Solar powered CPU mining

[antantti]

Yes it does, my brother in law is running his masternodes with his solar installation.   

You don't need solar power to run blaablaanode. MOST of the time you only need static ip.

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[btct22]

Yes it does, my brother in law is running his masternodes with his solar installation.   

You don't need solar power to run blaablaanode. MOST of the time you only need static ip.

I know, but I want to have solar power backup for my home data center .. My blaablaanode's have paid for it

[antantti]

Sorry guys.

[Phantoms001]

We have solar on our house for a few years now and trust me when i say that you need to take under consideration many things.

In my opinion it could be viable if you managed to plan on doing it without batteries (will dramatically cut down costs as well as performance) but it also depends on what you're going to mine. If you forget about batteries and only run it during the day (no need to store power), you will get the invested money back much faster.

It will be a real pain in the ass to optimize your setup and make it efficient though.

That really isn't possible.  You can't run anything off just panels, you need some kind of battery.  Solar moves up and down just like mining.  It is different every second.  On a 12v panel you could be getting 18v in full sun, a cloud goes buy and it could drop to 11.  This goes through an inverter which changes it to usable AC current.  Your inverter would be cutting off all the time (they have low voltage warnings).  This is where a battery comes in.  It stores the energy so the volts are constant and steady.  Yes, you can set up a bank of batteries and run your inverter at night time without the panels, but you have to have a battery just to keep things from spiking high and low.  If you have your panels hooked up to your house, the AC from the power company does this and takes the place of the batteries.  

The reason I haven't run a rig off solar is that it may run me 1500.00-2000.00 to get 800-1000 watts consistently.  Because it would take YEARS to ROI vs just paying for .12 electric, I haven't considered it (but have done the pricing and math.  Sometimes it is not worth adding to the ROI on the rig.  You have to sometimes just sit down and just try to make money.  

What I am working on is running laptops to mine.  I have 5-6 laptops sitting around (bought at gov auctions for 20-30.00) that can be charged by solar panels that cost very little.  No batteries, no inverter, the panels put out DC and the batteries take DC.  As I progress I'll start a thread.

[antantti]

Some kind of battery and regulator is needed. Nothing to run that thing overnight but something to just keep it alive.

Batteries are still really expensive and they do max 6 years.

Mining hardware likes 12volts. It is possible.

[joblo]

I don't see the point of a dedicated solar system for mining. Solar is just one power source and mining is just one
power load. Why not connect the solar to the house power as a hybrid system where you can use solar for everything
when it's available and commercial power when not. This would avoid imbalances in power availability and load.
A dedicated solar mining system would either have excess load leaving some mining HW without power or
too much power that can't be absorbed by the mining HW and would have to be bled off and wasted. A hybrid system\
would ensure all the mining HW is mining all the time.

[hackmyl1fe]

CPU mining is bad; they're not that well suited for hashing as GPUs, their cost is too much in comparison to their hashing speeds and you can't scale them (1 PC = 1 CPU, maybe 2).

Yes CPUs are just too expensive, and require lots of space (1mobo per CPU). or if you get one of those server mobo, which are like >600$ you might get 4 on one board.


Personally i wouldnt do it

[Bakhtra]

I don't see the point of a dedicated solar system for mining. Solar is just one power source and mining is just one
power load. Why not connect the solar to the house power as a hybrid system where you can use solar for everything
when it's available and commercial power when not. This would avoid imbalances in power availability and load.
A dedicated solar mining system would either have excess load leaving some mining HW without power or
too much power that can't be absorbed by the mining HW and would have to be bled off and wasted. A hybrid system\
would ensure all the mining HW is mining all the time.

Using GRID-TIE and exporting your excess electricity in to the grid just like joblo said and of course no need for battery since it will make your cost double. What you need is inverter that greater from your current need since you just can add more solar panel later (if you got small budget).

[Leass]

I don't see the point of a dedicated solar system for mining. Solar is just one power source and mining is just one
power load. Why not connect the solar to the house power as a hybrid system where you can use solar for everything
when it's available and commercial power when not. This would avoid imbalances in power availability and load.
A dedicated solar mining system would either have excess load leaving some mining HW without power or
too much power that can't be absorbed by the mining HW and would have to be bled off and wasted. A hybrid system\
would ensure all the mining HW is mining all the time.

Using GRID-TIE and exporting your excess electricity in to the grid just like joblo said and of course no need for battery since it will make your cost double. What you need is inverter that greater from your current need since you just can add more solar panel later (if you got small budget).

Yeah, especially that requlations in EU country can be funny ( In my country, we have to PAY to grid owner tax for sending him our produced electricity and they act as Vault of Energy, taking additional 20% of it for free - not good option :x )

[toptek]

I don't see the point of a dedicated solar system for mining. Solar is just one power source and mining is just one
power load. Why not connect the solar to the house power as a hybrid system where you can use solar for everything
when it's available and commercial power when not. This would avoid imbalances in power availability and load.
A dedicated solar mining system would either have excess load leaving some mining HW without power or
too much power that can't be absorbed by the mining HW and would have to be bled off and wasted. A hybrid system\
would ensure all the mining HW is mining all the time.

Using GRID-TIE and exporting your excess electricity in to the grid just like joblo said and of course no need for battery since it will make your cost double. What you need is inverter that greater from your current need since you just can add more solar panel later (if you got small budget).

