Heatbit Maxi Pro Review: a Space Heater That Also Mines Bitcoin | WIRED

$1,999 $1,499 at Heatbit

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WIRED

Combination bitcoin miner, heater, and air purifier. Setup is easy. Bitcoin mining offsets skyrocketing energy costs.

TIRED

Not 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 Korfhage

Perhaps 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 Korfhage

The 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 Korfhage

Otherwise, 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