I am sure if we could put a group together interested in home heating from bitcoin mining that we could get an affordable and elegant device made specifically for this purpose.

What I am thinking of is something clean and quiet that could sit on the wall in the living room or den and not have to be hidden in a closet.  Another option would be a device that hooks into a hydronic water loop heating system.

I'd like to start an interest list and make this happen, but we need a large enough group willing to invest in such a system to make the economics work out.  If we could get one of the mining rig firms interested that would also be helpful.  I've made some back-of-the-napkin calculations and I think the goal of nearly free heat is very attainable, even accounting for the initial investment in the mining hardware and heat exchanger.

I'm looking down the barrel of a nordic winter so I could use this kind of system today.  Who's with me? 

Ideal candidates for this system have the following characteristics:
 1) already using electricity for home heating
 2) long and cold winters
 3) own their home

The folks at Nerdalize are developing computational heat exchanger modules specifically for home heating that would be perfect for mining also.  They use general purpose computers for the computation/heat source, but  I have talked with them about adapting their technology for Bitcoin mining.   They are interested, but they would need a large enough order to justify adapting their modules for bitcoin mining.  They have already run evaluations of a KnC Jupiter mining board and their systems could easily handle the high power/heat densities of bitcoin mining chips.  They just need to see customer demand to justify more work in this direction.
 
One thing to keep in mind also is that mining is about to start running into Moore's law.   That means we could see 20 nm mining chips stay competitive longer than 28 nm chips, and future feature sizes even longer.

This could also be a way to decentralize Bitcoin mining which now seems to be dangerously headed towards data center centralization.