Greetings and happy new year! It's Istaria
here again. First of all, I am celebrating 300 subscribers, which may not sound like
a lot to you but it means the world to me because I love hearing from you guys and I really
appreciate it when you leave me comments and watch my videos, so thank you so much. And, I have
some other interesting videos coming up and I'm still hoping to make the LoungeKey series and
all that stuff but it will have to wait until the pandemic passes.
Anyway, this time around I
have an interesting house update for you guys and I hope you'll enjoy it! You may or may not
be aware that I purchased a property around half a year ago and of course I made a video about it.
I'm very happy about how good the deal was. In fact I still can't believe my luck half of the time
because so far everything has been real good and I haven't run into any problems. The price I
paid would indicate the property wasn't exactly move-in ready and maybe it wouldn't be for a
more demanding person but for my needs and wants it's perfect. There was some stuff I really
didn't like about it, however. First was the lack of a dishwasher, because I'm a lazy guy who
isn't a fan of washing the dishes by hand. Luckily, there is YouTube, so I went and taught
myself how to do the installation from scratch.
Cutting into these copper pipes here was scary, I
won't lie, but everything worked out perfectly and the installation cost me about 10 euro, because
the local place got me a very nice deal for a budget installation. Oh, and because it's me we are
talking about, the dishwasher is of course second-hand. It works and it's cheap, so it's all good!
Anyway, the next thing that was something I needed to fix right away was the heating system.
The property has a light fuel oil burning system which warms up water and then a pump circulates
it to radiators everywhere in the house.
But, the oil tank is not working properly so it
can't even be filled up. That means to burn oil I need to bring it in manually in small containers.
Buying it by the liter from the gas station adds a hefty markup and although oil was pretty cheap
when I bought the property, it would still cost quite a lot that way, so definitely was not an
option that I was willing to entertain at all. Initially, I paid 90 cents per liter for a 20 liter
container and then later on got a much better deal from a friend, who hooked me up with hopefully
enough to last me until I can stop burning oil all together at only 70 cents per liter. Now, the
price of oil has gone up by about 20 cents so I'm glad I hopefully won't need to get any more of it.
Here you can see the oil burner which people have told me is actually in a pretty good condition.
With the consumption rate of next to nothing I expect it to last until I no longer need it.
I
still use it for heating water for showers and the like, but there is no reality in which I would be
willing to rely on this thing for heat so the very first thing I had done here was to get an HVAC
expert to install an air-to-air heat pump. I had experience with this kind of heat source from my
previous home and loved it there so I figured it would do well here as well. The installation cost
around 800 euro on top of 800 euro for the unit, so if the weather hadn't been so cold already I
might have taken a shot at installing it myself with guidance from YouTube, but unfortunately this
time I had to cough up the extra dough to get it done. Not great, not terrible. I don't have any
regrets, the system will still pay for itself and I knew the guy who installed it and I don't mind
him getting some of my money for a job well done.
The unit should be good all the way until minus
30 degrees Celsius and although Finland can get pretty cold, we rarely get that kind of weather
here in the south. Maybe once every couple of winters. This pump is intended to provide all
the heat to the living area section of the house, which includes two rooms, kitchen, bathroom and the
living room. And now, we get to the interesting part! The other heating system of the house.
With
the pump being the primary source of heat, the other heating is actually waste heat from
mining cryptocurrency. Finally, as a backup there is the oil system but I hope it won't be needed, but
it's there in case the two other systems aren't sufficient. I haven't had this property long enough
to know how it will do during the winter but I'm about to find out. So, here you see a crude drawing
of the house and yes I did draw that in (MS) Paint. I'm quite the artist. It is obviously not to scale, but
it tries to be. So, somewhat accurate if I did even half a decent job. If you want to take a closer
look at what we got in here, feel free to pause. In any case, the house is kind of split into three
different sections the living area, displayed here… the shower and utility area, displayed here… and the unfinished storage area, which is displayed here.
Some would call me cheap. I would call me
frugal, but either way there is no way I was going to have three air-to-air heat pumps
installed to keep the house from freezing. I don't need the storage area to be especially
warm, as long as it stays above freezing so that nothing breaks and the pipes don't freeze over.
The shower and utility area needs to be warm, because showering in the cold is less than ideal.
Luckily the area is small in size, since the ceilings are low and there are not too many square meters over
there. Not that much heating required, unlike the unfinished storage area which is big in comparison
and with higher ceilings as well.
I have always been fascinated by using waste heat for warmth and
that's what I ended up going with here. My friend convinced me to try cryptocurrency mining for heat
generation and since he is an experienced miner and extremely knowledgeable when it comes to
computers, I had the easy task of just following his guidance on what to do, which parts would
be good and cost efficient.
With this help, I bought and set up a bunch of miners
to both of the secondary locations. I wasn't exactly sure of what kind of heating
demand I would have exactly, because I don't know how bad the winter will get and how the house
will react to the drop in temperatures outside, but I got myself a decent amount of useful waste heat.
I think it will easily keep the storage area above freezing even in really cold temperatures, but I'm
less sure about the shower if it gets real cold. I ran a little test for the Christmas holidays. I
turned all the other heating off, including the pump and left the miners on. When I got back home
five days later, it was -3 degrees Celsius (26F) outside and the temperatures inside weren't too bad.
Here is the living area again. I left two computers mining and when I got back, the temperature was
around 14 degrees Celsius (52F) in the living room. Not super comfortable, but considering that
this area is largely neglected in terms of mining heat generation, it really wasn't too bad.
Normally, the pump handles this easily, so there is no need for additional computers here.
These are just normal use ones that are always around.
All in all, this was quite a pleasant result.
Moving on to the utility room. Here, I had just one computer. but it is a power
hog and the area was small, so I was expecting it to be quite warm when I got back and so it was.
