Topic: Solar powered CPU mining (Read 7441 times)

solar panels are not cheap, most likely with the help of them mining will pay off for a long time. it is better to find a free source of energy

An extension of that is that mining requires a constant supply of energy, and solar alone
can't provide that.  Either the mining equipment sits idle at night or the system requires
batteries for storage. Either reduces the potential for profit significantly.

Solar power works best when the energy can be stored cheaply in a different form,
or when it's consuption can be scheduled to coincide with generation.

I do this for fun, if you can, tie the system into the power grid and go at it.
Masternode coins like others said are best for small setups and off grid applications but will be very hard to make money.  Your biggest issue will be storing enough juice to keep it going during night and bad weather.
I have mine tied in to the grid, so while it's not stand alone, I'm always making something from the CPU plus any extra power goes to my house.  Much lower start up cost, helps lower electric bill and much less components needed.  Higher reliability as well.
I also use it as a media server and can throttle the miner as needed to keep things steady.  It's a lot of fun, just don't expect to get rich and enjoy it.
After a year I have saved 200KWh in electricity, and my setup cost $400 not including the computer which should last 10-20 years.  Coin income will most likely never pay off the computer but I use it for other things too so mehh.
This isn't much savings, around $15 but it is a fun hobby.

Edit, just noticed this was a necro thread, woops.

for the miner it is necessary the whole field of solar batteries. energy consumption is too high and large storage batteries are needed

The most problem for people that want solar power is the needed space for the panels and if you want to safe some money you need a few of them and they take much space to install them !
Guess that the free Space is the most problem !

Solar power is the cheapest way of providing power to you needy devices. Solar power has a lot of benefits. People mostly now a days using solar power for earning their  money. If you want to do mining I think solar power is the best power for your devices.

Some people are thinking that solar system is just for a low voltage devices high devices can’t run on solar system then its totally wrong because through solar system  very high voltage devices can be run if you have a proper solar system.

The solar panels are usually subsidized by the government. I hope you can get the same kind of favor from the government. Otherwise I can't find a point to profit.

The cost of solar panels are very high. I guess the FREE electricity getting from them can't compensate for the cost.

The only way solar mining is viable is if you live in the Arctics. You will for sure get your RoI within 6 months time of sunny days. Half of the year, your mining project is dead. If you have GPUs however, you can only mine in the day and turn your system off at night. You will be able to recoup your RoI faster. I heard that ASUS just released a new B250 board that is built specifically for GPU mining. It has 19 PCIE slots, and although it takes a lot of power, you can mine like a madman and recoup your investment in the quickest time too.

You could always try and see if solar energy is worth doing. Essentially it's free electricity unless you plan to put solar panels in just for this.

Solar power is the cheapest way of providing power to you needy devices. Solar power has a lot of benefits. People mostly now a days using solar power for earning their  money. If you want to do mining I think solar power is the best power for your devices.

in most places it's about selling the energy subsidized to get profit out of it after some years.

Solar power is the cheapest way of providing power to you needy devices. Solar power has a lot of benefits. People mostly now a days using solar power for earning their  money. If you want to do mining I think solar power is the best power for your devices.

"SolarCity has installed thousands of PV systems in California. The average solar panel system from SolarCity is 5,870 watts (5.8 kW) and costs $24,947 for a price per watt of $4.25. The expected cost per kilowatt hour (kWh) is $0.14."

The fix cost is so high- "As of 2017, it's approximately $3.00 per watt, installed. The average sized solar panel system is 5,000 watts, so this brings the total cost to $15,000. That 15k figure is just an average amount. Systems can cost more or less mostly depending upon a homeowner's energy usage."

And does not fit majority of the country

I've been running a test on Riecoin profitability for a little over 1 week now.

