Bitcoin Forum

...is where I reside.   Midwest cool weather + a basement = a 6970 running at 73C with fan at 27%.   Did I mention my electricity is free?

I've made previous offers to sell mining space in the past...anybody in the Midwest want to mine here for a discount off your electric bill?

How is your electric bill "free"?

Usually the person who subsidizes the electric bill tends to catch on when it jumps 1000% (which would happen if enough people took you up on your offer).

Free electricity is fine for a rig or two but I have yet to find someone who can supply enough free electricity to power 20GH/s (~$9K annually @ $0.10 per kWh).

Free utilities with rent.  Some would make the argument its included in the rent price...but at $475/mo, I'm not worried.

20 GH/s?  How about 1?

Which state are you located in?

When your electricity bill is more than the rent, I think your landlord will do something about it. Just a hunch though.

Good luck.

Illinois

Because 1 GH/s is pretty damn worthless at this Bitcoin value?

And Giga's point was, if enough people approach you, wanting this deal, you'd eventually (hell, quite quickly) hit a point where the power costs become outrageous. Not a single person wanting to offload all 40 of their PCs to you, but 10 people with 500MH/s? Well, that's 5k... think the landlord might notice that?

Not to mention, what sort of wiring are you actually working with here? You'll need a number of breakers to actually support multiple, hard core, high end mining.

Tell me about it.  Once you get past a trivial amount of hashing power, the power distribution and handling thermal load becomes the most challenging aspects. 

I'm sure his landlord won't mind if he, an unlicensed electrician, goes ahead and runs some new breakers and lines in the house he's renting.

It's cool, yo. I can Google how to do that stuff.

Well, because I rent out a room in a house with 4 other individuals, I do have some advantages.

First of all, I can always deny that it's me using the electricity and it'd be very hard for him to prove it is me.  Rigs are concealable and I don't have access to the furnace since I'm in the basement -- he would likely assume that the girls living upstairs are cranking the heat in the winter, though letting them take the blame would be unethical I suppose haha.

Second, and more importantly, rooms in the basement are particularly hard to rent out because there is no easy access to the kitchen.  The house is set up so that those living in the basement need a key to access the upstairs with the kitchen.  It's basically a bachelor pad down here, and the other room was left unfilled for periods of up to 6 months twice since I've been living here.  So, the landlord would have to choose an option:  kick me out and lose $475 a month for who knows how many months, or let me stay and break even (assuming a $475/mo electric bill).  Lease is good till June and the lease agreement allows me free utilities.  By June I'll have my masters degree and will likely move out anyway.

Um I hope your degree isn't in mathematics.  Based on your scenario above it would obviously be a no-brainer to throw you out immediately.  He likely can't due to eviction laws in your state but just indicating your scenario isn't a hard choice.

Yeah...I reread what I just typed.  I'm currently laughing at the stupidity of what I just said.

Let me recreate the scenario.  Either  kick me out and lose $475 a month for who knows how many months, or let me stay and make SOMETHING since a $475/mo electric bill is unrealistic given the capacity of electrical output.

Edit:  The sad thing is, I actually just found out today that I aced a calculus final  :-\

The first thing I noticed as wrong, ,,, " 73C with fan at 27%"  Try adding 40 x 5850 and check back the temp/fan speed.

Heck! it is minus 10c and my windows are still wide open (kidding)

In the summer I had to keep my fan at at least 60% to maintain 73C or below.

It's hard for people who have never run 10 kilowatts of electrical equipment to realize just how much heat that produces. Even a quarter of that and you will run into heating issues. During the winter you'd have to at least have good air circulation to exhaust the heat. During the summer, you'll absolutely have to have A/C equipment, no way around it. Your situation isn't scalable one bit. Apart from that, "free" electricity is usualy a rediclous claim which can only last so long before you're "found out." Nobody would want to risk that.

It's not scalable because nobody makes a really really huge 6970  :-\

You are, however, offering to host more equipment.

Yeah. And it's the hosting bit that made most of us laugh, as if you could start running 40 videocards in a basement of a house you rent and:

A) Go un-noticed
and
B) Not have to massively upgrade your power distribution network
and
C) Not melt from the excess heat.

I never said 40 vid cards.  You did.

I said 1 GH/s.  That was a joke, but at the same time 1-2 GH/s is something I could support.  I'm really not sure why people are opposed to earning an extra ~$30 a month (haven't done the math, not sure what it comes out to).  Just because 2 GH/s isn't 20 GH/s doesn't mean you wouldn't be earning more than you currently are by utilizing a cheaper source of electricity.  I understand the human brain doesn't think that "small" monetary figures add up to some significant degree over time, but they do.

why would someone trust you with their expensive equipment?  You seem fine with screwing over your landlord so why not screw over the suckers who take you up on your offer?

They will meet me in person and know where I live and know my name.

I'm not screwing over my landlord.  He's making tons of money on the house already.  And, I'm not doing anything illegal.  I'm abiding by my lease. 

The way your landlord knows your name and address?  Letter of the law and not the spirit of it blah blah.  Considering the cold where you are 1 ghash is probably borderline what you can do without really screwing your landlord and needing to work out something else with the lease. 

Most leases (although maybe not yours) prohibit subletting and using property for commercial purposes.  If you move any serious amount of third party hardware in there and I was your landlord I would be looking to evict you simply to save me the electrical costs.  Would be pretty easy to convince a judge you are using the basement as a commercial data center in violation of the lease.

Then again that is why I don't offer "free" utilities in any of the properties I rent.   Not so much on the datacenter angle as the "private garden" one.

Too bad it has already been answered.

I'm not screwing over my landlord.

FYI - My landlord already violates state-law heating requirements and the lease requires us to maintain the heat below the state minimum.

