One word "solar" Im solar powered off grid time to learn to mine!
@wlbryce
How much Solar do you need to invest in the house to run (at least during the day) a Bitmain L3+ underclocked at 700 watts at 450mh rate?
I suspect it is much more than the worth doing this for either LTC or BTC. But curious, if you have solar how does something like this work out? (or not today?)
Brad
Not sure if you got an answer from the op you quoted, but I can probably help a little here.
Scenario 1 - DIY setup for just the miner
Essentially, you need 700 watts of continuous power to run just the miner - but that wattage is variable, so you'd really want to give yourself a decent buffer there; additionally, panels don't run at 100% efficiency, and weather - clouds etc - plays a factor. Let's go with 1 kilowatt to make math easy. You'll also need a battery bank to supply power for when the sun is down - let's say 12 hours @ 1 kw/hr = 12,000 watt batt bank. Let's bump that up as well to 15,000 watt battery - don't want to risk any downtime just because you didn't have enough battery power. But if you are going to charge the battery, you will need to double your panels (1000 watts to run miner, 1000 watts to charge battery). You'll need inverters and charge controllers as well, and probably some miscellaneous wiring. That's generally what you need more or less - it's pretty expensive and you wouldn't really break even on it for a long time. You could potentially do just a minimum setup to run it off solar during the day and have a small battery for when solar power drops below what's required for the miner to run - you'd only need half the panels and not a huge power bank, and the charge controllers etc would cost less, and just run off the regular grid at night - you'd be cutting your power usage by half theoretically - you'd have to crunch the numbers to calculate when you'd break even on that.
Putting that together probably get's you around $6-8k. I did see there are a lot of solar kits online for $2k-$8k, but I'm assuming you'd have to upgrade the battery bank in those to keep continuous power through the night.
I'm building a solar system for my sailboat so I have looked into DIY solar setups a bunch, so this was a fun exercise to see if it's worth it for me to do for my miner - I also have an L3+. Not sure if going the full 24 hour route makes sense in this scenario, unless I was trying to hack it together with used/reclaimed/cheap/free stuff junkyard style (for example, getting enough cheap junkyard batteries together for a couple hundred bucks versus buying a $2000-4000 power bank; locating cheap used panels off marketplace/CL) - that might be a fun challenge project - see how cheaply I can rig together a 24hr solar system for mining. If I do, will report back - would be mid to late summer when I could get to that.
Scenario 2 - whole house solar setup
If you're house has a good solar score (check your address on zillow.com - it will give you an idea - but not final word, my house has a 55.1 on zillow but my buddy who sells solar checked out it's 'illumination' score and it was 70 - anything over 50 is potentially a good candidate), you can get panels put on to run your whole house on solar, and you can sell it back to the grid and/or have a battery bank, like a tesla powerwall, and not really stress about power usage for even a couple L3+'s. Cost depends on size of house, amongst a bunch of other factors I'm sure - and also depends on where you are in the world. A quick google search gave me this:
'Solar panel installation costs around $18,500 for a 6kW solar panel system for a 1,500 square ft. home and the price per watt for solar panels can range from $2.50 to $3.50. Residential solar panels are usually sized at 3kW to 8kW and can cost anywhere from $9,255 and $24,552 in total installation costs.'
Either way, I think it's definitely responsible mining to use renewable sources of energy. Someone I know mentioned he knows people with bitcoin farms that use hydro power and wind power in addition to solar.