Mining pool: https://ublock.it
Machine specs:
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4710HQ CPU @ 2.50GHz 8GB DDR3 (laptop CPU TDP 47 W)

Power consumption measured at wall ~94 Watts

Weekly power cost @ 11 cents KW/h = $2

RIC generated in 1 week

99.7 RIC = $6.24 USD at current market price

Still testing other higher end CPU's < 100 watt TDP, should have an update soon on i7 4770k

Riecoin thread https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/annric-riecoin-constellations-pow-cpu-hard-fork-successful-world-record-446703

Seriously, if not after profits or some crazy ideas like I am, the best use for solar power currently is to use that to power your ac.

Panels don't like heat and they really like clear sky.

Solar power is most actual for south regions. But in this case another problem apears: a lot of heat. So the best for the mining is Hydro or Nuclear POWER (cheep enough) in northen regions

Oh man i'd just like to have enough money to play around with such stuff all day.
Maybe you could start with segmenting usb-miners to groups which would be turned on if power is enough.
Then use capacitors to even the supply a bit. 
Having to look at ROI all the time takes the fun out of it a bit.

Hybrid systems are how it's generally done here, grid owner buys all the power small producer doesn't use himself. Price is daily spot http://www.nordpoolspot.com/.

But the original use case of solar systems was to bring the power to places that don't have (and never will) commercial power (for example an island or sahara), or it would be too expensive to build. Solar power made water pump or a small refrigerator in the middle of nowhere possible. For decades panels cost 4-5€/ watt so it wasn't cheap.

Then China started mass manufacturing of panels and today the price is 1€/ watt, ROI times fell below 10 years and we started to see solar panels everywhere.

Like I said, there is no point to build solar only powered mining rig but the idea itself is tempting. It's like mythbusters, can it be done? Can you, in theory, mine somewhere in the middle of pacific ocean?

You may want to look into Solarcoin.

As I understand it, it's "mined" by producing solar power.  I've never looked too far into it, but it may interest you.

Additionally, if you want an easy answer to this question, just fire up any mining calculator (Google has several) and set the "power cost" field to 0, using your hashrate / etc.

A staking wallet, run on a cellphone powered by a small solar panel would effectively be "free" coins, not accounting for whatever your Internet access costs may be.

Altcoin mining is not dead at all, your power consuption and electricity costs are up to you and the country you reside. However, if you are going to mine anyway, do not even bother with CPU mining, it's not profitable anymore, for years now, if you are planning to invest in solar panels, use GPUs or ASICs miners, which do have a higher consumption costs.

Although, you would have to think and plan your investment, do you think it's worth spending all this money for solar panels? Unless you already own them, the ROI to have solar powered mining rigs will be low and probably will take many months or even years to achieve. I would stick to normal GPU mining if I were you, unless the electricity costs are too high and prohibit that.

Besides from it is expensive. The hashrate and the duration of usage of cpu is too short compared to GPU. I already try that using the workstation computer in my office. Intel xeon cpu. But it only gave me a penny for almost a day of mining using minergate app.

in the US the Electric Company pays us for any thing we make and don't use . but some solar company's if you rent there panels will charge you for what you don't use in the US i found that kind of stupid, so I stayed a way form them sense most of the ones i looked at lets us keep anything left over an auto sells it to the to the Electric Company by law they  have to take it and pay us but we have to stay on the Grind in my state .

some states in the US  are trying what you deal with in the EU but it won't pass . mostly the Republican states .

Yeah, especially that requlations in EU country can be funny ( In my country, we have to PAY to grid owner tax for sending him our produced electricity and they act as Vault of Energy, taking additional 20% of it for free - not good option :x )

Using GRID-TIE and exporting your excess electricity in to the grid just like joblo said and of course no need for battery since it will make your cost double. What you need is inverter that greater from your current need since you just can add more solar panel later (if you got small budget).

Yes CPUs are just too expensive, and require lots of space (1mobo per CPU). or if you get one of those server mobo, which are like >600$ you might get 4 on one board.