Keep in mind, I have no problem with this, I can always wear a sweater.  In addition, the house is long-ago paid off (it's from the 50's) and this guy is already banking by renting out this place.  It's also not the only property he leases. 

I hope you dont study law. If you present what you said in court, the judge will slam on you the "irrelevant" stamp.

You sounds like a dick envy the landlord for having properties to lease.

I would slap your parents across the faces for being irresponsible
 

Well, then it's a good thing for me that hypothetical propositions are also irrelevant.

But, you make an interesting point.  It actually kind of reminds me of Bitcoin and the dickishness of all its users.  How irresponsible of us to take advantage of a legal loophole which inevitably contributes to economic inflation that ALL citizens have to deal with.  And, that's not even mentioning the threat Bitcoin poses to hard-working bank executives and officials of the federal reserve.

And the part about slapping my parents...yeah that's a bit uncalled for.  Do you know what projecting is?

Oh please, thats totally called for.

You're not exploiting the loophole to help the bitcoin project, you're doing it for your own benefits... to gain money from selling the mined coins or renting your mining space. You got a nerve to even make it sounds like you're doing a good deed.

Did mommy teach you this?

So many angles to approach this from...

1)  No, I'm doing it for my benefit and for the benefit of the person who wants to mine here...like a good utilitarian.
2)  Most Bitcoiners are doing it for their own benefits.  I'd say the ones that genuinely care about the project more than the money they earn are few and far between.
3)  Not renting...helping?  Interpretive difference.  It's like carpooling...it's a win win for the 2 in the car...the toll authority and the gas companies lose (yes I know, slight difference with the lease issue  :D )

Regardless, you have your golden rule and I have mine.  If I was a landlord and I didn't want to worry about it, I would simply construct a lease that prevents any issues from happening.  If I stated free utilities in my lease and someone took advantage of it to the extreme, then my bad.  I didn't think it through.  I'm assuming my landlord did think it through as that would be his responsibility.

Has the word "inconsiderate" ever appeared to you?
You expect the landlord to have a meter in every room? What stop you from breaking in someone's house because they dont have a lock?
I bet you dont even understand the word "ethic"

And you're talking about doing a good deed.  ::)

So...at this point I would assume you aren't interested?

Where in Illinois do you live.  Are you renting one of my units.  Is that why my electric bill is high. 

Haha, maybe. 

Hold up, I'm a landlord and this is mostly the landlords fault. You never include a utility because you never know what your renter is going to do or how they live. Most include it just as an incentive to rent their unit, mistake #1.

That being said, if he has a contract/lease there is possibly a clause in there stating electricity use. If there is no cap in use or no clause, then yes, it is free electricity and is not grounds for eviction. The landlord is at fault here, though most fault should fall on the user, joint. I would be very interested to see what does happen when the landlord discovers what is going on. If your rig is open air, he can definitely boot you on grounds for a fire hazard.

Rig is not open air.

Fire hazard?  You should have heard the complaints from the housemates upstairs when the front door lock became jammed and wouldn't open.  Landlord's response?  "Well, you guys mostly use the side door anyway, right?"

We also buy our own lightbulbs, shovel our own snow, mow the lawn ourselves, etc.

There is no cap or clause in the lease.  Trust me, I read what I signed.  Only mention of anything electrically related is the max. heating temp allowed.

Hint, : nobody care because you have no real capacity worth advertising.

You became laughing stock right after mentioning "ultimate" and "Free", no need to elaborate.

Right.

You must be the wise one on the forum, yes?

So many of you...everywhere.

So, you have only one room, right? Your approach doesn't make much sense except if you put a friend's rig into your place. Even then, do you have any idea how loud a rig with just multiple cards (say 3-4) can get? You will not be able to sleep in the same room. I'd also not put my head to sleep right next to my computer(s) at night for electrosmog reasons, unless you like to have really intensive dreams/nightmares.

On an upside, if it's cold down there, I see no reason why not to heat the basement with a rig or two. It will even be good for the girls upstairs because they actually will have to heat much less when the warm basement rises up. In fact, they might end up saving electricity normally used for heating and the bill will just go up a little bit.

Forget the data center idea and buy yourself a couple of used 5870s for cheap.

I rent a room along with everyone else.  The rest of the house itself is "shared living space."

I sleep to heavy metal.  It relaxes me.

It's always cold down here...sweater weather.

Used 5870s require additional video card slots that my motherboard does not have.  Otherwise, this might be a better idea assuming Bitcoin's value doesn't drop off the face of the earth.

Actually, instead of having to invest in good sweaters to keep you warm and to enhance your way of life (how do you concentrate while working on a master's degree when you are freezing? unless you sleep in the library)

 for 35 bucks I'd buy another mainboard with one pci-e 16x and at least two pci-e1x,
2 extenders from sintech (china) off ebay,
a sempron for 30 dollars,
a usb drive,
2-3 120mm fans,
a plastic shopping cart (as a case, works well)
and a good used 80+ 700W PSU

In your situation, with a limited amount of free electricitiy, it still makes sense to invest in hardware. I'm assuming the only reason why you ask others to put their equipment with you is cos you can hardly survive on what money you got and have 0$ left to invest.

Bingo.

On a positive note, I consider student loans a low-risk investment.  After all, it's not my money  ;D

Too much hazzle to host other people's hardware. It'll only steal your time and even if people would trust you with expensive hardware, which they won't, you'll likely only have trouble with being accountable for when the cards aren't running full load at all times. Say your internet gets cut off, you'll get a call "Why isn't my rig running on 500 Mhash?" right away. Or say one rig, or just one card dies under your watch. Who's responsible? Try to save some cash to further extend your own rig, even if that means you need extenders or a new motherboard. Even one more card can make it a little warmer down there.