Topic: What you need to know about solar mining (Read 286 times)

It's a full blown contract with the utility with strict requirements, a connection fee and a negotiated rate for your excess production
that may be less than they charge for consumption.

If I was setting up solar, mining would likely not be included.

 Guys, forget the batteries because you can't backup more than 10' to a miner of let's say 1Kwa (with only 1 battery). You will need thousands of Lead Acid batteries and will cost a fortune every 18 months.

 By the way, if you are not electrician and don't have knowledge, I don't recommend to do it by yourself because you have lot of cables to connect. At this point you have many factors to consider like cables Amp capacity, quality, connect by polarity, cables distance, modify the switchboard, etc.

 From the other hand, if you intend to connect your Grid Tie to the city pole, you might need to request a permission to do all that modification. 

 

I have a small solar powered installation on montain lodge. Only 146 Amp/12v. But I build it myself.

It is stupid to think about POW mining fully solar, with batteries by night.

Only option is grid tie-in by night. I agree.

The biggest expense in mining is the mining hardware so it needs to run 100% of the time to be
economical. This isn't possible with only solar energy. You need either a grid tie-in or batteries
to provide continuous power. Batteries are still too inefficient so grid is the only viable option.

Thanks for posting this information.

I have been educating myself on solar not just for mining and trying to do it on my own rather than paying someone a tone money for the setup $$$$

while there are a lot of info out there but it is still lots of unknown in every case.

my initial thought was to start small and expand on it if everything went as expected. is that bad idea? i am wanting to have a grid tie system with no battery backup.

also it would be nice if you could recommend or list a few parts

Thanks!

my bad, in my country i get the bill of 2 months.
i already correct it and thanks for the notification

60 days in a month ?

 Hi guys, I saw a lot of post related with solar mining and seems that most of the people have no clue about it.

 Below you have a post with full explanation with details, if you want to avoid reading and save time and know if I recommend it or not, I say NO unless you want to do a big scale investing lot of money for long term.

 You have too many details to consider before proceeding...

Country
- In which country you are?
- How many hours of sun you have? Consider the weather in 4 seasons.
- Windy or not windy? Might be a good idea to switch from solar to wind generator
- Hurricane, typhoon, earthquake, tsunami, etc.

Establishment
- What kind of establishment you have? House, apartment, penthouse, countryside, etc.
- In your house do you have mono-phasic or tri-phasic?
- In apartment you have 220Vac for sure, but how about the space for the panels? Wind generator might be a good choice.
- If you are in a countryside, this would be easier in all aspect.

Consumption
It is very important to calculate VAC / WATT / AMP, you will need this select the ideal inverter.
Before selecting the inverter’s capacity, you will have to calculate the total consumption of your miner.

 Commonly the PSU has PF 0.9 so you have efficiency loss between 10~20% (it depends of the efficiency of your PSU). Below you have a link for the 80 plus category types which explains how it works…

https://www.velocitymicro.com/blog/what-is-psu-efficiency-and-why-is-it-important/

Now let’s put an example on how to calculate, let’s say we have 15% of loss and we have 85% efficiency.
1500w % 0.85 = 1764.7 watts will be consuming
To calculate the monthly electric fee would be like this…

1764,7watts x 24 hrs                    : 42352,8watts in a month
42352,8watts %1000 (Wh/kWh)    : 42,35 kWh
42,35 kWh x 30 days                    :  1270.5 kWh
1270.5 kWh x $0,11 electric fee     : $139,75 USD in a month

 This is not the only part that you have to calculate, careful when you buying a high frequency inverter that I will explain later.

Inverters
In the market you have 3 kinds of inverters and I give a simple explanation...

*Grid – Cheap with fast ROI, sell what you produced while not using. No batteries option.

*Off-Grid – have batteries option, generator compatible but you can’t sell what you produced. This kind of inverter are more expensive.

*Hybrid – too advance and too expensive, all options are available except the generator.  

 In this case the most suitable inverter is Grid-Tied, when buying 1 of this make sure of the other points to consider…
* You will find it with high or low frequency. High frequency has many small transformers which will make to have loss of efficiency, also the design make it to have less life span (not related with component’s quality).
Now for the low frequency, it’s made with a big transformer that will give you better efficiency with a better life span.

 This is the other efficiency that I was mentioning on the PSU from above, consider the inverter as a PSU, “works the same” but with more features.
 You can make the same calculation for the efficiency, but this is for the output from the inverter, for the solar panels will give what it produce.

 Example… 1500watts from solar panel for an inverter of 1500w, the output of the inverter is 1275w while it’s consuming 1500w. (15% of loss)
DC to DC is a part without problem, but DC to AC has loss of efficiency because of conversion.

* Make sure to buy one with pure sine wave, this will give a good “electric” quality to your miner, others like modified & square wave form will damage your miner in short term.  

* PWM vs MPPT (solar charger). PWM is cheap and good for small system, not good with high temperature and is prompt to brake sooner than MPPT.
MPPT has higher charging capacity and matches big quantity of batteries, it is more durable but more expensive.
 Nowadays the charger can be included inside or optional to install.

* Find out if you have single phase or three phase in your place, this will have to match the inverter for the whole installation.

Solar Panel (AKA solar module in commercial terms)
Most commercial types are Monocrystaline, Polycristaline & Bifacial. The suitable is Monocrystaline that has high efficiency & performance, also is not sensitive to high temperature.
 Don’t buy cheap quality or you will have an incident like the case of Walmart suing Tesla. Remember this… cheap is expensive, expensive is cheap.  

 In case to opt wind generator, the same, safety first. Get one with some kind of protection like overcharging, overheat, etc… windy day will make the fins to spin faster, without protection will produce fire.

Battery
 Forget about it, you will be wasting tons of money for many reasons. Let’s put like this…
 A small USP of 600w with a battery of 9Ah (small battery) will give you around 2’ of backup time on a PC of 400w. Now I ask you, how many inverter’s battery you need to backup 14hrs without sun? (Inverter’s battery are like cars, depending the type).
 From the other hand, every 1.5 years you will have to change.

Investment calculation
Run the profit & investment calculation to see how long it will take for ROI, I think I don’t have to explain this part.
Inverter’s warranty has 3 years approx. could last around 5 years depending of the brand and quality. About solar panels life span, this could last in your life with a good quality. Wind generator have no idea.

 At the moment this is all, any questions I will reply when I can.

 Good luck in your project.