I’m a Bitcoin / crypto newbie with access to solar power. The unit is off-grid and gets fed to a lithium battery, with 12 kw power. Any excess power is not utilized, so was thinking that mining Bitcoin (or possibly alt-coins?) might make sense. What do you think would be a good starting configuration for me?
Also, the property is a few hours away, so I would want to ensure I could monitor it remotely and shut it down if need be (e.g. if there’s any possibility of a fire hazard). I already have temperature sensors, cameras, and remote lights / power strips, so hopefully that will help.
From what I’ve been reading, trying to mine solo is almost impossible so I assume I would need to join a mining pool. I did some research on ViaBTC, but not sure I’m understanding the payout. Seems like it’s 7 cents per terahash / second rate for the entire day?? That doesn’t seem to add up to much, but maybe I’m not reading it correctly.
If you’re only using the excess power, it doesn’t really matter what you earn per TH since, it’s 100% profit. At any rate, it’s difficult to project what you’re gonna earn since it’s a function of the total hashrate, whether bitcoin or alts which is really only going up, meaning profits are only going down on a coin per TH basis.
The other important question is if your solar system is sized appropriately for miners. for example if you only have a 1000W panel, you can only run asics that will draw less than 1000W.
Matching the load to the solar output is also difficult since power output changes based on time of day. but if you have ample overhead, for example 3000W at peak (noon) then running a 1500W miner for 4 or 5 hours you wouldn’t have to worry about any intermittent power issues
I would suggest starting small and doing it asap.
Don’t spend too much on the miner (200-600 bucks) and go for a low wattage miner Under 400 watts or even a 175 watt. Maybe even try to run it 24/7 .
A tiny mini will always be used , until you dump it or whatever.
The best way to learn mining is to mine. Better to do that with a $500 investment earning $0.55 cents day (or something like that) than a $5,000 miner and realizing it will only run 5-10 hours a day on solar and never pay itself off.
The real theory (IMO) with a solar start up, is to make profit now and try to use todays profit to grow. More panels > more miners > more panels > ect.
If you got a small miner now, like a mini-doge (which mines the Scrypt Algorithm so it also mines LTC and a bunch of other Scrypt Algo coins), Or ever a smaller KDA miner, you can then move up to the bigger version of the same algorithm miner, on the same pool , in the way you know.
I assume this place has internet already, So paying that bill in a sustainable way could be goal #1.
Once you pay the internet bill and determine profit, you can then do the math on larger setups or profits over time.
Hey mate how many kw of solar do you have? (You mean 12kw battery right, but how much is the solar?)
I think there’s a few factors that could help us give a better idea. Firstly does your inverter keep a record of your monthly solar production? For example on my house my 8kw system produced 1700kw in December but in June only produced 380kw. Also my brothers house about 300m away only seems to produce 3/4 of what I do on the same size system and I think that might be because of the direction his panels are facing, so I don’t think it’s fair to assume you can pump out 8 hours of your max solar production a day.
Secondly are you in north or Southern Hemisphere? This also comes back to what months are your peak production? Because if you are north I’m assuming your solar production would be low at the moment and you wouldn’t want to buy too early, not be able to mine much and then have mining profits drop off a clif. I don’t think that will happen but I’m saying it is possible.
Lastly what is the max discharge of your battery? I’m assuming it’s 5kw if it’s only 12kw?
So if you could share how much you generate that will help us help you. If you were the same as my house (8kw solar/13kw battery) in the climate I live in I would consider buying a small box miner to run 24/7 365 days a year (as much as possible) however I would consider buying a bigger miner such as a S19XP but buying it just before your peak solar season kicks in and then after your good solar season finishes you can sell the miner to shorten your ROI. This is something I am considering before next November when I have my 40kw system up and running. Some might disagree with this but I welcome a healthy open discussion of any cons or pros
Cheers
Edit: forgot to say for fire suppression I use Elide fireballs on both my miners and batteries. Haven’t had to use them Personally but the videos look impressive
Thanks for the reply (and others on this thread too)!
These are all good points / questions, and I’m still finding out what I got with this house that I just purchased. It’s a 2nd home and it’s winter here now (Northeast) so have not been out there too much.
knowing that your battery bank is 12kW it’s not out of the question to assume your panels are ~2kW-2.5kW, which would give you a full charge in ~6 hours which is an ideal period for a solar system. so you could potentially run 2 S9’s. and If that’s the case, and the home being off-grid, you could capture the waste heat energy to heat your water, which would then mitigate power draw from the hot water tank to the miners but still have hot water.
Having only 120v I believe will rule out anything like antminers and limit you to smaller miners like box miners. Still worth looking into though for sure!
most of the new gen stuff runs on 240, now even 210-490 3-phase. But ideally what you want to look for a 120V miner that has the highest joule per TH or watts per TH (basically the same thing) to get the most coin for your power.
I think the most difficult part will be load switching the miner(s), Meaning balancing the amount of load the miner pulls for the output of the panel and any given time. As the output of the panel(s) fluctuate whether due to sun position, small/intermittent clouds, and even atmospheric conditions, the efficiency of the power delivered to the miners degrades for both having to much power and to little power.
I’ve thought about this a lot and ideally what would be best is to have a firmware, maybe braiinsOS, that has an API so you can adjust the power consumption based on the power output.
most solar systems have a device for this between the panel and the batteries called and MPPT charge controller. Currently I’m not sure if it’s better to connect the miners before or after the MPPT controller.
anyway if you cant tell im a f*ckin nerd so I could go on and on, but ill digress, lol
Love the nerd info!! Guess I’ll start off small with a 120V miner to get my feet wet.
BTW, if I wanted to just run a full node at my normal (on-grid) home, with no mining, can I easily do that? Is the biggest hurdle the disk storage for the blockchain (I think it’s currently something like 400 GB)?
yea i’d disk space is probably you biggest concern, and its around 450GB. but remember, its taken just over 13 years to get to that size, so if you use a 1TB external SSD you know you’re good for another 13 years before you need to get a bigger hard drive. And the size of the chain grows linearly because each block as a finite size of around 1.5mb and blocks are mined at a constant rate, on average about every 10min.