Yeah, especially that requlations in EU country can be funny ( In my country, we have to PAY to grid owner tax for sending him our produced electricity and they act as Vault of Energy, taking additional 20% of it for free - not good option :x )

in the US the Electric Company pays us for any thing we make and don't use . but some solar company's if you rent there panels will charge you for what you don't use in the US i found that kind of stupid, so I stayed a way form them sense most of the ones i looked at lets us keep anything left over an auto sells it to the to the Electric Company by law they  have to take it and pay us but we have to stay on the Grind in my state .

some states in the US  are trying what you deal with in the EU but it won't pass . mostly the Republican states .

[Casabrandy]

CPU mining is bad; they're not that well suited for hashing as GPUs, their cost is too much in comparison to their hashing speeds and you can't scale them (1 PC = 1 CPU, maybe 2).

Yes CPUs are just too expensive, and require lots of space (1mobo per CPU). or if you get one of those server mobo, which are like >600$ you might get 4 on one board.


Personally i wouldnt do it

Besides from it is expensive. The hashrate and the duration of usage of cpu is too short compared to GPU. I already try that using the workstation computer in my office. Intel xeon cpu. But it only gave me a penny for almost a day of mining using minergate app.

[Ultegra134]

Altcoin mining is not dead at all, your power consuption and electricity costs are up to you and the country you reside. However, if you are going to mine anyway, do not even bother with CPU mining, it's not profitable anymore, for years now, if you are planning to invest in solar panels, use GPUs or ASICs miners, which do have a higher consumption costs.

Although, you would have to think and plan your investment, do you think it's worth spending all this money for solar panels? Unless you already own them, the ROI to have solar powered mining rigs will be low and probably will take many months or even years to achieve. I would stick to normal GPU mining if I were you, unless the electricity costs are too high and prohibit that.

[Princess802]

You may want to look into Solarcoin.

As I understand it, it's "mined" by producing solar power.  I've never looked too far into it, but it may interest you.

Additionally, if you want an easy answer to this question, just fire up any mining calculator (Google has several) and set the "power cost" field to 0, using your hashrate / etc.

A staking wallet, run on a cellphone powered by a small solar panel would effectively be "free" coins, not accounting for whatever your Internet access costs may be.

[antantti]

I don't see the point of a dedicated solar system for mining. Solar is just one power source and mining is just one
power load. Why not connect the solar to the house power as a hybrid system where you can use solar for everything
when it's available and commercial power when not. This would avoid imbalances in power availability and load.
A dedicated solar mining system would either have excess load leaving some mining HW without power or
too much power that can't be absorbed by the mining HW and would have to be bled off and wasted. A hybrid system\
would ensure all the mining HW is mining all the time.

Hybrid systems are how it's generally done here, grid owner buys all the power small producer doesn't use himself. Price is daily spot http://www.nordpoolspot.com/.

But the original use case of solar systems was to bring the power to places that don't have (and never will) commercial power (for example an island or sahara), or it would be too expensive to build. Solar power made water pump or a small refrigerator in the middle of nowhere possible. For decades panels cost 4-5€/ watt so it wasn't cheap.

Then China started mass manufacturing of panels and today the price is 1€/ watt, ROI times fell below 10 years and we started to see solar panels everywhere.

Like I said, there is no point to build solar only powered mining rig but the idea itself is tempting. It's like mythbusters, can it be done? Can you, in theory, mine somewhere in the middle of pacific ocean?

[Mr_Snipes]

Oh man i'd just like to have enough money to play around with such stuff all day.
Maybe you could start with segmenting usb-miners to groups which would be turned on if power is enough.
Then use capacitors to even the supply a bit. 
Having to look at ROI all the time takes the fun out of it a bit.

[umine]

I see alot of people are saying alt mining is dead due to the high cost of power consumption. If I run a CPU miner on solar power, would that make it worth doing?

Solar power is most actual for south regions. But in this case another problem apears: a lot of heat. So the best for the mining is Hydro or Nuclear POWER (cheep enough) in northen regions

[antantti]

Solar power is most actual for south regions. But in this case another problem apears: a lot of heat. So the best for the mining is Hydro

Seriously, if not after profits or some crazy ideas like I am, the best use for solar power currently is to use that to power your ac.

Panels don't like heat and they really like clear sky.

[ziiip]

I've been running a test on Riecoin profitability for a little over 1 week now.

Mining pool: https://ublock.it
Machine specs:
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4710HQ CPU @ 2.50GHz 8GB DDR3 (laptop CPU TDP 47 W)

Power consumption measured at wall ~94 Watts

Weekly power cost @ 11 cents KW/h = $2

RIC generated in 1 week

99.7 RIC = $6.24 USD at current market price

Still testing other higher end CPU's < 100 watt TDP, should have an update soon on i7 4770k

Riecoin thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=446703.0

[sevenmiles]

"SolarCity has installed thousands of PV systems in California. The average solar panel system from SolarCity is 5,870 watts (5.8 kW) and costs $24,947 for a price per watt of $4.25. The expected cost per kilowatt hour (kWh) is $0.14."

The fix cost is so high- "As of 2017, it's approximately $3.00 per watt, installed. The average sized solar panel system is 5,000 watts, so this brings the total cost to $15,000. That 15k figure is just an average amount. Systems can cost more or less mostly depending upon a homeowner's energy usage."

And does not fit majority of the country

[shawn995]

Solar power is the cheapest way of providing power to you needy devices. Solar power has a lot of benefits. People mostly now a days using solar power for earning their  money. If you want to do mining I think solar power is the best power for your devices.