Topic: Say I have free electricity (Read 271 times)

So the grid act as a battery for you? Damn, that's a good setup. I know many countries try to stimulate people to invest in solar energy under this 'we buy back your excess electricity' scheme but the slots are very limited depending on the local need of electricity. This is because electricity companies also have to invest in the electric lines, power stations,... to receive and deliver your excess electricity back to the grid and outward it to those who need it.
So yeah, a lot of complex stuff behind the grid so your plans work depending on the location. I know someplace, they won't accept excess electricity into their grid since it could cause an outage over their max loaded grid.
For OP, I think your setup is quite good but your main concern is finding GPU that has a decent ROI but not overshot your amount of free electricity.

well 10kwh/24hr = 420w rigs best fit is laptop mining, you can fit 4-5 rtx 3060 laptop, total 200mhs or try using an asic if you can get one lol

and yeah rtx laptop is expensive, you can buy defective laptop from distributor, cheaper than gpus

The first time I started mining I built a solar energy for the mining and I don't care if I'm going to make the money on solar back but today I don't regret my decision cos I've made the money back and still adding GPUs on same solar panels, it's a long term ROI if you have the patience

My solar farm is tied to the grid.  So anything I produce in excess of what I consume, flows back into the grid.  At night and on cloudy/rainy days, I draw power from the grid.  With the Net Metering arrangement I have, I'm credited for every kWh I put back into the grid at the same rate they charge me, i.e. ~ $0.12 per kWh.

God damn, what kind of solar setup is this? You said you don't need batteries for backup? How is that even possible? What happens once the sun goes down in the evening and night? Wowu

It takes a pretty serious investment to produce meaningful power from solar.  I have a 50 kWh farm in Virginia and I try to match my mining rig consumption with what I produce.  I have Net Metering with the power company, so I don't need to worry about messing with batteries or anything like that.

Here's my production vs. consumption for 2020:



Its a bit misleading since I move my rigs to the house in the winter months to supply all the heating I need.  So the above graph only captures the consumption of the mining rigs when they are located in my shop building.

2021 so far:



I sold all my 1080Ti, 1070 and 1070Ti rigs in November and December of 2020 and have been slowly building out 3000 series rigs this year as I've been able to get GPUs.  That is why you see a gradual climb in consumption since April (which is typically when I move the rigs from the house to the shop).

Looking at last month specifically:



So on nice sunny days, I generate about 300 kWh/day, and my rigs consume about 175 kWh/day.  I do run a few rigs at the house all year, so the actual daily consumption is more like 200 kWh, or about 8,000 watts at the wall as seen here:



Areal of solar farm:



As mentioned above, I have Net Metering with the POCO.  So any excess energy I produce, goes into a "bank" of kWh on my account to be consumed during the winter months.



They do make me pay a basic meter charge of $30.75 plus $3 in County taxes, but I can live with that.  

Btw, the meter is also supplying power to my main house, so it basically gets a "free ride" and "free" heat in the winter.

I suggest you use S9K, it only needs $330. Power consumption is 1.2KW per unit, 6 units can be put, and currently there is a daily profit of 5.6644 USD

That's true, it's called buffer zone meaning that your battery back up must be fully charged before mining unless you have extra sun power available then you can keep mining and your batteries will keep charging as well

I mine on solar as well and I've learned that if your solar panels are feeding you 4000watts make sure you are using 2000watts only and the remaining 2000watts will be available for battery charging or else you will spoil your battery backup real quick

Make the math again 50 - 100 GPUs with 10kwh? A normal rig with 6 GPUs use around 800watts per hour. A day has 24 hours, so he need around 20kwh per day 

@OP
I think it is worse, start with 3 cards and you are fine i think.

10 kWh per day can be used to power 50-100 modern video cards.
100 video cards 6600 xт or 50 video cards RTX 3080, but now it is very expensive.
The easiest way is to buy several inexpensive ASICs for mining Bitcoin or Litecoin, and after the payback, invest in more expensive equipment.

No no no, rx580 consumes 120watt each from wall how is this electricity friendly? 120watts looks good only if your GPU is doing 60MH on ETH, since OP is running on solar panels GPUs like 1660Ti and super will be awesome, they consume 60watt and few lottery wins can bring 45watt to 50watt 1660s to your table

Your best bet would be to get the older and less efficient GPUs like the RX 470 570 480 580 8GB. These are generally less inflated compared to most of the newer GPUs and they only use like 120 watts each.

So with your power availability it would work. I think you can buy from sources from China somewhere. If you search this forum you can find a thread where someone found some on Alibaba. They hash at 30mhs.

You can also get a few old ASICS easier to maintain and set up, however they are more much power hungry, the older the generation. So your best bet are GPUs.

I could be worth it depending on how much you pay for gpus. As other stated there are more options. Mine was just based on similar to what I have.
For me all I had to buy to setup where gpus, 2xpower supplies and risers all the other gear I already had spare.
If you have to buy a full setup then everything has to be calculated to figure out RoI.

6600xt might be the best choice atm also since you dont have to worry about LHR models then.

I'm running on solar power too, I have 5kv solar setup and sun is very shiny here, sun lasts for 10hrs per day and I have 4x 220ah batteries for backup at night, this setup is only for mining purpose so my advice is go with less power consuming graphic cards like AMD 6600XT and gtx1660 supers, these cards draw 50watts - 60watts Max using hiveOS

You have the problem of having only 10Kw/h spare for a day however I would say 5 x 3060 ti can give you about 300 Mhsh which is about 22 dollars daily,they do like 600 watt an hour or about 575 watt when you undervolt them more than you should,you get about 285 Mhsh at 5 of these at 115 watt each at a total of 575 watt.I doubt you can find anything more profitable than 5 of these right now based on your conditions.

If you have 20 Kw/h spare than definitely go for any GPU rig which can give you low power consumption.Another way would be to go with 10 x Rx 6600 Xt at 320-340 Mhsh at 550 watt power consumption and this setup can give you better profitability than the above one.Options are there,and as long as you have money to invest in such "free" electricity I encourage you to do so and build at least a rig with 1 GPU at first and then add as necessarily.

It's slways tempting to consider green mining but it isn't that simple. Get some exeperience mining before
you try merging it with renewable energy. In the end you may find mining isn't suitable for a "dump load".
It's a lot of expensive HW doing nothing when you have nothing to dump.

It does, thank you. So basically - not worth it?

Need heaps of power for any ASIC, plus they cost heaps and could turn into useless brick.

Even a small setup ie 4x 3070s uses 590w (if setup right) and hour thats 14.16kw a day. Only makes about us$20 a day most days sometime 27 if really lucky.
So you could maybe just run that. But atm its very expensive to get into mining. If you dont have spare gear already then I doubt you will get any decent ROI.
Even using less gpu say 3x3070s well u still have to power cpu, mobo and ram so it only takes about 135w off not 1/4. So the earning is a bit less then 3/4 then.
Maybe this helps idk.

I live off-grid on 100% solar and wind power. Obviously it cost a lot to get set up but now my electricity is "free". The catch is I only have about 10 spare kWh per day.

What's the best way to mine with this? Do I have enough spare power to get an ASIC or should I be looking at just mining with a PC or something when I have spare power?

Occasionally it'll be windy all night and I might have 20 spare kWh instead. It would be great to integrate it with my system somehow, basically as a dump load. At the moment my dump load is heating water, so it charges my battery bank completely and then dumps all the extra into making hot water. An ideal scenario would be dumping it into mining, and I could use the heat from mining to warm water anyway.

Anyone on the forum solved this problem already? Appreciate any tips, thank you