Topic: How do you get free power? - page 2. (Read 6090 times)

Just give them the oven example. When the oven door is closed, the heat go way up and it cook your food. That is identical to what would happen to your miners, they would cook. I'm meeting a lot of people, even IRL that want to get into mining and thats what they usually say;

"Just put it in the storage room." (That has no window or air flow)

Last one yesterday, chained with "I'll just put an AC there" which would just generate more heat since he did not have a way to dump the heat outside. He was going to leave the exhaust in the storage room as well.

Which miners have you ran personally?  I don't think you get how loud some can be.  And putting in a cupboard..... would trap exhust with miner so it would be like a box of death getting hotter and hotter.

This will not work in hotel in 90 percent of cases.  And if it does... chances are you paying more for hotel then you make with miners.  They are not geared for a lot of electricity.  And actually chances are you would try it in a motel not hotel.... and it could be one nasty place.  But still not going to get you cheap electricity after paying for room.

They probably wouldn't make too much noise, and If they did, you would be able to try and drown ehm out or even place them in the cupboard. There would be enough plug sockets, I think. Why would staff get suspicious about not being able toclean a room, also, if you book somewhere like a premier inn or travel lodge, they don't tend to not clean the rooms on daily basises anyway!

@ Taylor256

If you are going to plagiarise some text straight of the net at least edit it to fit the context of the thread and remove text like "In this science fair project"...............



Rich

And the staff will never wonder why you never let them clean the room or the loud noises other rooms complain about....

It's a idea that will never work.  Hotels are not meant for ton's of electrical usage. You would really surprise me if you could do 6 S7's in 1 hotel room.

what a moron brain could ever think that?

The mines are suspose to get more efficient to where it helps in race when switching to new.  Also value should reflect mining.

Value of BTC right is not bad.  it's not terrific or anything but I consider it to be a lot better then 230 we were at forever.  So there are some good things out there.

In this thread some are the tremedoous lucky with "free" power.  Those people are hard to beat.

Please remember that mining is the ultimate zero sum/queen's race game there is. The faster the miners that come out, the higher the difficulty and the quicker they become totally obsolete. It is a perfect market, therefore long term profits are impossible.

* Queen's race: Where you have to run faster and faster just to stay in place.

The BITMAIN AntMiner S7's are moving very fast. We're only going to see more and more hashpower added in the coming weeks.

We had a LONG time of very low nice difficulty changes so keep that in mind when looking at it.  Will this difficulty change hurt?  Yes sure will.

But overall we are not doing bad, unless we continue at this rate.  If we continue at 10 plus per week yes could be bad if market does not follow.

At the current difficulty and the high-priced ASICs even miner with cheap or even free electricity will have a hard time getting an ROI.

I think this is true.  Miners use a LOT of power if using a decent sized one.  You easily can run thousands of watts on miners even in "home" mining.  And "hobby" miners are even more then that.

I just do not see a big payoff when you spend the amount on even just solar panels.   Going cheap electric is going to win every time.

Right, and as your power use increases lineally the heat output increases linerally but the water flow/pressure to the turbine increases by the oh fudge this is math, probably pir^2. Regardless your pipe is getting bigger, thus the flow through your heat exchanger is increasing faster than the chips dump heat into the water.

Hm. How much would an abandoned dam cost I wonder.

How much temp rise? Well, the size of your pond after the tailstock would determine the temp rise with 1j of energy rasing one cc of that water 1 degree c. It would probably take a bit....

Hm. Now I'm thinking of building a dyson swarm around a star and harnessing all the star's power output to run bitcoin miners. I wonder what that would do to the difficulty assuming we use all those generation 1 Avalon chips. Hm. That may not work due to latency/lag between the chips and the closest bitcoin nodes. Oh well...

I was thinking more along the lines if you were using the water to cool your miners/air as well

Um. Unless you're thinking Hoover dam levels of power generation the waste heat would be minimal. Remember your turbine needs water flowing by it to work, so that flowing water can take the heat away. Now if you build a nuclear power plant.........

