As a space heater, the Heatbit Trio is pretty good. It comes with all the crucial safety features that we tend to look for in a space heater, including a tipover switch and overheat protection.
It doesn’t make too much noise, either; we measured it around 53 decibels, about as loud as our long-running budget-pick space heater from Lasko, and a fraction of the volume of an actual industrial cryptomining facility.
When I put the Heatbit Trio through the same trials that I do for every space heater, it performed well overall. It did take a little longer to boot up than other space heaters because of that CPU inside. It also took some time to really get the heat going; the temperature barely changed for the first half-hour of the test.
But the Heatbit Trio ultimately pulled through, raising the overall room temperature by nearly 13 degrees over the course of two hours, a result that made it almost as powerful as some of our current picks. (Almost.)
Even more impressive was that we measured only about a 2.4-degree difference across our temperature sensors, which means it was more even and consistent than a lot of other space heaters out there.
To my surprise, the Heatbit Trio didn’t dry the room out, either. Most space heaters tend to obliterate the humidity, producing a desiccated warmth as a result. But the Heatbit Trio kept the humidity strangely consistent, which felt more comfortable overall.
If I were judging the Heatbit Trio based solely on its heating prowess, it wouldn’t quite earn a top-pick nod, but it might garner an honorable mention.
But I suspect that you’re less interested in the heating coils than in the other part.
The first thing worth noting in that regard is that the Heatbit Trio is surprisingly easy to set up for cryptomining. All you need to do is download the app and enter a phone number, and you’re pretty much good to go. It’s already hooked up to a mining pool, and as soon as you turn on the heat, it starts earning.
Well, technically.
During an average eight-hour workday, I spent about US$0.75 on electricity and typically earned a total of around 0.0000014 Bitcoin (BTC) per day. Based on the current value of Bitcoin, that’s roughly the equivalent of US$0.14—slightly less than the estimates provided by the calculator on the Heatbit website, and hardly the high-rolling cryptoculture life you may have heard about.
Even if I were to let the Heatbit Trio run 24 hours a day for an entire month, adding about US$67 to my electrical bill, I still would have earned only around 0.0001246 BTC, or a whopping US$13, assuming I were to cash out right now.
You also can’t use the app to control the heater from your phone. To be clear, you can use the app to monitor the Trio’s current status—it allows you to check your air quality or the current temperature and settings—but you can’t actually control the device remotely with it. The company says it’s planning to add that feature in an upcoming firmware update. But the omission still seems like a strange oversight for something that’s already connected to Wi-Fi.
The onboard controls are strangely oriented too. While the user interface on the Trio is slightly different from what you’d find on other space heaters, it isn’t that difficult to parse. The problem is with the directional fins, which point the heat in the opposite direction of the control screen. So if the controls are facing you—so that you can read the temperature—the heat shoots away from you. The designers could easily remedy that by just flipping the digital interface.
