This year the electricity prices in Europe have skyrocketed and at the same time the mining profitability has been going down steadily until things became unprofitable for most miners after Ethereum’s switch from PoW to PoS last month. With the Fall already here and Winter coming soon and temperatures starting to drop outside it seems that some ASIC miner manufacturers are figuring a way to still sell their hardware. Like JASMINER who are making Ethereum ASIC miners that just posted about their JASMINER X4 3U-Q ASIC miner calling it a “small home heater, with secondary income to offset high electricity bills and still keep warm”.
Using GPU mining rigs and ASIC miners at home during the cold months (if you live in a place that has these) has long been a thing to do if you have quiet running mining hardware or can set it up to run quietly. This way even in a non-profitable period like the one now you can still utilize the heat from the miner to keep you warm at home. Even if the miner just manages to pay for the electricity and you use the heat it is still better than to pay just for electricity for heating, isn’t it. So, if you have your mining hardware not running at the moment, you might want to consider turning it off as a heating solution during the coming cold months, you just need to make sure that you can make it run silent or at least with a very little noise.
Back to the JASMINER X4 3U-Q ASIC miner, it is an Ethash ASIC miner that promises a hashrate of about 1040 MH/s with a power usage of around 480 Watts and with a noise level at under 40 Decibels. We haven’t tested that miner personally, although we would love to, but if these specs are true it could easily be used for keeping your home warmer during the cold months of the Winter and since the power usage is quite low you should be able to cover at least the electricity costs with that hashrate of 1 GH/s. Of course mining Ethereum with it is no longer possible, but you should able to mine Ethereum Classic (ETC) and other Ethash based crypto coins. At the moment the breakeven price of electricity for this device is around 0.21 USD or EURO, so while it may not be bringing profit it could still give you free electricity… sort of…
The official Jasminer website lists the device out of stock at the moment with a price of $9099 USD, definitely way too high, though there are some offers for the miner in the $4000-$5000 range with stock available on the internet. Even that price is a bit too high at the moment for something that can barely make a negligible profit or even breakeven in most cases. Even with the free heating you would still need to pay for the “heater” and if the price of the device is going to be higher than what you’d normally pay for regular heating during the winter it might still not be worth it.
Of course, if the crypto market gets another bull run things may drastically change in favour of the Ethash ASIC mining device, but at the moment even getting one with the idea to use it as a “free” heater may not be that good. Of course, if your electricity costs are lower than the breakeven price and you manage to score a good deal on the JASMINER X4 3U-Q miner things might be looking better.
One important thing to note about Jasminer’s Ethash ASICs like the JASMINER X4 3U-Q, JASMINER X4-1U, JASMINER X4 and JASMINER X4 MINI is that all of them do come equipped with 5GB of memory for the DAG. This was more of importance while you could still miner Ethereum with a nice profit as it has passed the 5GB DAG size, but since it is no longer mineable and other Ethash-based crypto coins do have quite some time before needing more than 5GB RAM you should be safe for the time being.
It is not only Jasminer however that is thinking along the line of using the heat generated by mining hardware for something other than just waste by-product, and heating your home during the cold winter days is one of the options. Still, this is not something that you can do all year round, unless you live in a very cold place that is. So, finding other alternative uses to utilize the waste heat generated from mining hardware is something that needs more work and people are been working in that direction.
– To visit the official website of the JASMINER X4 3U-Q Ethash ASIC miner…
