WHAT’S IN THE BOX?!

This is an electric boiler. It heats radiant tubing in the floors of my basement. It earns me bitcoin while it heats my basement. If you want to know more about this project, continue reading (and smash like and subscribe, jk, this is nostr, zap me).

Brief intro: I’m a Bitcoin Veteran that works on bitcoin mining software and run Shenandoah Bitcoin Club.

I decided I was going to heat the basement with hashrate. I contact Exergy Heat (Tyler Stevens of HeatPunks). I acquire a Whatsminer Heat Core. It’s a M64*** hydro unit***.

Never in my mind would I ever look forward to pouring water into a computer. But here we are. The water circulates between the reservoir tank (funnel is inserted to top of tank), the miner (over the ASIC heat sinks), and through a radiator (left side with handle).

It worked!

Until it didn’t. Luckily, Exergy is incredible and I was able to get a replacement quickly.

I tried to find the problem but came up short.

We got the replacement racked and it was instantly off to the races. I learned a good sweet spot for setting the thermostat of the unit. It’s in Celsius and I landed on 61C as the temp to aim for. Once it went above that temp, fans would kick on for the radiator. Otherwise, looping the water cooled it enough sometimes. With a heat exchanger on the back, we can tie it into a radiant heating system.

The red tubes go to the radiant loop and the black tubes are the inner loop for the ASIC itself. You’ll notice the left side missing from the original pictures. That is a detachable radiator with fan. We ran that out to the garage.

If the heat exchanger doesn’t take enough heat from the ASIC loop, the fans will kick on and my garage becomes a sauna. One day. I may just have a sauna and shove this in there.

Speaking of heat exchanger, I totally loosened mine and leaked some water. be sure to keep things tightened down.

Now let’s get to the radiant floor loop.

The red hoses run an entirely separate water loop across the heat exchanger to draw heat into the radiant system.

This is the boiler loop. Off to the right there is a tie into the main water system. The black gadget at the top of the loop is the circulator that keeps this loop moving. The grey box is where the thermostats tie in. It’s the zone valve controller. There are four zones, one for each of the rooms this system is heating. Each zone has it’s own thermostat and flow valve.

The blue widgets on the upper copper are the control valves for each zone. The insulated tubing is the supply (hot) water and the non-insulated is the return (cold). There’s one more gadget to point out. The mixer.

This thing accepts the returned cold water and mixes it with the boiler loop. The upper screen shows some stats.

So that’s pretty neat, but where does the heat go!

The floor. but first it travels through the ceiling to manifolds. One for each room. This one is for a large room. But a bedroom has just two port manifolds.

These manifolds then feed pex tubes that are run through the floor. There is a subfloor, then these template tiles. A hardwood will lay on top of the pex and the channeled templates.

Anyway, thanks for getting this far down. Let me know what questions you might have or feedback.