Personally i wouldnt do it

I don't see the point of a dedicated solar system for mining. Solar is just one power source and mining is just one
power load. Why not connect the solar to the house power as a hybrid system where you can use solar for everything
when it's available and commercial power when not. This would avoid imbalances in power availability and load.
A dedicated solar mining system would either have excess load leaving some mining HW without power or
too much power that can't be absorbed by the mining HW and would have to be bled off and wasted. A hybrid system\
would ensure all the mining HW is mining all the time.

Some kind of battery and regulator is needed. Nothing to run that thing overnight but something to just keep it alive.

Batteries are still really expensive and they do max 6 years.

Mining hardware likes 12volts. It is possible.

That really isn't possible.  You can't run anything off just panels, you need some kind of battery.  Solar moves up and down just like mining.  It is different every second.  On a 12v panel you could be getting 18v in full sun, a cloud goes buy and it could drop to 11.  This goes through an inverter which changes it to usable AC current.  Your inverter would be cutting off all the time (they have low voltage warnings).  This is where a battery comes in.  It stores the energy so the volts are constant and steady.  Yes, you can set up a bank of batteries and run your inverter at night time without the panels, but you have to have a battery just to keep things from spiking high and low.  If you have your panels hooked up to your house, the AC from the power company does this and takes the place of the batteries.  

The reason I haven't run a rig off solar is that it may run me 1500.00-2000.00 to get 800-1000 watts consistently.  Because it would take YEARS to ROI vs just paying for .12 electric, I haven't considered it (but have done the pricing and math.  Sometimes it is not worth adding to the ROI on the rig.  You have to sometimes just sit down and just try to make money.  

What I am working on is running laptops to mine.  I have 5-6 laptops sitting around (bought at gov auctions for 20-30.00) that can be charged by solar panels that cost very little.  No batteries, no inverter, the panels put out DC and the batteries take DC.  As I progress I'll start a thread.

Sorry guys.

I know, but I want to have solar power backup for my home data center .. My blaablaanode's have paid for it

You don't need solar power to run blaablaanode. MOST of the time you only need static ip.

I reckon just stick to masternode coins, way cheaper and better ROI

Yes it does, my brother in law is running his masternodes with his solar installation. And I've bought some panels as well which I'll set up this summer.   

But whats wrong with masternode coins?  They have this intrinsic value property that other coins don't have.  If you know a better way to increase your crypto supply I'd be keen to try it out.

True, as long as you can find that greater fool. Solar power has nothing to do with it.

I used to mine bitcoin a lot.  Now I've got a garage of dusty mining gear, and have gone all in on Masternode coins.  Beats mining hands down!  No gear to buy, no extra power to pay for.

Here is some background info: https://www.investitin.com/masternode/  

and a new site that has launched that compares these coins is: https://masternodes.pro/

I use XenServer and host several nodes on a single PC. The cost of running 1 node is about the same as running 50 (yes, maybe one day  ) , and the profit potential is pretty ridiculous if you diversify into a few of these coins.

So with this setup it is definitely possible to  run a solar powered mining op because you might need max 250W to run a reasonably specced PC with lots of RAM.

This is what I'm dreaming about. Add some wind, solar, fiber and brown trout.
 

If you live in a very sunny place it would be a cool fun project for sure.
There are places where you can melt nails with a frensel-lens of an old rear-projector.
And a lot places where you do not have so many sunny hours/year.
If you are a tinker you could build some kind of storage-system where water is pumped up and released in a tiny turbine at night.
That is what switzerland does- they pump up water in a dam when power is cheap and release it to generate power when they can sell it at high prices.

One day i wanna have a house and a little river nearby to play with such stuff   

gorenje knows the facts, batteries kill all the profits, I still don't understand how that teslaguy can run his business.

I have used solar power for almost 20 years now and first started to play with the idea of solar-only mining when nvidia maxwell's (750ti) came out, never made any prototypes but the idea itself is fascinating.

System would need sun and internet connection, the most power efficient hardware (hash/watt) you can find, it would have to know how to boot on power.

Obviously that wouldn't be a goldmine but when hardware is getting more efficient we are getting closer to the point where it could actually work. 20 cents/ day is a lot of money in some parts of the world.

