Hi all, I dunno if anyone has tried heating their swimming pool with their miners using a brazed plate heat exchanger yet (like the guy from Space Design Warehouse) but I’m in NY so I’m wondering what to do when winter comes back around! I don’t want the pvc pipes to freeze. Must be nice to live in Florida and never have to close your pool for the Winter, lol. I could bury the pvc pipes, but they’d still need to come up to the surface in order to get the water outta the pool. (It’s a vinyl liner, not sure if I could tap into the side of it below ground level somehow, seems like a lot of work.) Currently I have a radiator + fan setup with 1 of the miners, but with only 1 miner hooked up, it makes the basement room they’re in really hot, even when it’s like 65 out. Anyway I was thinking I could bury a separate pvc line (maybe 10’ x 10’ or so) out under our lawn filled with antifreeze. Then after the pool gets closed for the winter, I could switch the brazed plate heat exchanger over to that loop with some 3-way ball valves. Anyone else tried something like that? I’m wondering if the ground would be cold enough to keep the antifreeze in the pvc cool.
If you’re referring to using “geothermal” to cool them in the winter, I don’t think that would be enough and I would go with something other than pvc. You could easily use pex or black irrigation pipe (hdpe I think). I think the easiest solution would be to have a dry cooler for each one or one that would do both. You could use it to heat your hot water or use radiators in the house (passive heat exchanger) and then at the end simply put a dry cooler outside to take away any heat left. Either way it will take some ingenuity.
I will be going through some of this either later this summer or next year. It just depends how everything goes for me on the IC setup I’m doing now and how much time I have.
Thanks for the reply! I think I might skip the pool stuff for now, maybe tack it on later sometime after I get the closed geothermal loop thing working. I’m not sure 2 L7’s would even be able to heat a 30’ pool that much, anyway, which would just be a bonus. My main concern right now is keeping them cool during the summer. I haven’t tried to estimate if the geothermal setup would work, but I’m hopeful! I was thinking of running a zig-zag pattern of pex on our side lawn, about a 14’ x 14’ area at 18" or so below the surface. I looked up average yearly soil temps, and at that depth the hottest the soil gets is about 63°F. That’s just an average, so obviously it can fluctuate. Still, 63° is colder than pool water!
Right now I just have 1 miner hooked up to a condenser w/ a fan in a basement room with 2 duct fans in the basement window. I keep the room closed so our cat doesn’t get in there, and the room gets pretty freaking hot - like almost 80 degrees F even though it’s ~46°F outside. So I’m thinking of either moving the condenser and its fan outside, or cutting a hole in the wall and blowing the hot air into the rest of our basement, where it’s like 70°F, hopefully keeping the mining room cool.
Nice, good to know someone else will be goin thru the same thing. I have both miners converted to liquid cooling, now I just need to figure out where to put that liquid heat!
After looking into geothermal cooling, I’m not sure I will have enough horizontal ground area for what would be required for two L7 miners. 
I think they’d need almost 2 tons of heat removal (3,260 watts x 3.41 x 2 = 22,233.2 BTU. 1 ton = 12,000 BTUs). After googling, I found “As a rule of thumb, 500-600 feet of pipe is required per ton of system capacity.” Sounds like I would need upwards of 1,000 feet of pipe. With all the trees and fence and things (pool, lol) around my ~1 acre lot I just don’t think a horizontal geothermal loop is feasible, unfortunately.
Now I’m back looking into cooling the miners with pool water. I’m wondering if anyone who lives in colder climates has left their crypto pool heating setup running during the winter months. Looks like this person from MN did: “-21F this morning here in Minnesota. The pool (blue line) is nice and toasty warm at 92F.” https://twitter.com/CoinHeated/status/1479423686297927680 If the miners are left running 24/7 maybe they’re able to keep the pool water warm enough during freezing outdoor temps so that the CPVC pipes don’t burst? Hmm.
I think I read somewhere that chlorinated water corrodes copper, so that would eventually wreck the plate heat exchanger… No idea how long something like that would take. Maybe I can just replace the heat exchanger every 2-3 years once it goes bad. But I’d need to be on top of that, otherwise I think I’d get cross-contamination, which doesn’t sound fun: “Granular swimming pool chlorine (calcium hypochlorite) and brake fluid (polyethylene glycol) react violently when mixed together, producing a fierce fireball.” Not sure if what I’m using in the miner’s liquid loop is polyethylene glycol, it’s Shell Rotella ELC NF Antifreeze + Coolant. So I’m not sure what to do at this point, I may just give up and go back to air cooling and shut them off when it gets super hot out. Ugh.
You need a different kind of heat exchanger for pools/hot tubs. I think something like this: Pool/Spa Heat Exchanger SS - 85k BTU – OutdoorBoiler.com