Bitcoin Forum

Is it possible to reduce the power consumption of a miner in order to use the energy produced from solar panels?

you can use weaker mining hardware with less power consumption, but then you will also have less hashrate.

for example: a raspberry pi with an asic usb stick

You would need a big field full of panels in a constantly sunny place in order to compete as an individual miner, it's probably not worth it compared to filling that same field with ASIC machines.

I believe in a future where everyone has sonal panels and everyone acts as a miner, then that would make a difference. If you count millions of solar panels together, that would be a pretty big amount of hashrate that could meet in a pool and challenge the ASIC monopoly, but that will need bitcoin to be mainstream.

technically anything is possible. but it is all about efficiency.
you can make miners that are consuming less power and giving you a better hashrate at the same time. you can also make a solar panel that generates more electricity with higher efficiency and then pair these two together to get a nice setup.
but in the end it comes down to a manufacturer to find this economically possible to make something like this.

I don't think that it is possible to reduce the power of mining hardwares because in mining you cannot control the power of the hardwares and they are all maxed out when you are using it on mining because that is how mining works, it uses all the power of the certain hardware and it keeps on working as long as it is still fine. If you want to used solar panels then your solar panels needs to upgrade to have more capacity for mining.

I have already a 5kW grid connected solar system and I want to use energy for mining which is not used in my house and would otherwise be delivered to the grid.
Is it possible to reduce the cpu clock to reduce the power consumption of the miner?

I don't think you'd get anything done with a 5kW PV system even if you could underclock the miners, no offense. I don't think it's possible to do so without opening them up and tinkering yourself, though, which is risky. Anyway, yours is not a large system at all, enough to cover the average home's electricity needs perhaps but definitely not enough to handle a miner's power draw. A single S9 under normal operating conditions will draw 12.7 MWh a year, or 12,702 kWh. If you're in an excellent location for solar, your 5 kW system may produce... what, 7,000 kWh a year? If you used no electricity yourself and it all went to the miner, that still would barely cover it running at half-power. I've done the math on it myself, and in my location (which is average, but not exceptional, for solar PV production) I'd need an 11 kW system (with installation costs of $30k+) to cover one single miner costing $1.5k.

I don't thin it is possible to reduce the power consumption but you can reduce the cost of the electricity your spare your mining rig. That will be helpful for you to see the profit more than you expected. Solar panel electricity is green energy which can be use for your home purpose too.