Solar Powered GPU Equihash Mining ?? Thought's or Experience?? Off-Grid

[bitfools]

Is electricity expensive in your place??

Do U live in a place where electricity costs more than 0.20 KWH??


Do you spend lots of money on electricity for your mining hobby?

CRITICAL POINT  here, and you don't want the GOV to know, just like pot growers, once your ELEC usage goes above say $200/month, you bring all kinds of authority's looking at you, especially when your running 24/7, which means your doing something strange.

Having a few miners and accumulating coin, learning is ok, but once you start a "Mining Farm", then you need 3-phase 440V service, a warehouse, and your talking a REAL-BIZ and insurance costs, and ... blah-blah thus IMPOSSIBLE to make money.

Even the big farms in iceland & europe went BK ( bankrupt ), we only see consistent mining in CHINA where the politically connected can get free excess electricity from the new giga-watt-dams they have built in the last 20 years. But even in China, the large users of electricity are well connected with GOV.

Keep it Small, Keep it Simple.


I agree over 0.20 KWH cost, your talking about 50% of your profit ( less hw ) going just to the ELEC Company, I think the smart thing for young ppl to think about is low-cost solar-farms, design simple low cost GPU farms, that can run off a battery and be charged during day, then elec would be free, and once you tune your rig to minimal power, then its life is greatly enhanced.

I don't worry about power-cost, but if I say lived in Arizona, or some place sunny all the time, I would seriously consider generating electricity. 300 watts per panel, probably six panels at $200, you could run a rig 24/7 just fine, using some good RV battery's at night to power a 600 Watt rig 24/7. Panels wouldn't matter they last forever and can be re-deployed, like the GPU cards.

Building your own charge-controller for battery panels, then you can do away with the CPU power supply, you wouldn't lose any loss, as you don't need 110v, so that save 200 watts right there as power-supplys are terribly inefficient, lower power cpu can control the miners with say linux on banna-pi ( cpu that costs $10 ), I think the chinese will have many gtx-1060-3 class cards out soon that will work low-power, say less than 50 watts each, also some of the new btc mother-boards can support 12+ gpus, ... again going SOLAR then the GOV has no idea your even alive, off the grid mining.

Right now the gtx-1060-3 cards I use are chinese clones of the NIVIDIA, work great. They're working on cloning the NVIDIA chip, so prices for GPU mining will drop dramatically in the future. Right now I'm spending more time on this with my ARM7 systems, looking into gpu mining as these systems run on about 10 watts rather than the 250 watt bullshit of a full BTC mobo with power-supply

Probably see chinese gpu-sticks (usb) very soon, that you can plug a rack of into your rasberry chinese clones

***

Just sharing ideas with other miners, I do have the problem now if I expand my mining then I will bring all kinds of un-wanted attention from authority's. Thus solar mining is very strategic to be off the grid. Also solar-panels now are very cheap, and all the electricity management can be done with arduino class machines the little banana-pi cards that cost $10-$20 work best for me, they even have full 64 bit now for running full nodes

I have a test system now running MONERO, which I find very interesting works fine on arm7 class HW, and generates PRIVACY coins, with privacy off the grid HW,

Lastly all this stuff can be re-deployed, as if the power goes out you can always turn on the inverter and make yourself some electricity for the house.

I can see in the future that turn-key heating system that run solar, I know in Arizona its colder than shit up in North Arizona in the winter, but plenty of sun, and what better way to but to heat the house and make money doing it for free

There are even little boards that you can buy from china that make things COLD, perhaps excess power generation could be used to GEN baby AC if you have excess power?

[phuocduong]

high money for invest, but decrease cost of eletric

[bitfools]

high money for invest, but decrease cost of eletric

Well that's why I keep saying HOBBY

It's rich guys hobby to buy 1/2 dozen high performance GPU boards

I watch these DUMB youtube videos about these kids who have spent $25k on credit-card debt, show their 'rig miners' the u-tube is fool of this stuff, now these are people are going to end up just in debt.

I already had GPU's, from cuda machine-learning years back,

I played BTC in 2011, I played BTC in 2014, but there was always viruses in the software miners, and I didn't want to BUY asics that I would have to trash, when GPU mining became viable because of GPU friendly algo's, now we can play, and re-deploy our HW forever,

I don't think 'investing' in TEN solar panels is that BAD, resell is very easy, and you can always re-deploy the system to taking care of your house, I know that at my home 'electricity' is my single biggest expense, If I went 24/7 100% solar, for the house the payback would be much less than a year, I just don't bother because I don't want a 'critical problem', if my miners fail nobody cares, if my hot-water fails while the wife is having a shower I'm in deep shit

Our hobby's should effect other people, I was hoping from this thread to learn the experience of others an entire solar system is less than $500, and a single 1070 gpu card is $600, if your solar-system keeps running and providing you 'free electricity', it doesn't take long to pay for itself, hell right now I spend close to $100/month for electricity, before I was BIG on my mining hobby my electricity cost was $10/month; My wife threw a fit first time she saw the bill post mining, I just remind her that I pay the bill not her, but she see's it as throwing money away, as she points out "she never sees these bitcoins"

IMHO a solar-system is a very small part of the cost of a full rig, the problem is scaling, from experience 10 panels to keep battery's charged 24/7 for 6gpu 1060-3 miner rig, but if you went to say 10 1070 rigs 10K watts, I would need close to 100 solar panels too keep that amp-hours fed into the battery's to prevent discharge during non-solar times,

The good thing about solar-mining is that you can control the TEMP&POWER so with a smart rasberry-pi controller, you can easily manage your cards to work-less if the battery power predicts discharge prior to sun-up.

