How earning works
The H1C heats your water with Bitcoin mining chips. The electricity that warms the tank is the same electricity that does the mining work, so a normal hot water run also produces mining rewards. Those rewards are credited to your Superheat account in Bitcoin and paid out to a wallet address you provide.
One kilowatt doing two jobs
The mining chips give off heat as they work, and that heat is what warms your water. While the chips run, they send their work to a mining pool, and the pool credits your account with a share of what it earns.
Rewards do not arrive as one large payment. They arrive as a stream of small credits, each one a fraction of a Bitcoin. That is why every amount in the app is shown to eight decimal places, for example 0.00001234 BTC.
Your heater mines in a pool rather than on its own. You can read more about the system behind this in About Superheat.
When your heater is earning
Earning tracks the health of the unit. The status shown at the top of the Home tab tells you whether mining is running.
| Status | Hot water | Mining |
|---|---|---|
| Healthy | Running normally | Running normally |
| Needs attention | Still on. The banner reads "Hot water is on, but mining is paused" | Paused |
| Critical | Disabled. The banner reads "Heating has been disabled for safety" | Stopped |
| Offline | Unknown, the heater is not reporting in | Not reported |
| Inactive | Not in service | Not reported |
In Needs attention, hot water keeps running while mining is paused, and nothing is being earned during that time. Several of these alerts, including a mining module that has gone offline and abnormal water circulation, also switch the unit to backup heating. See Status and alerts for what each banner means and what to do about it.
Uptime is the thing you have the most influence over. A heater that is plugged in, on ethernet, and free of alerts earns whenever it is heating. See Energy and hashrate for the charts that show how much work the unit has actually been doing.
Where the numbers come from
Every reward the pool credits to you appears in the app as a Mining reward entry, timestamped to the minute. Those credits add up into two figures on the Wallet tab:
| Figure | What it counts |
|---|---|
| Balance | Rewards credited to you that have not been paid out yet. This is the amount a payout draws from. |
| Lifetime Earnings | Everything credited to your account since it started mining, including the most recent 24 hours. Payouts do not reduce it. |
Both figures cover your whole account. If you own more than one heater, they are added together, and the app does not break earnings down per unit.
Bitcoin amounts are shown to eight decimal places. Amounts in dollars, euros, or Canadian dollars are converted from the Bitcoin amount at the current exchange rate, so they move with the market and should be read as an estimate rather than a fixed value.
The app refreshes these figures when you open the Wallet tab, and again about every five minutes while the app is running. You can also pull down on the Wallet tab to refresh right away.
What the amounts depend on
Three things move your earnings, and none of them are settings inside the app:
- How much the unit runs. More hot water use means more heating hours, which means more mining hours.
- The Bitcoin network. Mining difficulty and the price of Bitcoin both change constantly.
- The service fee. Superheat charges a service fee of 5% of mining revenue. See Payouts.
Getting the money to you
Rewards sit in your Superheat balance until a payout sends them to your own Bitcoin wallet. There are two things to do, and they take a few minutes total:
- Add a Bitcoin address. See Add your wallet.
- Understand the monthly payout rule and the minimum amounts. See Payouts.
Payouts run on their own once an address is linked. There is no button to request one, and no action is needed from you each month.