first of I am neither an electrician, builder nor IT guy, but I taught myself Bitcoin early on and have a basic understanding of “stuff”.
We recently bought a 30yr old house in South Africa near Cape Town. Despite the prejudice about “it’s in Africa” please note that during winter times temperature falls below 50F/ 10C regularly with an ø of 59F/ 15C.
Africans heat their house with fireplaces or electric heater. Me, coming from Germany and know how freaking awesome underfloor heating is, I consider adding this to the house. Floor size ~120sqm.
Peak sun hours in summer are ~7,8 h and as low as ~3,5 h in winter. The yearly average is ~5,3 h.
My questions are:
With your professional expertise and those parameters, should we either choose regular bitcon heater or floor heating?
What Hydro Miner would I choose to heat the house during winter?
I know this seems vague, but I gotta start somewhere.
What kind of power do you get in South African homes? Voltage, Current, Phase?
And what’s your electric rate?
I built a calculator to help you compare heating fuel pricing with sats baked in - but you’ll have to enter in rates manually. The default averages are from US data.
it depends on your energy (kW/h price) but it’s always good to replace electric heating with a hydro miner.
solar is not worth it because you only have around 30% uptime. in winter when most heat is needed there is even less sun. it will never calculate. only if you already have PV you can use it also but never build it for mining you will have a loss in ROI for sure.
if you need to heat up 120sqm it depends on the heat usage. let’s say it’s above 5kw which is possible (otherwise you can just support the current heating). it depends on the house isolation. if you need for example 7,5kw heat there would be M63 or newer. Otherwise M64 delivers around 4-5kw and it’s single phase 220V instead of the M63 which are three phase. i know that a basic house (200sqm) with normal isolation needs around 10kw heat. so you need to calculate your heat usage first and than decide which hydro miner you want/need to go for.