There are tons of cool projects out there that take old mining rigs and turn them into space heaters. But I’m curious if anyone is looking into the reverse: using miners for cooling.
Back in my days working with aircraft reliability, I dealt with these air cycle machines that actually take super hot bleed air from jet engines and use it to cool the cabin. I also noticed these reverse cycle AC units, especially in Australia, that can both heat and cool from one unit.
This got me thinking that it might be possible to use mining hardware as the heat source in such systems. If we could get old miners to do both heating and cooling, that would really shake things up.
So, has anyone come across any projects like this?
Biggest problem is that it requires power to run the compression stages and in the air-cycle systems on aircraft that power of course comes from the engines plus the temperature delta is far lower. Miners have no 'excess' power to run it because power efficiency is driven to be as high as possible and the lower inlet temp would seriously impact the efficiency of the process.
The idea of using heat from mining boards for cooling is pretty interesting. It makes me think of "absorption refrigerators" - these things use heat to drive the cooling process. So in theory, extra heat from the mining boards could maybe be used for cooling too. I'm no engineer, so not sure if it would really work. But there are portable fridges for camping and RVs that run on propane, with no electricity needed. Those use heat as the power source and don't have compressors. The mining boards produce lots of heat while working, so maybe some of that could be harnessed. The tech might already exist. If not, probably needs an engineer to design it properly. But I think it has potential if done right.
How a Propane Refrigerator Functions