Bitcoin Home Heating in Finland: Free Above $70,000 BTC
Bitcoin home heating is real in Finland, but the “free heat” has a price tag: roughly $20,000 to install and a bitcoin price near $70,000 to break even. CoinDesk reported on November 8 that Finnish startup SunBit has about 30 of its “Bitcoin Boiler” systems running, almost all in Finland. The $70,000 in the headline is SunBit’s owner break-even, not a guarantee.
How the bitcoin home heating system works
According to CoinDesk, one system is a 495 TH/s Antminer S21 XP Hydro on Braiins OS. It draws about 5.3 kW and sends water at up to 60°C into the house. SunBit’s own site, sunbit.fi, sells it as a replacement heating system.
The example house is 180 square metres in Nokia. It has left district heating altogether. CoinDesk also lists a 200 square metre house in Kotka, an old manor in Tampere and a 3,000 square metre hall in Vimpeli.
The numbers behind the “free” heat
These are SunBit’s assumptions as CoinDesk reports them, so treat them as the company’s claim:
- Power use: about 46,400 kWh a year, roughly $5,200 at 11 cents.
- Mining income: about 1/12 of a bitcoin a year at $82,000 and 1,040 EH/s.
- After SunBit’s 10% fee, the owner keeps about $6,100, a surplus near $900.
- Install cost: about $20,000 or more, with payback of three to six years.
The founder, Elmeri Suomi, told CoinDesk the heating works whatever the market does, and “only the payback time moves.”
Is bitcoin home heating a good deal?
CoinDesk notes a heat pump gives 2.5 to 3 kWh of heat per kWh of power. A miner gives 1 kWh. The miner only wins because it also earns bitcoin. That makes it a bet on price and difficulty. A further halving in spring 2028 would cut the reward from 3.125 to 1.5625 BTC. The article says a house would then need roughly $131,000 bitcoin to keep its heat free.
We only have CoinDesk and SunBit’s own figures here. Other sites we found repeat the CoinDesk piece. Nobody has independently checked the claims.
Miner math: what the story means for a miner
Rerun SunBit’s sums with live data. Bitcoin is $75,985 and the network is 985 EH/s. Scaling the 1/12 BTC a year by that price and hashrate, income after the 10% fee is about $6,015. The power bill is about $5,200. So the surplus is about $815 a year, before the $20,000 install. That is thin, but still positive, because the bitcoin price is only about 7% under SunBit’s $82,000 case and the network is a bit smaller than it assumed.
Blunt version: at 11 cents, a miner on a normal power bill loses money in most cases. A home heater avoids that only because the power was going to be bought for heat anyway.
Miner math: what a plain power bill does to the same machines
Here is the live maths on November 8. Bitcoin is $75,985 and the network is 985 EH/s, so hashprice is about $34.93 per petahash per day. That is what one PH/s of hashing earns before power.
| Machine | 5c/kWh | 8c/kWh | 12c/kWh | Break-even |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Antminer S19 (95 TH/s, 3250 W) | -$0.58 | -$2.92 | -$6.04 | 4.3c |
| Antminer S19k Pro (115 TH/s, 2645 W) | $0.84 | -$1.06 | -$3.60 | 6.3c |
| Antminer S19 XP (141 TH/s, 3010 W) | $1.31 | -$0.85 | -$3.74 | 6.8c |
| Antminer S21 Pro (234 TH/s, 3510 W) | $3.96 | $1.44 | -$1.93 | 9.7c |
Numbers are profit per day after electricity, at the three power prices shown. Break-even is the most you can pay per kilowatt-hour before the machine loses money. Specs are the manufacturer ratings; network data comes from mempool.space. Try your own power price in our free bitcoin mining profit calculator. See what these machines really sold for in our used ASIC miner price index. Want to run the same numbers on a machine you can buy today? See our used ASIC miners, or buy several at once through bulk lots.
If bitcoin falls 15% to SunBit’s break-even area: the break-even power price on an S19k Pro falls from 6.3 to 5.8 cents per kilowatt-hour. At 8 cents, daily profit goes from -$1.06 to -$1.38.
Our Bitcoin price prediction shows the ranges we expect. Our mining economics guides explain the maths. If you are selling gear, see we buy used miners.
-Nick
ING Mining
This is general information, not financial advice. Crypto is volatile, and exchanges can fail. Please do your own research.
How this story was made: drafted with the help of AI tools from public sources, then edited by Nick Squires. See our editorial policy. Spot an error? Email ns@ingmining.com.