It was actually the exact same temperature as it was when I left, at 22 Celsius (72F). The unfinished storage
area which was the final section of the house didn't really have a lot of going for it at the
time, with only two computers mining stuff there. As expected, they couldn't keep it very warm at all
and the temperatures were only about 10 Celsius (50F).
Luckily, as I got home, my last missing piece was
waiting for me next to the door and I was able to start putting the remaining gear together. So, even
the storage area is actually warmer than it needs to be, but that's good because it's bound to get
colder than this pretty soon. So, let's go over the rigs, shall we? This puppy here is a dual Xeon
E5-2678 v3 with two Geforce 1080ti graphics cards. I am running it from a 1.2 kilowatt server power
supply, which meant I had to solder the connectors on. This one needed two 4-pin cpu connectors
and a total of four 8-pin pci express connectors, but there are extras in there, in case I need to
add more heat later.
There is also a temporary super old motherboard with a 15 year old processor
because I don't have a power supply which could support it in another location, so I had to hook
it up into the Xeon' supply. Together they are using a kilowatt or so of power and that's
currently plenty of heat for this small area. The shower and utility section of the house is
actually warmest of them all and together they get it all the way to around 24 Celsius (75F) now
that the walls have warmed up. As you can see this installation here is far from finished. The
computers are just on the ground like that and I haven't really done proper cable management or
anything yet. I should be able to get them off the ground in a couple of days and that will be
a good start.
Either way for now, I just need the heat. Next in line we have the storage area.
Like mentioned, it doesn't need to be very warm and it is a much larger area so it will naturally
be cooler. I have located three computers here. Here, I have a similar dual Xeon setup as
well as the two Ryzen 5 3600 cpus. They all have a Geforce in them as well. Together they use
maybe around 1.3 kilowatts of power. This room is also powered by this 1200 watt server supply but
with the current setup it is not enough to power all of them on its own, so it is being assisted
by an old supply I happened to have lying around, which is powering one of the Xeons, as well as
the motherboard. Like with the other one, I had to solder all the connections to hook them all
into the one supply. So, if you have watched this far, you are probably interested in what kind
of hash rates these radiators are getting. Let's take a look. Right now, they are not running at
maximum power because I don't need any more heat, but if the winter fights back hard, I can make them
work faster and increase the power consumption. But, for now my current setup is mining Ethereum
at a bit over 350 megahashes per second, which amounts to maybe a bit less than one ether
per month at this current mining difficulty.
This fluctuates heavily though, of course, so who knows
what it will be tomorrow or a week from now. The processors are mining Monero. They are doing
about 55 kilohashes per second, which at this difficulty is a bit less than one XMR per month. I
haven't optimized this fully and if I tinker with the Xeons, I would most likely be able to get a
few more kilohashes, which could take me over to the one XMR per month mark, which is pretty good.
I doubt I'm going to do that though, because it needs me to hack them and install Windows and
I much prefer Linux for server and mining stuff. So, how much did I pay for this stuff? Does it make
any sense? Should you do it also? I would definitely not start a mining operation if you're not into
it as a hobby. Electricity can be expensive, although if you use it to heat your house like I
do then it's kind of freeish, because you'll need the heat from somewhere anyway.
Occasionally,
something does something and no longer works and then you have to tinker with it. Definitely not
fun, and I spent many hours setting these things up, mostly because things didn't work out of the box,
unfortunately. It took a lot of testing to figure out what is wrong and how to fix it, even though
I had someone with mining experience to guide my hand. There are definitely easier ways to both
make money and to heat your house. Combining the two is definitely not necessary, unless you get
a kick out of it. I kind of do, and that's the only reason why I do this.
And what about the cost?
Let's go over it together, shall we? Before we begin, I have to mention that just like with the house,
I took extra steps to make sure I was getting a great deal on everything I bought, and you may not
be able to get the same items for what I paid for them. With this in mind, let's go over the expenses.
First I paid about 50 euros per Ryzen motherboard. I got four of them, so a total of 200 euros. I paid
about 142 euros for a single Ryzen 3600 processor. I also bought one 3900X for 350 euros.
I also paid around 15 to 20 per RAM stick, and then some quality ram to go with the 3900X, for
40 euros a stick. Then, I paid about 70 euros per x99 motherboard, total of 140 euros. 65 per Xeon,
a total of 260 euros. I may have invested too heavily into some of the cpu cooling.
Let's say 15
euro per cheap and 25 euro per expensive cooler. The server power supplies were free from my friend
who no longer needed them, but if I had to buy them they would have set me back another 60 euros
maybe. Let's say another 100 euros for the miscellaneous stuff, like the hard drives
and power supplies and whatever else it is that I needed to get these puppies running. The
connectors I salvaged from broken power supplies, so those were technically free but not really.
I also got a very impressive titanium power supply for 50 euros from a friend. It normally
costs quite a bit more, so not too bad of a deal. And finally, the graphics cards, with shipping
costs included maybe a bit under 300 euros a piece, but let's round them up. One of them was free
from another friend, because it was defective, which means it was extremely loud under load… …but perfectly fine for my purposes, since it's so far in the storage area that I can't hear it.
All this comes to a hefty sum. So yeah,
it will be a while until I recoup the investment, but luckily that's not really even the goal here.
Hobbies cost money, and I wanted to experiment and tinker with an unconventional heat source.
So far it's been both frustrating and fun at the same time and taught me a thing or two about a thing or two. Well, that's it for this video!
I'll be sure to post an update…..in case we get some real cold weather up here. and I hope… Thank you so much for watching to the end!
If you have any questions or comments, I read every one of them so feel free to drop
one and if you like the video, you know what to do, which buttons to press so YouTube
will recommend this to more people..
