This spa’s water is heated by bitcoin mining

“I thought, ‘That’s interesting—we need heat,’” Goodman says of Bathhouse. Mining facilities typically use fans or water to cool their computers. And pools of water, of course, are a prominent feature of the spa. It takes six miners, each roughly the size of an Xbox One console, to maintain a hot tub at 104 °F. At Bathhouse’s Williamsburg location, miners hum away quietly inside two large tanks, tucked in a storage closet among liquor bottles and teas. To keep them cool and quiet, the units are immersed directly in non-conductive oil, which absorbs the heat they give off and is pumped through tubes beneath Bathhouse’s hot tubs and hammams. Mining boilers, which cool the computers by pumping in cold water that comes back out at 170 °F, are now also being used at the site. A thermal battery stores excess heat for future use. Goodman says his spas aren’t saving energy by using bitcoin miners for heat, but they’re also not using any more than they would with conventional water heating. ... Read full article.