Passively heating palms with Bitcoin miner?

[BayAndroid]

So for fun, I wondered how you would approach passively warming parts of the garden where cold sensetive plants lived. Bitcoin miners heat up a lot and I thought, while the idea of just having a heat lamp or something out in the garden might work, it's not going to return you any money.. You simply spend the money to heat your plants. Technically speaking, you may not be making money running a miner, but in doing so, you passively stack some Bitcoin (in the hope maybe it's worth more in the future) while also passively warming your plants in the winter. 

 

Keeping the conversation focused, how might you set up a system to heat your plants, assuming you have unlimited wasted heat energy that needed to be delivered to your plants. (All theoretical, of course.)

[Xerarch]

1 hour ago, BayAndroid said:

So for fun, I wondered how you would approach passively warming parts of the garden where cold sensetive plants lived. Bitcoin miners heat up a lot and I thought, while the idea of just having a heat lamp or something out in the garden might work, it's not going to return you any money.. You simply spend the money to heat your plants. Technically speaking, you may not be making money running a miner, but in doing so, you passively stack some Bitcoin (in the hope maybe it's worth more in the future) while also passively warming your plants in the winter. 

 

Keeping the conversation focused, how might you set up a system to heat your plants, assuming you have unlimited wasted heat energy that needed to be delivered to your plants. (All theoretical, of course.)

Need lots of mining machines and lots of electricity to get any meaningful amount of BTC these days, but if you wanted to harvest the heat I suppose you would need to trap it somehow, like a greenhouse and use the mining to warm the greenhouse.

[Allen]

I would think any heat would need to be piped into a greenhouse/conservatory type enclosure

[bruce Steele]

I would think moving large rocks near your palms results in passive heat. 
There is a culvert that runs under a highway near my farm and it has a small spring that keeps it moist year round. Because the culvert is thirty feet under the highway the temperature stays at a steady 50 degrees all winter, in the summer the evaporative loss keeps it cool even during 100F + conditions. So using earths heat you could install pipes into the ground to harness passive heat with fans to deliver it. 
With adequate canopy such a system might make enough difference to zone push a little. 

[BayAndroid]

3 minutes ago, bruce Steele said:

I would think moving large rocks near your palms results in passive heat. 
There is a culvert that runs under a highway near my farm and it has a small spring that keeps it moist year round. Because the culvert is thirty feet under the highway the temperature stays at a steady 50 degrees all winter, in the summer the evaporative loss keeps it cool even during 100F + conditions. So using earths heat you could install pipes into the ground to harness passive heat with fans to deliver it. 
With adequate canopy such a system might make enough difference to zone push a little. 

This is what I was wondering, if piping heat into garden beds would do enough to push the zone a bit. 

[Foxpalms]

13 minutes ago, BayAndroid said:

This is what I was wondering, if piping heat into garden beds would do enough to push the zone a bit. 

I have seen videos of geothermal greenhouses taking warmer air from below the ground. So during a freeze even if you're not trapping in the heat, such as when it's used for greenhouses, it could still give you 1-3f and if you then have an evergreen tree over it, that will sort of trap the warmer air under it. Unless you're in a very bad microclimate there probably no point in doing that. But instead evergreen tree canopy, a large pond and good sized patios (the less grass the warmer) can give you at least 2-3f unless it's very small. Because I'm a 9b not far off 10a that pushes parts of my garden into zone 10a.