Topic: Crazydane's 32 kw solar array build feeding 16 kw worth of miners - page 2. (Read 6515 times)

great setup and a great writeup, i wonder how much the panels lose of their efficiency/production in low light/cloudy conditions.

bookmarking

I have been looking into using old Gen 7 Xeons for mining and possibly also for HDD mining stuff.

This is really great to see Dane, I watched your videos on Voskcoin and showed my mum who is really into green technology and she was pretty impressed by it. She liked your 'wife approval factor' - something we don't have in our house, so much!

Are you also mining Storj? Do you mine Burst simply due to the profit or do you see the potential of the coin ?

Thanks for sharing that CrazyDane  That's very impressive!  Just out of curiosity, how do you control such a large array of disks with one motherboard?  There are usually 6 stata ports on a motherboard and a few USB headers.   Do you buy PCI-E controller cards which can control dozens of drives?  If so, which one to get?

Also, if you don't mind, who has the best prices on like twenty 200-250w or so solar panels?  Is there a particular brand/model you recommend?  I was thinking about putting them on the roof of my home.  Only thing I am concerned about htough is it is a brand new roof with architectural shingles.. don't want to damage it with tons of holes. . Is it easy to properly install so many solar panels without there being any leaks?

I have 4 x 24 bay chassis used by a single server (housed in one of those 4 chassis).  I have a total of 90 drives ranging from 2TB to 8TB.  Total storage just shy of 300TB.  I have a Supermicro motherboard with a E5-2683 v3 (14 core CPU).  It is capable of scanning the entire 300TB worth of plots in 30 seconds.  Plotting the drives initially is very time consuming, but once done, other than a burst of i/o every 4 minutes or so, there is not much stress on the machine.  So I don't see why you could not also GPU mine on the same rig.  My 2683 is actually mining XMR at the same time as Burst.  With the new PoC consortium and the recently released white paper on PoC2 and PoC3, I think Burst has a bright future.

If you wouldn't mind answering my question about your Burstcoin array.  Very interested in it.  (Posted the question above)

I keep wondering: If you have that much money to spare -obviously you are doing pretty damn well- wouldn't it be better to buy altcoins now and sell them later for profit?

Too funny, I stumbled on this thread and thought That is my kind of Crazy and then I read you moniker! Lol

Great job, I can see your not afraid to roll your sleeves up and your pre-planning skills are superlative.

You cheated though, your supposed to lug all those panels up the ladder!

Wow insane!  That is awesome.

Sure!  Maybe once I get all my miners situated in/near my shop this spring, would be a good time for a follow up.

Thanks Phil!


What are your thoughts on going with a bunch of smaller fans vs. fewer larger ones.  Larger ones are much more efficient when you look at CFM per watt.   The Master Flow 1600 CFM pulls just under 200 watt, so that works out to 8 CFM per watt.  The large 36" fans I was looking at do 10,000 CFM @ 800 watt, so that is 12.5 CFM per watt.

But having more smaller fans allows for better redundancy and air flow can be adjusted by turning some of them off when not needed.  Cutting round hole in metal is a bitch though.


That is a great idea!   The container comes on a roll away 5th wheel trailer, so it will be tricky to get the container up on that base since the driver won't be able to drive up on it to do the unloading, at least not without a lot of temporary support.  They do offer "precision delivery", but that almost doubles the cost since they have to bring out a big crane.  I'll have to check with them on what options I have.  With my equipment I might be able get it up on there myself.  I think a 40ft is around 8,000 lbs.  I mean, I can do this:



So I can probably position the container on the foundation somehow.  Should be fun. 


Another great idea.  I figured I can do mesh skirt all around the container to keep out animals and other large dirt object.  Sort of like a pre-screen for the pleated filters in the floor.


That or have the inside spray foamed.


That link did not come through.  But basically create a slope in the ceiling towards the exhaust fans, right?

Thanks was an honor my audio was a total bust but gives me an excuse to bug crazydane for an updated one!

Thanks to everyone else also for the kind comments + the video was received incredibly well on youtube which was so cool to see!

me as well, this is the very thing I want to set up  but since I live in the city, plots of land just are not big enough to house enough solar panels to make it worth while lol. but danm seeing this is quite wonderful. me personally id add in residential wind turbines to produce power during night time and possibly looking into a battery backup setup so as to store some of the energy produced during the day so one isn't drawing power from the grid at night. just seems a little counter productive to make tons of power during the day with no way to store it only to draw 100% during night hours

Watching your setup is giving me a serious case of solar envy.
Thanks for sharing, it is truly inspirational!

Just watched your interview with Vosk.  Solar panel arrays is something I was thinking about doing to my home way back in 2014.  If I would of done it then, most of it would of almost paid itself off by now . Such a great investment.  Guaranteed ROI unlike a mining rig.  I am concerned though with Trump's recent threats to China with respect to tarrifs of solar panels.. seems like he is in big with coal , natural gas & petrol industry no?  Why does he despise green energy sigh.. and the science behind global warming.

Btw, I noticed in the interview you had this very large Burstcoin array.. several sets of like 24 HDD .. you have how many HDD runnign now?  How many motherboards drive those arrays?  I was thinking about getting into burstcoin because it's green and well it makes sense.  I am surprised there aren't more proof of capacity coins.  Do you think proof of capacity will eventually really take off?  I am thinking about adding 5 x SATA HDD to my GPU mining rig, would this be a bad idea?  like 5 x 8 TB HDD.  Would it slow down the GPU mining?

The rural county that I live in started offering fiber based internet service about 3 years ago to help develop and attract businesses.  I got together with my homeowners association (16 of us, each with decent sized lots ranging from 6 to 200 acres) and worked out a deal with the county to bring in fiber.  Cost of construction was about $50,000 which the county subsidized so the cost to the homeowners was only 50% of that, and they let us pay it back over 5 years at 0% interest.  All but one homeowner signed up, and we closed on the deal.

That was 2.5 years ago and we now all have nice fast fiber based internet service.  I actually have 2 ONT's (Optical Network Terminators, or fiber modems), at my local, each on different sub nets, for some redundancy.  I'm still working with the county to get them to offer symmetrical GigE service.  The equipment is capable of handling it, but they just don't offer residential rates at that speed.  So I currently have dual 50 mbps down / 10 mbps up for an aggregate of 100/20 service.

The rest of my network equipment is all Ubiquiti Unifi, which is the same company that sells the solar equipment that I use.  So I have a central dashboard from which I can manage router, switches, and access points.  Here's the main dashboard:



A view of the network devices on the network:



The AP down at my shop is currently disconnected as I ran out of ports on the switch, so the above view, as well as the main dashboard, provides an indicator that something is wrong.

Here's a topology view.  Sorry that is is all squished together horizontally.



Here's the actual core network equipment:



24 port path panel on top for hardwired ethernet jacks through the house.

48 port core 1Gbps switch with 500W PoE (powers ip phones, access points, security cameras, etc).

16 port 10Gbps switch for server connections and fiber down links to other switches.

Dual WAN/LAN router/gateway.

2x ONT modems to the service provider.

Id like to get a hold of you regarding your projects.  You have done many things I am trying to emulate and some advice would be fantastic if you're willing.