need to return all of the original packaging, including the documentation and cables. So make sure you hold on to everything.

You also need a crypto wallet in order to withdraw your accumulated Bitcoin from the app—and you’ll probably still have to pay a fee. That fee is how the miners make their money, and that’s part of how crypto works in the first place. You can find plenty of safe and reliable apps that help with this, including Cash App, Coinbase, and Robinhood; some traditional banking services also offer support for cryptocurrencies.

You may need to figure out some tax stuff, as well. Again, I’m not a financial expert (and honestly, this stuff makes my head hurt). But according to the Internal Revenue Service, any crypto that you receive or trade or mine is supposed to be reported on your tax return. So while you can potentially make money by using energy to produce intangible digital assets that contribute to climate change, you should also try not to commit tax fraud in the process.

Overall, the Heatbit Trio is a clever device. For better or worse, people are going to continue mining cryptocurrencies, and the Trio does attempt to address the energy squandering that’s intrinsic to the process. It’s also a surprisingly decent heater. But there’s simply no way to justify its cost, even as a luxury item for wannabe crypto-billionaires.

This article was edited by Maxine Builder and Harry Sawyers.