OT:

Looking at this section of bct there is an inevitable everlasting bullmarket ahead of us. In theory, would it be possible that every human (and their pets) in this planet just started their own farms and we would never ever need to do anything again? Washing machines, microwaves, toasters would have asics integrated? Most of this shit is going to the moon, we could start remote farms there, plenty of solarpower available. Would that work?

(:

I have several systems Xeon's  I7's tried em all, tried to find a TINY bit of worth in it!!!! NONE

You aren't going to mine a lot of anything on a CPU.  There are coins out there ( I don't know CPU coins ) but even at free electricity you will need many computers to make a substantial profit.  However, there are coins that you can buy that will 'stake', like RAIN, EMB, B3 and others that will generate more coins over time.  It isn't technically CPU mining, but it can be profitable if you have enough coins to stake.  The more coins you start out with the more coins you get.  

 Here is an example, XPTX has an interest rate of 230%.  If you start out with 100 XPTX then (on average) one year later you would have generated an additional 230 XPTX, giving you a total of 330 XPTX.  

 I am not recommending the coins I mentioned.  I am using them as examples, there are more coins out there, please research before investing in them and read up on staking.  

EDIT:  It's possible to stake while also mining a coin.  It's not mutually exclusive, so you can experiment with both on same PC.

There are a few hard drive mining coins such as burst and storj. But the ROI is too little, not quite worth unless you already have some free hard drives to use.

Would not it be better to mine with hard drives?

You can give a try for BiblePay its profitable for CPU mining.
I don't know much CPU coins with asic resist. Thats the only one i guess.

With CPU - I'd agree, but with GPU it's kind of a different story.
In my country (central EU) the cost of small solar power plant system with battery is about 3k usd (3,5kWpi). Lets say that we'll use it to power 8x1080 ti (250w ea, so 2kW rig at price of around 7k usd). Since the power of powerplant at peak is 3.5kW, I think we could assume that our rig will have 80% uptime on solar plant and rest from main cord. At our rates 1kWh is ~0.14$, so our rig will use 6.72$ daily, and our solar will 'earn us' 5.37$. It put solar ROI 558 days ROI with warranty of 10 years. Pretty good

If you have very new CPUs (like i7 gen 6+) and you mine Monero you may have a tiny chance.
But CPU mining is basically waste of time and resources.
However, the best option is to mine for about 1-2 days, see what the average is and do the math yourself.

Users of my local mining community calculated the profitability,
but the conclusion was that it's nearly impossible to make profit considering the price and lifetime of solar panel.

Imagine each CPU core being a very stong dude. Now imagine each GPU core is like an 8-year-old kid.

Now, CPUs generally have 2-8 cores while GPUs have thousands(!) of much weaker cores.

But hashing (mining) is like having to gather berries in a forest; thousands of kids will gather a shitton more berries than a few big dudes.


And CPUs are too expensive in comparison to their mining performance they'll take years to mine back their costs. And then there are botnets, meaning thousands of computers are mining CPU coins making things even worse.

And while you can put 6-12 GPUs into a single computer, you can only put 1 (maybe 2) processors into a PC so you have to spend on Motherboard/RAM/HDD/PSU on all of them.


It's just a bad idea altogether - from a profit standpoint at least.

This is very good but I do not know the cost to make solar system, if this cheaper is worth a try.
we can make comparisons and choose cheaper energy. there are various alternatives to save electricity. for example using wind and water energy.

using a gui miner i can use 4 cpu's and have had success mining many altcoins, we are on solar power here and I'm curious to know if the high power bills were the only reason people say cpu mining is dead? I've got my eye on a new desktop computer with octo-core processor for my next mining project.

CPU mining is bad; they're not that well suited for hashing as GPUs, their cost is too much in comparison to their hashing speeds and you can't scale them (1 PC = 1 CPU, maybe 2).

I see alot of people are saying alt mining is dead due to the high cost of power consumption. If I run a CPU miner on solar power, would that make it worth doing?