You must be retarded if you going to pay 40k for 10kW system lol
$1/W is the going rate for a few panels, you should be able to get them for even less in bulk. |
|
|
|
|
I'm pretty impressed with mine. It works great for upscaling 1080p to 4K, but a carefully tuned desktop with a good GPU does it better. The latter is obviously a lot more expensive, of course. If you're not a hardcore videophile, it will be more than good enough.
|
|
|
|
|
Possible but unlikely to be profitable.
|
|
|
|
|
I knew a fat, mean girl named Jean Ma in high school. Jean Ma sounds like "golden horse" in Chinese. She's fat so she's massive, so Massive Golden Horse, MGH. That's the formula for potential energy and she's storing a lot of that in the form of fat!
|
|
|
|
|
We make life more complex than it really needs to be because it's better that way. Otherwise, we would just be another species of apes...
|
|
|
|
I use technology to help my best friend who is another special person, even more special in fact.  Speaking of technology, I have been curious about it since preschool, got my first electronics kit in 1st grade, and built my first switching power supply in 4th grade. A very early start on electronics and it definitely paid off! |
|
|
|
Batteries would need to be half their current cost for me to consider it. The problem I have is that I can store 60KWh per day and batteries are $10,000AUD per 12KWh...
Nissan Leaf modules are going for about $200/kWh, probably even less in quantity. There are also LiFePO4 cells which are even cheaper (like the ones I used in my setup) but building up a sizable pack out of those is a lot of work... |
|
|
|
Excellent project, feeling jealous of you. It is really a great way to use solar power in mining.
I have to admit that I'm jealous of my best friend Naomi Wu! Not only is she smart, she's very beautiful and artistic. I kind of wish I could be as good looking as her so that I could host a nice TV show of my own. I also have to say that another one of my friends, Allie Moore, is really jealous of me now. For a bit of background info, she and I have been trying to "one up" each other in going green. That kind of slowed down once I got a Prius since she couldn't afford a new car, then she needed to replace the HVAC system in her house so I suggested one of the Gree smart systems. She didn't care very much about my cryptocurrency mining (not even how I largely focus on energy efficient coins), but add the solar and the fame and I managed to rise to a level that would be very difficult for her to one up. To get back on topic, the best way we could promote solar power is to share information on how to build effective DIY solar setups. From beginners who need a bit of guidance to put together their first solar power system to experts who design open hardware for use in solar power. Solar power and cryptocurrency mining unfortunately don't tend to go together as a good investment. For those who have built large solar mining setups, what are they planning to do with the solar panels once mining is no longer profitable? |
|
|
|
Correct which somewhat defeats the purpose of Maximum Power Point Tracking. The battery will store the energy that otherwise just turns into heat. If you're not utilizing the potential of the panel at all times, you're wrecking your ROI versus what you get off the grid.
Also if you're doing this off a 12 volt panel and using it at a 12v power supply, you're artificially dragging the voltage down using the MPPT (unless your input tolerance is way higher). This makes cabling costs and voltage drop an even bigger factor and a full stop for anything larger than 1000W.
If you make sure the load is always at least what the solar panels are capable of producing, then the full power generated by the panels can be used. The remainder will be pulled from the mains. You can even have just some of the panels supplying the hacked PSUs with the remainder supplying an inverter as is usually done. In that configuration, the required inverter will be quite a bit smaller, since those aren't cheap. (The idea of hacking a hybrid car inverter into a solar inverter/rectifier is an interesting one since those are dirt cheap for their power capacity, but requires a very expert level of electronics knowledge.) |
|
|
|
May I know the official site for Perk? Mining using phone? Interesting
It's largely a dead coin nowadays, but here's what's left of the community: https://www.reddit.com/r/perktv/ |
|
|
|
I can’t say how long a mobile device would last under that kind of load, but I can’t imagine it would hold up well at all.
In my experience, the cheap ZTEs I used for mining Perk would last about 6 months. Back then (2 years ago), it only took a week to break even so it was a good investment. |
|
|
|
Unless you live in the desert, even with MPPT, the voltage won't be stable enough. The moment a cloud hits a panel, you're going to see voltage swings without a buffer. If the 5-8% loss is of that great concern, having a battery as a voltage buffer is the safest way of doing it. Not to mention the PSU and GPU don't keep a stable draw, it varies constantly. The MPPT needs something to power track against. If both the power source and load are constantly varying, that's not the best.
