Heatbit's $899 Water Heater Element Mines Bitcoin While It Heats Your Tank

Heatbit, which makes space heaters with built-in Bitcoin miners, has unveiled a water heater element that mines Bitcoin while it heats water, the company said in a tweet on Thursday.

The element, called Bitwater, replaces the resistance wire in a standard electric water heater element with 20 Bitcoin mining chips, so the heat they give off warms the water instead. "Same heat, same electricity, plus bitcoin," Heatbit wrote, arguing that "the electricity was going to be spent on hot water anyway."

The element uses 20 of Bitmain's BM1370 chips and is rated at up to 34 terahashes per second, drawing up to 600 watts at an efficiency of 12 joules per terahash. The water cools the chips, so there are no fans and no noise, according to the company.

Heatbit describes installation as a do-it-yourself job: switch off the breaker, drain the tank, unscrew the old element and thread in Bitwater using an included wrench. It fits the standard one-inch port on regular 30- to 80-gallon electric tanks in the U.S. and Canada, including those made by A. O. Smith, Rheem, Bradford White, Whirlpool and GE, Heatbit said in a follow-up tweet, with no plumbing changes or new circuit needed.

At up to 600 watts, Bitwater draws far less power than the 4,500-watt elements common in U.S. tanks. Those heat water fast and then shut off, while Bitwater heats more slowly and runs for longer, Heatbit explained. When demand spikes, the tank's existing upper element still provides backup.

Users can track water temperature, hashrate and earnings in an app and choose between solo mining and joining a pool, with mined Bitcoin going to an address they control.

Preorders for the first production run, which Heatbit calls its "Genesis batch," cost $899, with later batches priced at up to $1,299. The refundable preorders are due to ship in the first quarter of 2027. Heatbit said it tested the element through the winter with households of four and five in New York and Florida, and teased a product for homes with gas water heaters.

Heatbit has not published its own earnings estimate. Instead, it shared a reply from xAI's Grok chatbot putting earnings at about $1 to $1.25 a day, adding that "estimates aren't guarantees." That is in line with Decrypt's own figures. At the current hashprice of about $36.73 per petahash per second per day, according to Hashrate Index, an element running at its full 34 TH/s would mine about $1.25 worth of Bitcoin a day, or roughly $455 a year. Heatbit says the element is built to run more than 80% of the time, and earnings would rise and fall with Bitcoin's price and network difficulty.

Heatbit's home mining pitch

Heatbit is pitching Bitwater as a way to spread Bitcoin mining across homes. Homes worldwide use about 300 terawatt-hours of electricity a year heating water, compared with about 170 terawatt-hours for the entire Bitcoin network, the company said.

"Public miners are fleeing to AI and dumping coins to pay Wall Street and CEO salaries," Heatbit wrote. "Home miners answer to no one."

Large public miners have been moving into AI. Bitcoin miners struck 17 deals worth more than $110 billion over two years, contracting out roughly 6 gigawatts of power to companies including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia and CoreWeave, Bernstein said earlier this year. The bank expects AI revenue at the miners it covers to grow from $1.2 billion in 2026 to $10.7 billion by 2030, and has said the sector's planned power capacity of more than 27 gigawatts makes miners key suppliers for the AI boom.

The two businesses work differently, though. Bitcoin miners can switch off to relieve pressure on the grid, while AI data centers need power around the clock. "We're interruptible [as Bitcoin miners], whereas a traditional data center needs (to be) on 100% of the time," Shanon Squires of Compass Mining told Decrypt in March 2025.

The company's first product, a space heater with a built-in miner, cost almost $700 in 2023. Founder Alex Busarov told Decrypt at the time that it would always earn something however mining economics changed, because the heat it produced was replacing a conventional heater's. "Dyson doesn't make you any money. This one does," he said.