Again, its all about the "HOBBY"

I don't think of this as an INVESTMENT, but I do agree that we accumulate lots of different coin, and perhaps one of them will go to the moon, ... perhaps, but just like GOLD or GUNS sometimes you must wait decades for the price to rise.

In the class of investment, if your young, BUY real estate, make your BIG money the old fashion way,

In this SCAM, best is to clone your own ALT-COIN and market the hell out of it, and then you might 'get rich', but odd's are against you, as the old saying say's if it was 'easy' to get rich, everybody would be rich,

MOST BTC legacy people are NOT rich, most have lost their coins; Most of these people sitting on a million alt-coins can't really sell them cuz the price would collapse. Just like the IPO market, these things really aren't that easy.

The number of people that make BIG MONEY is always very small.

Solar is much cheaper than the MINING hobby,

[eleceng1979]

I own 13kw of solar and generate over 16000kwhr's annually.  I still pay an electric bill mining.  The solar ROI for me is 6 years.

Offgrid battery powered systems are infinite ROI and have 5X the $/kwhr rate of my power company.

People buying solar with a 6 year ROI to power mining with a 8 month ROI need to get their head checked...  i do agree about staying off the radar but seriously?

My solar offsets my house, my mining pays for the extra power cost associated with mining.  I didn't spend $30,000 to buy solar so I could buy a $4000 gpu rig to run it 24x7.  Unless you are heavily subsidized and can get free solar buy more gpus instead of solar...

[fanatic26]

So pretty much everything the OP said is flawed.

1. Solar is crap for mining. The solar investment to run a single miner 24/7 is insane.

2. You obviously have no clue about where mining farms are, their size, and how they function. While yes, some have gone out of business that is because of mismanagement and failure to reinvest capital back into the business there are plenty more still in business and just doing fine. Also while China does have a large number of farms, there are massive farms in many other countries. I know of a few dozen private farms off the top of my head that are private and not government funded as you seem to think.

3. The average family home in the US uses $200/mo in electricity easy. Nobody is looking at this like it is strange.

4. There is nothing illegal about using lots of power. Mining isnt illegal either. Meaning there is virtually no risk to running miners at home.

5. Mining farms are very profitable as long as you know how to keep build costs down so I have no idea why he says its impossible to make money.

6. Solar is very expensive and there is no solar system out there with an ROI like you claim. Nobody is buying a solar system that can cover their entire electricity usage and pay back that fast because they dont exist.

[Cereberus]

A solar panel for the home max bring you 3Kwatt and this is not a lot if you intend to build mining farm with GPU-s(so you need some panels). Also the initial cost of solar panel energy is very high compared to electricity which you will pay over the longer run.

If you are not happy with your performance you stop using or sell those rigs. If you build with solar power you have to buy the solar panels and you cannot do anything real good with them except lower the energy cost of your home.

Not worth it for the moment and me and some friends have thought it thoroughly before we ventured into the mining rigs with GPU-s.

[Nick P]

but if I say lived in Arizona

I DO live in Arizona and there's no need for batteries if you're near the Grid. When you're Grid-tied the Grid is your virtual battery. Half the cost of off-grid. All the benefits.

[h311m4n]

I have 6kW worth of solar panels on my roof. I'm sending the data to my domoticz box to see what I'm producing. My peak was somewhere around 35kW in one single day.

That said, a simple 6 GPU rig uses around 20kw a day depending on what you mine.

Solar energy is a good, but it's not the most viable energy for mining. At some point you just won't produce enough and you are completely dependent on the weather (clouds, winter...).

The ultimate way to get free energy 24/7 is with a water turbine if you have access to a river/waterfall.

[fusepay]

Solar energy / production is great for mining, if you have an excess you can feed back to the 'grid', you can also build or buy a Powerwall, store the energy for lower solar producing times.

[Nick P]

h311m4h

You are mixing apples with apples then describing oranges. kWs describe your instantaneous capacity to generate. kWhs describe your production or usage over time. 1kW for 1 hour is 1kWh. I believe you are saying your 6 GPU rig consumes 20kWh of power a day, or about $1 worth of power for a solar setup such as I have. Can you get it cheaper? How much $ does your 6 GPU rig produce a day?

[h311m4n]

h311m4h

You are mixing apples with apples then describing oranges. kWs describe your instantaneous capacity to generate. kWhs describe your production or usage over time. 1kW for 1 hour is 1kWh. I believe you are saying your 6 GPU rig consumes 20kWh of power a day, or about $1 worth of power for a solar setup such as I have. Can you get it cheaper? How much $ does your 6 GPU rig produce a day?

Yes, sorry was kinda late when I typed this. Basically, I can produce up to 37kW over 24h on a nice sunny summer day with 20x300W panels on the roof, a rig will inevitably consume a big chunk of that power. So that's 1.5kWh on average on that particular day. Now with the shitty November weather, it was only 3.8kW for a whole day yesterday for example.

My panels feed my whole house, including the heat pump, dishwasher, TV etc. Basically on ethash a 6x470 rig single mining uses about 750W, so 0.750kWh so 18kW for 24h. I live in Switzerland and electricity is not cheap at all, kinda impossible to get it cheaper. I believe my average cost is somewhere around 0.22CHF/kW so 0.22USD/kWh (we have double tarification as in it costs less during certain hours).

So my panels do bring my electricity costs down, but not nearly enough to pay for my 5 current rigs (I had almost 10 at home at some point).

That said, I'm currently mining other things than the top coins like ETH, ZEC, XMR and produce around 40$/day worth of coins. So even if a rig costs me 4$/day on ethash, and even less on cryptonote, I'm still quite profitable :-).

When I started back in 2016 on ETH, I was barely making any money AND I didn't even have solar panels.

If you have access to a 24/7 power source (hence the water turbine) you are king of the world with your mining operation.