I think the OP is on the best route. Operating large solar systems at 12V is NOT cost effective. The cable sizing required to bring the amount of amps from any length of distance at 12V is outright impossible and certainly not cost conscious. Keep in mind there are MANY factors in the overall efficiency of a solar system, cabling and inverter are certainly big ones. Having the solar system bring in the high voltage (the whole point of strings) and invert it (that inverter is likely 98% efficient) to clean 120VAC is worth the few % lost.
I was a solar designer and installer for almost a decade and the question of can I do this right off the panel came up very often. I have a very similar mining/solar set up myself.
The normal PSUs running from the mains hold the voltage constant. The hacked PSUs (that accept on the order of 300V DC and perform MPPT) just take load off the normal PSUs when solar is available. Could also just tap into the primary side DC bus with one set of PSUs but then the solar setup will have a connection to mains, probably causing problems when connecting many PSUs together. For my setup, I can (and have) run it without a battery if I add a PSU with a series diode, connecting it where the battery would normally go. It just wouldn't be efficient at using the solar panel since the miners only use 16W or so and the 100W panel almost always makes more than that during the day. |
|
|
|
|
High end smartphones have never been profitable for mining - they cost way too much for the performance. Cheap smartphones like $20 Moto Es give way more performance per dollar for mining.
I have also tried mining earnhoney with a Pi 3. It is profitable when it runs, but it proved too unstable to be worth running.
|
|
|
|
What's coming down from his panels aren't 12V, they're likely strings somewhere in the 150-300V range. Even individually, larger panels like this individually are above 25V themselves. Not to mention the solar power isn't constant enough; you'd be varying input voltage constantly. You need the inverter to smooth it out and make it a clean and stable power.
Hack some cheap server PSUs to perform MPPT, then parallel the output with unmodified server PSUs to get a constant voltage. Hack the load share to give preference to the solar PSUs, with the normal PSUs supplying the remainder. It will take a lot of electronics knowledge to do it. |
|
|
|
Have you thought about finding a way to feed the DC from the solar panels directly into the 12V consumers and bypass the two transformation stages?
That could potentially give you another 10 - 15% more net power by reducing losses. I know they do things like that in large datacenters sometimes. Unfortunately, 12V PSUs are still not mass produced and therefore expensive. However, compared to high end consumer PSUs and solar panels, it may be very profitable. You could perhaps implement it by using some properly dimensioned battery bank like an UPS and then add some custom wiring to the GPUs.
I have done that, but on a much smaller scale with one 100W solar panel. The miners (cheap smartphones and small ASIC board) run from a TI DC/DC module. At 89% efficient, it's a bit dated, but works well enough for now. (I plan to replace it with a homemade 96% converter based on a LT chip just for the fun of it.) There's a LiFePO4 battery pack to provide power at night (although the main purpose is as a UPS/Ohmconnect battery for my IT setup) and since the solar panel easily generates more than what the miners use, I have the DC/DC converter (custom design) in my PC to use whatever is left over. BTW, I would suggest not having a DC bus voltage that can be both higher and lower than the load voltage, since buck boost converters are less efficient than plain buck converters. The reason that was used in my PC was because back then, lead acid was the only economical option for a UPS battery. (And going 24V would require two batteries which doubles the cost.) When that needed replacement, I replaced it with LiFePO4 which is very close to a drop in replacement. If I were to redesign it from scratch, I would use LiMn batteries which is 14.4V nominal for a 4S configuration, so the DC/DC for the PC would only need to be a buck converter. What would be interesting for larger setups would be to get a hybrid car inverter and hack it to act as a grid tie inverter/rectifier. With continuous power ratings well into the 10s of kW, it would be plenty for a very sizable mining setup. It would also require a very expert level of electronics knowledge. |
|
|
|
|
At one point (over a year ago), it was profitable to mine with cheap ($20 or less) smartphones, but now it won't return enough to break even in a reasonable time.
|
|
|
|
|
Solar power. More for the fun of it than anything else, but long story short, I did get pretty popular with many of my friends.
|
|
|
|
You really cannot make anything much from Android minig.
You actually can if you do it right. Catch is, even a $20 phone is going to take a while - a month or more - to break even, and that doesn't even account for increasing difficulty. The winners are the ones who started early. A further catch is that the few who are making a good profit mining with cheap smartphones are going to keep a secret which coins they're mining so as not to invite a lot of new miners and greatly increase the difficulty. |
|
|
|
|
The Panasonic GH5 is said to be one of the best "affordable" 4K cameras currently available, but it's still anything but cheap.
On a side note, invest in some LED lights if you film indoors. They're very cheap nowadays. There are many Youtube videos getting great quality from a smartphone by using that trick.
|
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
