Topic: As some of us enter Winter, here're some calculations on true cost of mining (Read 2925 times)

depends on you heating cost.. if you get heat cheap enough with your normal HVAC system you still lose money heating with old tech ASICs and/or GPUs.. just not as much. loss is loss.

I would lose money big time heating with my GPU and 65 nm ASIC stuff vs my geothermal HVAC.

It wasn't Winter when I wrote I'm not mining anything because it's not Winter, and it still isn't Winter, so none of them are running. With propane prices, though, I think I'm going to wind up heating the house like a normal person this year... I'll let them run on a Scrypt multi-pool for a week and see if it's worth it.

You're really not mining a coin? I'd at least mine some scrypt/x11 etc coin. What type of artificial load are you giving your GPU's?

If anyone on propane was considering this, it might be worth checking propane prices again in your area, esp. if you're in the US. Propane prices have collapsed. Futures contracts seem to be pointing toward continued freefall in retail price into Winter. For those who stock up on propane before Winter for a better price, it might be worth trying to wait until it actually is Winter this year, though relative to Summer prices, current prices are pretty damn good.

Now this is a big point.  the entire network is 236ph give or take a few ph


https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty


Bitcoin Difficulty:   29,829,733,124
Estimated Next Difficulty:   33,192,651,006 (+11.27%)
Adjust time:   After 1574 Blocks, About 10.1 days

Hashrate(?):   236,199,455 GH/s

now what does that number mean?

simple      at 1 watt per gh     the entire network is burning 236,200 kwatts or 236 mega watts.





  that is not that much power


look at this puppy

http://www.power-technology.com/projects/gurihydroelectric/

10,200 mega watts or more power then 43 current btc networks.  what do they charge for power?


the official rate is 3.1 cents

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_pricing

so they could run the entire btc network at 3 cents a kwatt. There are more then 14 countries on the wiki list with power under 5 cents.
so at    3.1 cents per kwatt an    s-1 under volted and down clocked
 is  cheaper to run then a 10 cent per kwatt  sp30 .    Since the sp30 does around .6 watts a gh and the downclocked under volted s-1 does 1.3 watts a gh.  I could argue a large builder of chips/machines could have 2 plants 1 north hemi   1 south hemi    as long as he can get 3 cent power.  he can keep one turned off when it is hot.

That might be true if the older machines had some relevance.  I replaced 5 BFL Singles doing 300GH/s and pulling 1500 Watts with just 1 Antminer S3 doing 450GH/S with just 350Watts.

Even if every Avalon, BFL, AM Blade and block eruptor came back online it would be less than 10PH/s.

Also as winter comes to the north, southern hemisphere like Venezuela with cheap power goes to summer - so minimal season effect.

I assume you are not going to be mining bitcoin with this setup (likely will use a multi pool with scrypt based coins or some other algo).

I would not at all be surprised to see the difficulty increase as a faster pace this winter as people start to use their ASICs that are no longer energy efficient enough to mine more BTC then they cost in electricity again to help heat their home.

Any thermostat which uploads over WiFi should be able to do this pretty easily. Alternately, one could be rigged up for far, far less... but this is outside my knowledge area (like 99.99% of everything ).

It may be possible to set up a script where if GPU temperature is X, they shut off or undervolt... this may be possible with CGRemote. Since you should be able to trial-and-error to roughly estimate ambient temperature by GPU temperature once it's heat peaks, it may be possible to script all this to determine whether miners should be shut off or undervolted even if they're all running -- and of course, you can have these change by time of day, so you don't have to heat the house too much while sleeping... though for those of us without a sleep schedule, this is more problematic.

Eh? Who mines BTC anymore but $250k+ farms?

Not even worth turning them on. Calculate your mean time to mine one block. Decades or worse, probably.

Somebody needs to invent a thermostat for bitcoin miners so that they kick in once the temperatures drop too low.

cant wait to feel the heat of my asics in a positive way 

it is 11:30 am and 64 f.   my miners in the garage are doing 5% better hash due to the cooler air.


I use nat gas to heat my NJ home.  I will lower my heating bills about 100 usd a month using my miners.

 My mining will be about 2500 watts this winter.  this is 60 kwatts a day  cost is  60 x .15 or 9 dollars x 30 days = 270 power bill for the miners  round it to 300 a month take away the 100 in the winter and my mining  power is 200 a month.

  So my 15 cents a kwatt is really 10 cents a kwatt for the winter.  Not too shabby.

I like hot weather, but it is getting colder here already

104F degrees out here in LA today.  I really envy you guys getting a bit of cool weather.  I can't even go out for a walk with kids let alone think about miners 

Haha, good idea. so you treat your GPU as a heater now? heh..

None. It's not cold enough to need heat. Any more questions?

What coins you are mining ?

GPUs :p

exelent calculations, so this means you have found a very good way to earn out of mining, which miners do you use ?

gallon of natural gas has ~84,000 BTUs in it.
gallon of propane has ~91,500 BTUs in it.

... in case anyone was wanting to calculate the relative cost assuming heat's desired since some of us are heading into Winter.

Using my own #s for example:
Our house uses ~50MBTU/year for heat.
Electricity cost = $.145/KWh
1Wh=~3.4121BTUs
Propane cost (we buy in Summer, and holy Hell have prices risen) = $2.492/gal
Natural gas unavailable

For propane, I'd need ~546.45 gallons. Assuming 20% of heat is lost by heating rooms we have no reason to heat (closed ducts as well as ductwork and heater in basement [no purpose in heating basement with all its windows] all still leak significant amount of heat), this becomes 655.74 gallons. @$2.492/gal, that's $1,634.10/year to heat house.

For electric, I'd need 14,653.73KWh. Since I can strategically place miners, there is no wasted heat. My cost is $2124.79/year.

If we bought propane in Winter, of course, cost of electric vs. propane would be much, much closer (and electric would've been cheaper this last Winter). However, with these numbers, I simply need to earn ~$487.69 by mining in all of the cold season, where everything after is effectively profit. Assuming the 14,653.73KWh usage needs to be spread out over 140 days, this means I need to consume ~104.67KWh/day, or ~4.36KWh/day, which means I need ~4,361W in mining equipment.

Numbers can be improved by shutting miners off while we're asleep except in bedrooms while temperature difference in cold season can be countered by over-clocking/over-volting or under-clocking/under-volting. However, I'd rather keep things under-volted and deal with it being a little bit colder inside on most days -- of course, propane can still be used on extremely cold days.