> In a colder climate, DEFINITELY.

Actually, I suspect heating-by-monero-mining is more likely to economically beat heat pumps only in the very coldest climates. Heat pump efficiency goes down when the temperature delta between inside and outside is very large. Below 0F or so, it's quite difficult to find heat pumps that will work sufficiently well, and generally they transition to resistive heating.

Caveat: I'm only talking about marginal advantage, ignoring the capital costs of the Xeon servers or the heat pump itself.

For hobbyists such as myself, the capital cost of already-owned (and obsolete) Xeons are infinitely less than replacing an otherwise-functional (albeit cooling-only) AC in a sub-tropical rainforest climate (like mine), which only has a few weeks of annual frost (snow "sticks" once every decade).

As far as placement of the machine: underneath your computer desk is ideal, as this directed heating allows you to keep the house's thermostat a few degrees cooler.

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If anybody were to ask me "what would you BUY to mine monero@home," I would definitely tell them to [instead] buy a heatpump-heater, -watertank, -&c (presuming they don't have each, already).