. What I compare these to when looking at power is electric showers. any decent 1 here uses 10.5kw and allowed a max on 2 on my system at any one time. They have to have a dedicated breaker each.
Keep in mind the "time" factor, taking a shower is 30-60 mins max, mining is 24/7, so the infrastructure might not be set up to handle the same load all that long, I also doubt the 10.5kw thing, are you sure about that? what kind of shower is that? I have a 200L water heater and a large pump and those combined don't go past 3kw, 10.5kw is enough for 2 average houses almost everywhere on planet earth, why would they allocate 10.5kw for an electric shower?
Yes exactly that. Not an investment its a learning curve.
With all due respect, I always talk about "Newbies" who mine at loss or break-even when we discuss future difficulty, sometimes based on the numbers in front of us, we expect diff to drop by say 10% and then it doesn't, or any other kind of speculations we do, those numbers are usually off because we miss a very critical element in the equation, which is miners like yourself, that is not a bad thing at all, I am just trying to tell you that "you are most certainly not alone in this", and I do encourage you to actually learn how to mine, and the best way of learning is by practicing it in real-life, mining for a week by yourself probably teaches you more about mining than reading half of the topics you find here, so mine on!
I might enjoy doing it and decided to invest in proper efficient miners in the future.
If you are located on the west side of Europe, then your best move would be finding a better power rate and not just more efficient gears, the word efficient gear is rather misunderstood, the word efficient is subjective really, as @Biffa mentioned that power costs about 16 cents in the UK, no gear will be efficient long enough and turn out to be profitable at such power rate, in other words, S15 is could be more "efficient" in China than S17 pro in the UK, when mining you are basically competing against everyone else, almost every competitor has access to the same mining gears so having more efficient gears than some other miners is not a huge advantage, however, having better power rate is the biggest advantage one can have against the world.
That's just what I think, it's not a popular or proven fact, it's simply how I interrupt the mining business based on my humble experience so take it with a grain of salt.
