5/10
Open rating explainerInformationWIREDCombination bitcoin miner, heater, and air purifier. Setup is easy. Bitcoin mining offsets skyrocketing energy costs.TIREDNot profitable. Not efficient. Not quiet. Not the best at anything it does. You probably won’t make your money back soon.Some devices are built for utter dystopia. The Heatbit Maxi, a space heater that also mines bitcoin, is one such device.
In case you're so rich you didn't notice, residential electricity rates have corkscrewed to stratospheric heights in the US since 2020, rising more than 40 percent in the past six years as of February 2026. Weather prone to extreme temperatures and gone utterly chaotic doesn't help much with heating and cooling bills.
And so here comes Heatbit with an unlikely but maybe irresistible solution. What if your space heater mined bitcoin to offset energy costs? Or, conversely, what if your energy-intensive bitcoin miner offset its horrible energy use by also helping heat your house? And what if the Heatbit also ran the air through a HEPA filter, to fend off whatever horrible, health-ruining things are swirling around in our dystopian air?
Video: Matthew KorfhagePerhaps no device this year has been the subject of as many email chains and Slack threads from other WIRED staffers as this Heatbit, forwarded along with a mix of bemusement and genuine curiosity. Gearheads are worse than a sewing circle sometimes.
But while the Heatbit is an intriguingly ingenious notion when drawn on a cocktail napkin, the devil is in the details. And I can't make this thing pencil at the current bitcoin price. It's neither a great heater nor the most energy-efficient bitcoin miner on the market. And the high up-front price ($1,499) means any energy savings will likely take years to surface unless you're quite crafty about when you use it, and live in the right place.
Here's the math on the back of my envelope.
A Solution to Unprofitable Bitcoin Mining?
Heatbit via Matthew KorfhageThe hidden message behind the Heatbit is a harsh reality that crypto miners have been struggling with in recent months. Once a get-rich-quick scheme, crypto mining is now basically unsustainable at current electricity rates for most residential miners on the market. Expensive power, plus higher mining difficulty and a six-month tumble in bitcoin value, have largely crashed the market for mining as a profitable endeavor.
But what if you're not trying to be profitable? The Heatbit doesn't position itself as a competitor to other bitmining devices. Rather, its makers present a contrast between “smart heat” and “dumb heat.” Dumb heat is a normal space heater. Smart heat is the heat that's also making you money.
Bitcoin miners, by dint of power usage, produce waste heat. By adding a fan and an auxiliary heater, the Heatbit makes itself usable as a small-room heater that mostly runs at around 1,200 watts. But unlike other heaters, the Heatbit Maxi Pro also mines bitcoin.
On the Heatbit Maxi Pro, I averaged pretty close to the device's advertised mining speed of 60 terahashes per second. Not bad! (Think of hash rate as the number of times your device swings its virtual pickaxe.) At bitcoin prices in March 2026, this added up to about $2 a day worth of bitcoin when I ran it all day and night. The price has since tumbled a little further, as of April.
Alas, this was about one-third of my energy costs to run the Heatbit, when you also take into account moments the Heatbit lost connection with the router. I live in Portland, Oregon, where electricity is about 17 cents per kilowatt-hour, the approximate national average. As a profitability scheme, this is laughable on an Underpants Gnome scale.
But, if you reframe this as energy I would have already spent heating my home, that $2 bitcoin rebate becomes a bit of a selling point. Who doesn't want a third or more off their heating bill? For novice miners, Heatbit has removed pretty much all difficulty in getting started. Indeed, pulling the device out of the box might be the hardest part of setting the thing up, given that it's quite big and bulky: a foot and a half tall, and 20 pounds.
Photograph: Matthew KorfhageOtherwise, you pretty much just need to download the app and pair it to the Heatbit. Initial pairing took a little trial and error, and the app has an irritating habit of disconnecting and not immediately reconnecting on an unstable Wi-Fi connection. (Alas, you can't hardwire to the router, a decision that was both aesthetic and practical: The room with your router might not be the space you want to heat.)
But once you've set up your device, Heatbit will track and file your mining revenue to your phone, even if you don't yet have a bitcoin wallet set up. After you reach the transfer minimum of 100,000 satoshis, or one thousandth of one bitcoin ($66 at April 2026 prices), you can transfer this to your wallet and, presumably, spend it. Heatbit's app is compatible with the Lightning networks and most major exchanges (Coinbase, Binance, OKX, BitFinex).
