Topic: Advice on setting up a personnal farm (Read 1437 times)

Phil, If this project is something you may have others involved in, or if you wanted to entertain a franchise type agreement with someone keep me in mind. I have been becoming more educated about solar and have a gentleman who is also very interested in mining that is coming to the table for solar.
It is appreciated.

sent a pm to Finksy  with info i have.  on solar setup. Solar install is his business and he is best equipped to answer that.

I will leave op's thread alone. But I do hope to have a thread on this by Jan or feb.

Cool setup Phil! Just out of curiousity, if he has a 60kW setup for solar, can he cut a deal with the local utility to get cheaper purchased electricity during the 2/3 time off-production, or does he just get it free 1/3 of the time and have to pay the going rate 2/3 of the time?

I'd be happy to help you get PSU's setup once you guys are ready. For a setup that size we can get some good pricing on the auxiliary components like cables.  PM me once you are ready to look at options etc. I'm gonna send you some samples of each board as soon as I get the 4K boards ready.

He posts here and his business is solar installation.  We live in the same town in NJ, USA

The goal is to run mixed use his home and some miners. I was at his house yesterday looks good so far.

Since he does 100% of the install on his spare time it gets done slower.  He is also not subject to the average costs since for setup.

As he gets all parts wholesale.  In NJ  the power company will pay you 4.4 cents a kwatt  and charge 10 cents.

 So he is better off mining then selling back the power.

He runs a no battery setup link to power company.

 The math is ⅓ of the time the solar would make 60kwatts  so you are talking 20 kwatts 24/7 can be used to mine, since ⅔ of the time  he buys power.

This gets rid of all battery cost and make the plan work.   Battery cost is what kills most solar setups.  But if linked to the power grid year round you should get 8 hours of 60kwatt every day from the field that where you get the 24/7 figure of 20kwatts.

In time this actually becomes a free power setup as the gear all should fully pay off in under 6 years.
As he sets it up and  we have it fully running we will post more.
The op should look into  alternative solar if he can make it work.

Very impressive for sure.  Is the goal of it to be bitcoin mining with all of this electricity? Or is it selling to electric company?

Either way that is a lot of solar.  Could be interesting to hear more about it for sure.

WOW! A 60kwatt solar field is a huge investment. Where is your friend located?

I am interested to know more about this solar project.

Buying one of your new 2x 2000 psu's and running 3 s-7's.  Is an investment.

I have a friend building a 60kwatt solar field that is an investment.

Mining has money left for spot mining under the correct conditions.

I think a new farmer needs to consider getting your 2880watt psu's and your 4000 watt 2x psu's  then running s-7's and avalon 6's

Of course that farmer needs to understand selling off gear when he needs to sell.

I look forward to using finksy/J4bbrwock   psu's    in this solar setup that my friend is building.

Joining a signature campaign is similar to freelancing or advertising. They cannot be considered as an investment.

My reply was a facetious mix of rhetoric and sarcasm, since we all know gambling is not a real investment and the person I was directing it at clearly has a history of it as well as the ever-popular spam signature campaigns.

And altcoins as a LOW-RISK investment? Are you fucking serious? While you're at it, you should put some money towards the new Joshua Zipkin / Friedcat joint-venture startup, guaranteed to make you money . [ Note: This was also sarcasm]

As far as I'm concerned there are almost no sound BTC investments.  You can either buy and hodl coin speculating that it will increase in value (which will not net you a + BTC return), or speculate on mining if YOUR circumstances are right, hoping for a BTC return.  People are always quick to bag on mining, but if you look at the track record, it is one of the only investments that have the ability to generate a positive BTC return depending on your purchase price and hosting cost.  Pretty much everything else has turned out to be a scam, and has resulted in a hell of a lot more losses than mining in general.

well signature campaign is not really an investment, of your money, you invest your time there which is another thing

so you can do signature while still investing in something with low risk, maybe some high altcoin like eth, which look not so volatile comapred to other

Gambling is a horrible idea it's not a investment.  It's something you might enjoy if your a gambler but in no way is it an investment.  

Signature campaigns are kinda a bonus.  Just post normal and you get a little extra coin for posting which is nice.


But neither of the two things mentioned above are investments.   For what it's worth I think mining still has some life in it.  Just is longer ROI and harder then it once was hen 3 month ROI was normal.

Curious, what is your idea of a sound BTC investment? Gambling or signature campaigns?

Honestly man I wouldn't even bother with mining. In this day and age ROI is pretty shit and you're likely not to make anything by time you factor in electricity and whatnot. Mining isn't a game for consumers anymore but for large corporation that have centralized the BTC mining POW.

Honestly better just to buy BTC and invest them somewhere.

Hydro-electric has always interested me.  If you are setting it up as 3-phase generation (I think that is more efficient for generation?) Make sure top get proper 3-phase PDU's and keep the load balanced.  Do you know the minimum flow at certain times of year?

As for maximizing your revenue, it depends on how much you have to invest in mining after the infrastructure is built.  You would be best to build the electrical to whatever size you deem fit (including the water supply you have), then maxing out your electrical generation taking the minimum flow/generation into account.  If you have enough to invest in the newest generation miners, do that.  If you can only afford to max the power with last generation miners (S5's), do that.  If you don't have enough for that, fill it with S3's.  As long as you are making as much use of that near-zero-cost electricity you will be ahead of the game, as miners are priced on the market (new or used) with electrical costs taken into account.  I.E. any of them can be profitable with cheap/free electricity, so you are best to max it.

Most importantly, don't buy the miners until you are confident your electrical setup is built and tested, otherwise you will end up over-paying and sitting on hardware that is not hashing, and effectively losing you money and value every day/week/month that goes by.  And,  I wouldn't personally get the farm online before the halving, because at this point if coin value doesn't increase, equipment cost will have to decrease rapidly to take it into account.  Once the market (bitcoin and equipment) re-stabilizes, you will have a better idea on how to model your investment.

I disagree or it might be I just went bigger with asics... although I was decent size on GPU's.   GPU's I had a lot of little fans, and AC in some rooms (yes AC I was new and using it to).

Then go to summer mining with ASICs now I was using lots of CFM's of fans.  Had to buy a industrial exhust.  upgraded some vents to help air leave.  I consider my area a "hobby" not "home" miner.   I do still put one like I did with Avalon 6 in house right now so I can relate to home mining.  But having a area for just miners is much nicer.

Sadly a big nice fan died... even though it's winter I went and got another one and am going to try warranty on other. Hopefully I have a extra after they fix it (I hope) the store could have cared less on the year warranty after 3 months you go to manufacturer according to them so that's one thing I will be doing.

Depends on your budget, if its moderate and you know your biggest block is limited output, you'll want to get something fairly efficient, like S5's. If you just want to get the most hashrate for the 10kw, you'll want 8 S7 or so.

A bunch of S4's could be easy to slap and turn on, too, but you'll have a bit less total hashrate than the S5.

It was much harder to maintaining the air flow when we were using GPUs to mine bitcoins. Good old days.

There is a lot to be said for doing it in smaller batches.  Do X amount run it for a at least a few day's to week then order more.  Repeat until your happy with number, or you can't handle more.

Going from 0 to a lot is just a major undertaking.   Only reason to do it is if your ordering so much you got a discount (most do not fit into this).    My summer it was a lot of trial/error.  I had to much and kept adding things to help with air flow till I was good.   Would have been much easier on myself to do smaller a few times.

Sage advice. I over bought equipment on my first mine and was shocked at the heat output of just 10kW.

Do you currently have free power or are you planning to install a hydro power system on the waterfall?