Oh yeah, but then you're using the grid as your battery. If you're doing this in a cabin far from humanity that's what you will need.

Also it's interesting to note how much power you need to run a modern-ish life off grid. A fridge pulls 100-200 watts 24*7, there's 20% of that amount. Lot of batteries and panels needed to run the modern life. So go hug your utility guy sometime....

The two ventures (solar and mining) do not have to be mutually inclusive.  The solar power generates revenue in itself by being grid-tied, and I would be inclined to design it to make the best use of my invested capital, labour costs to install the system, and with a fixed output if the tariff rates are tiered. Then, buy as many miners as you would in a traditional sense, weighing your ROI over time given the purchase price of electricity. From a cash-flow point of view, it's not a bad idea to use as much electricity on mining as revenue is generated from the solar, however the notion of mining on solar power is more of a warm-fuzzy-romantic-feeling than grounded in logic.  Each venture can be profitable in itself, but they aren't necessarily better when combined. 

However, the idea of a hydro-electric turbine generated mining setup makes a lot of sense, because those types of locations would typically be remote and you wouldn't be able to tie into the grid anyways. And as someone mentioned, the passive cooling is an added perk.  I wonder at what point there would be an environmental impact from the heat being added into the water?

If I was doing this in a big way then I think batteries are a no no, just too expensive & they need replacing at some point. I think the thing to do is to "cheat".  

Have a grid tied system and run the miner off the mains in the usual way. Choose an appropriately sized miner for the overall solar power you are generating and then just keep tabs on the solar power you have generated and the grid power consumed. Then do some maths on an ongoing basis to check the profitability. Over a period of time you will get exactly the same result as having a large battery bank, but without the initial and ongoing replacement costs.


Rich

Stepping this up, if we replace 5 watts with 1,000 watts we simply multiply everything by 200. In other words:

30w*200=6kw solar array
12 volt battery@22ah*200=4,400ah battery pack@12v

That will mine 1,000 watts 24*7 with no utilities. Best miner right now is that Avalon thing, 2.7gh?

Got kinda big there....

Or a 1,000 watt peltier water turbine attached to a 1kw generator. Bit smaller. :-)

Let's see: How about if we build the smallest miner and go from there:

Raspberry Pi CPU with hardwired ethernet: 400ma @5v=2.0 watts
Silly little Block erupter (300mh/s) 500ma@5v=2.5 watts

So we have a unit that pulls 4.5 watts per hour. Round up to 5 watts. For a 24 hour day you will need a total of 120 watts of power in a 24 hour period. How do we get that?

Solar: Since the sun don't shine all the time we need to generate 120 watts in the amount of time the sun is shining. Normally in the US you get about 4 full sun hours a day plus 2 more hours for morning and evening. So 6 hours. 120/6=12 watts. Or a 15 watt panel.

Now, you need a battery bank big enough to be able to support the rig when the sun ain't shining, so 18 hours*5 watts=90 watt hr battery. If this was a 6 volt battery you would need a 15ah 6 volt battery.

However batteries are not perfect in terms of charge/discharge so you need about double the solar size. So a 30 watt panel which happens to come in a 6 volt configuration (7.5 volts actually so it's enough to charge a 6 volt battery).

And you don't want to flatten the battery every cycle, so go 33% deep and get a 45ah 6 volt battery. Now you can handle a day without sun *except* if you do the panel will have trouble catching up. But you doubled the panel size so you will probably make it.

And there you go. To generate 300mh for free get a 45ah 6 volt battery, a small dc-dc converter to maintain 5 volts regardless of battery level, and a 30 watt panel. Or a 22ah 12 volt battery, same 30 watt panel (now 12v) and one of those 12-5v USB converters.

Get a better USB stick and you can do 2.5gh or so on that same power input.

Hydro would be much easier, just generate the 5w 24*7 and off you go. Minimal battery to smooth out fluctuations, but much simpler.