Unlike many air purifiers that activate only when there are air quality issues, the Heatbit continually pushes air through its HEPA filter while the miner and heater are active. While Heatbit recommends filter replacement once every six months, in practice, the app showed that the filter was being used up by about 1 percent a day. For whatever reason, my Heatbit app refused to believe that I was not in Seattle, and so my exterior air quality readings were all tied to King County, Washington.
Early quirks aside, the ease of onramp is admirable for a device not aimed at crypto-loving engineers. At current prices, if I run my heater/miner nonstop, this would net me about a $70 rebate on my heating bills once every two months. Pretty cool, right?
Why the Math on Heatbit Doesn't Pencil
Heatbit via Matthew KorfhageBut here's the problem with that math. I'd also need to pay at least $1,500 upfront (the current discounted price of the Maxi Pro) before I get access to these savings. This is about $1,350 more than the best space heaters I've tested. It's also around $900 or $1,000 more than a combination purifier–heater from Dyson. So your money-saving math needs to take this upfront cost into account.
At this rate, assuming my energy costs and bitcoin prices stayed constant, it would take me between five and eight years to “make my money back” in bitcoin if I ran this thing 24/7 for four months a year. That's on a device with a one-year warranty. (Heatbit's founders say there has been a failure rate only in the “low single digits” after three years for the first-generation Heatbit Trio.)
These numbers assume I would otherwise run a space heater nonstop at full blast for months on end as a primary heat source—which is not how most people use space heaters. I tend to turn on a space heater only when I'm in a room, and direct it toward myself. For heating a whole house, natural gas or a heat pump are both far more cost-effective options, if available.
But let's say you have only electricity for heat. And you would always be running a space heater. And let's assume the Heatbit keeps running at the same efficiency for at least five years. Is the Heatbit now the best choice, economically? Well, still maybe not.
Every Crypto Miner Is a Heater
Every crypto mining device will heat your house, whether or not its makers advertise it as a space heater. Each miner will release heat with 100 percent efficiency, according to how much power it uses. That's because one way or another, all power waste will eventually get converted to heat.
The most efficient combination space heater and bitcoin miner will always be the one that mines bitcoin most efficiently. At that point, you could just pick up a Canaan Avalon Q ($1,900) and get a 50 percent better hash rate and produce about the same amount of heat. Newfangled ASIC Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) miners might net you even better efficiency. Pretty much anything you use, with the same amount of power, will release this much heat.
While some home and industrial users have begun to use crypto miners as heaters to offset large costs, none of these have taken the time to certify themselves for safety as a heater. Heatbit did so. This was backed up by my tests: When I dropped a blanket over the Heatbit to block its vent, the power immediately dropped—faster than any heater I've ever tested. The surface doesn't get hot. And while the Heatbit has an accelerometer sensor to detect when it's been tipped over, its vent remains cool enough that it doesn't have to automatically shut itself off.
Photograph: Matthew KorfhageThe functional differences with the Heatbit Maxi are better usability, better safety, a HEPA filter, an auxiliary heater, and a somewhat noisy fan that directs heat upward and away from the device. And, of course, easier onboarding for crypto mining novices. On its website, Heatbit forefronts the crypto miner's heat loss as a virtue and helps you track the money you've “saved” via a handy app. The easy-to-use app and interface make the device accessible to crypto mining novices.
The emotional difference with the Heatbit is whether you just personally like the device's design and find it cool. Other crypto miners … do not look cool. And you don't want them by your couch. The Heatbit is a conversation item, something to show off to houseguests.
But to make this pencil as a strictly financial decision, you’ll have to have a little faith in bitcoin’s future (and Heatbit’s future, for that matter). Heatbit cofounder Alex Busarov noted that when the first-generation Heatbit launched, it was during terrible times for bitcoin. But in a bear market, he said, “it paid for itself in two years or even less.”
If I had a couple thousand burning a hole in my pocket this year, and I owned my home, and I wanted to lower my long-term electrical bills? I'd probably lean toward attending YouTube University and installing a heat pump. The harsh economics of crypto mining in 2026 just don't make the Heatbit make a lot of sense to me.
Maybe someday, better bitcoin mining days will come. But even when those days do arrive, the real energy and ecological cost of mining bitcoin will still be far greater than what shows up on my power bill.
$1,999 $1,499 at Heatbit
