Heatmine recycles heat from bitcoin mining to warm homes

Heatmine, a Canadian mining company, works in Quebec, where almost all electricity comes from renewable sources, so its carbon footprint is relatively small. But the company saw that it could also extend the value of that electricity by harvesting the waste heat from its mining machines.

The company started first with its own large warehouse. “We’re in Quebec–it’s very cold 10 months of the year,” says Jeremy Dahan, Heatmine’s COO. “So we started recycling the heat.” Heatmine first used the excess energy from its processing systems to heat its water.

Now, though, the company is experimenting with a network of decentralized mining machines that can connect to heating systems elsewhere, like private homes and businesses. Essentially, Heatmine connects a small mining machine to a heating system. As the machine runs and mines bitcoin, the heat the process generates is transferred to more productive use, like warming a home.

In one recent test,…