Bitcoin Forum

Hi everyone,

Is anyone here using Solar power for mining?


I sat down with a friend yesterday and we found that we could find small Solar panels that could be integrated in a home circuit with around 200w at 500 Euros. Is anyone doing this? We thought that if this works, we should think about building something awesome with this. Generally, it could mean free electricity for one graphics card or 6-7 FPGAs.

The main hindrance to your plan is German weather.

11.025kwp running on my house and I can use all my energy by myself for what I want. Next step (next year) are batteries and using the energy all time :-)

Not yet, but maybe in future. :)

I would go for: produce solar power -> mine bitcoins when batteries are full -> warm up water with waste heat -> heat rooms with leftovers from that (dump outdoors in summer).

That and it will take a long time to get your money back for the price of the panels and inverter, you can buy a lot of power for EUR500

All my mining activity is solar powered, even at night.  I have a 5kw grid connected system that exports a significant excess of power to the grid (that I get paid for).  Any mining at night is more than offset by the power my panels generate during the day.  This power is used by someone else to offset their usage, so overall my mining activity does not use any fossil fuels.

The most important thing however is to consider the cost.  500 euros buys a LOT of kWh.  My system generates a minimum of 7500 kWh per year at 35 degrees.   200w of panels would generate about 300 kWh here.  How much does 300 kWh cost where you live?  I bet it's no where near 500 euros.  You would be looking at a payback period of many years.

Seems in most places ar9und the world solar panels are an investment in the environment not so much a business decision.

If you wanted to really save money on your mining you'd get a 12v battery setup and then run 12v power points to your miners and connect them direct to the wall without a PSU. Your PC would still need a PSU because it uses different voltages, but a laptop could be run directly off a 12v point.

This saves on the losses of the 12v DC to 220v AC conversion, then back again by a PSU. If you consider the DC->AC conversion is maybe 80% efficient then even a good PSU is 90% effcienct (most laptop PSUs are waaay less) then you are actually only getting to burn 72% of what your panels produce.
If you ran a 12v battery system your losses would be far less (in the charge/discharge of the batteries).

It would also be far cooler than just having grid connect!

That works out. The average power of solar devices goes to somewhere between 400-500kwh per year, with some units at 550-600 per year.

A really awesome summer could make somewhere up to 700 per year.


Chefnet, would you be so awesome to post the costs you had to set those up? I am considering to suggest my mother to get this done on her house right now.


Yeah, it looked like those were enthusiast Photovoltaic cells. Roof solar heat devices seem to be far more efficient and useful.

300kwh comes down at 0.25€ which means somewhere around 75€.


Yeah, those were the panels we looked at...

That's pretty damn good. Who's your provider?

0.25 per kw/h...

We have used Flexstrom, which is now bankrupt, now we are going with Naturstrom.de

Wonder why they went bankrupt.  :D

0.25 is damn good. I pay like 0.27 now and that is pretty good already. How well did the transferring over from a bankrupt company work? Any outages?

36 panels on our house for a total of ~7.5kW.  During the day if the pool pump or AC isn't running we are in the positive.  I run 3 GPU's and my PC takes up about 800W.  Our average electric bill has been about -$200, yes negative, and the lease for the panels is about $180.  Crazy, I know.

is that with or without goverment subsides?

#

I can tell you. They didn't collect their damn money. I forgot to pay them once. For almost a YEAR I did not hear from them.

They were largely profitable and are now blaming their customers, telling that they had bad payment morale. Which is likely true, but sending out letters with "PAY, CLIENT" usually helps. Or just automatic reminders.

I don't know about other countries, but in Germany it works like this: Your local provider provides your electricity. Always. So you never have an outage, whatever happens. The companies that do not produce themselves are brokering their energy from the electricity markets, in and out of Germany. The regional provider brokers everything it does not blow from its electricity to the markets, getting into the selling market.

So, most of the cheap providers are actually traders. Most of the bigger providers that are more expensive are producers. When the company went bankrupt, nothing really changed. Except that we had to collect our reader's numbers and were automatically switched to the regional one, who automatically enters you into a ridiculously expensive contract that can be canceled every month by switching somewhere else.

Yeah spill the beans?

He said he leased the panels, so that usually means the leasing company got subsidies. Theres tons of those panel leasing company like solarcity or sun run. usually a 20 year i think, with option to buy at end of lease.

^^ oh i see..

You can make a system that is off grid, that produce normal electricity, that control itself automatically.

Its based on 2 big solar panels, one inverter (12V DC to 110V/230V AC), fuel generator which is started automatically by the inverter if the load is too high for it to deliver to help produce enough electricity or when the battery level is low. You also get these HUGE Royal batteries with many thousand Ah. So even if you don`t get sun where you are, you can live of the fuel generator (which is cheap electricity) in the winter days when the sun is not so strong in the northern hemisphere.
In the south you can connect this system to the grid and sell the electricity you don`t use and make money.

I sell this stuff. Kinda genious.

I like...

   2 big panels
   sell unused back
   auto source change on demand
   HUGE Royal batteries ? use it to store charge??


dont like..

   fuel generator .. you mean the kind that if you and all your neighbors ran one nobody would get any sleep?

   That kind? 



Ive been considering a move on solar but .. only in my head. lol  I keep hearing "researchers making ground breaking improvements" on solar panels but pricing schemes seem like they just went from "buy my panel" to "lease my panel"

Of course no diy install packages. When are we gonna get something where we can install panels and add inverter and batteries that hold charge and press go. Maybe replace "press go" with attach miner!  ;D





 
 

Well you can buy panels on your own, inverters on your own, and batteries on your own, what more are you expecting from a kit? The rest is the DIY, of installing it, not much more to be said for that?

Well, I live in Ontario and they have a solar panel subsidy program.  If your country/region offers a program it would increase ROI by a lot.  So, you would have lower costs to buy the hardware.  Also, I'm not exactly sure but they buy back solar power at, at least 40 cents per kwH.  That's a great price.  So it would be best to sell all your solar power to the grid then buy cheap electricity at the lower rate.

Something with an upgrade path would be nice.. so that you dont buy a panel that only works with a certain  kind of inverters..or only woks and tandom with another panel of the same kind.

 or maybe ya want a solution that you can daisy chain or add batterys for expansion for longer winter or heavy use or maybe something with a mixed solution you can offset if ya get desperate like a noisy fuel generator.


or maybe something thats a standalone unit , Guess some folks wanna sell back to the utilities and some just want them to fek off so they can go off the grid.

 


Sometimes companys start off looking modular and then when you need to replace a part you realize youre stuck in their lil eco system and you have to buy one of "their panels" or it only works with their inverter .. and when another company comes out with a panel 6 months later thats 150% better youre just a simple upgrade away ... you dont have to take out a third mortgage to catch up to the tech.






 
I dont know much about this stuff.. just some thoughts.

 But the way bcpokey put it was like "hey you can buy a motor and at transmission and wheels .. there's not much more than that!" lol



if HjerterEss sells this stuff im sure he can come up with a 101 reasons why its not "just that"  ..

 I could be mistaken! I dont know thats why i inquired! For all i know they run off asics and gatorade!