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Australia struggling with oversupply of solar power
(www.abc.net.au)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
For home usage my thought would be use it as a hot water heater or a dryer for clothes or maybe even make a switchable 500 watt and 1500 watt version and use it as a space heater for those cold winter nights.
Ya, if you have a miner at home, it will reduce your heating bill. You just gotta find a good use for it when it's not cold outside, so something like supplementing your water heater as you mentioned would work ya.
I think there's merit in the idea. Someone makes an electric water heater purpose built for this and they build a miner card you can swap in/out as technology improves the the current one becomes obsolete. Uses the miner for primary heat, and when it's not enough uses regular electricity to make the heat.
See, that would be awesome as hell, because those appliances need heat. And so, mining with it basically subsidizes the heat that I would otherwise just be using anyway. It may not subsidize it completely, but any subsidy is better than no subsidy at all.