+1 to look for some inspiration in order to increase independence and quality of food.
+1000 to add solar energy production and home mining to increase energy and monetary independence!
⛏️🫂☀️
Discussion
home mining from household renewables unfortunately does not work. you increase monetary sovereignty by buying Bitcoin.
if you have the miner, you have to run and cool it 24/7 and then maybe it works. solar energy is at least 3x than what profitable miners get from hydroelectric dams. and that's before you solved the problem of the night.
Sorry, buy I've got to disagree here.
Home mining is a perfect match of a solar generation system.
It sucks wasted/unused energy, making the system much more profitable, all while maintaining independence of the possible grid surpluses subsidies.
And at the same time, It helps mining decentralization, something much needed in my opinion.
Win-win.
the math never works out. the capital investment for miners is so high that in order to get at least return on capital, you need to run it 24/7. it never pays off to turn it off. if you do and only use surpluses, the miner will never pay for itself.
I have a solar system and was doing this calculation several times, also tried other people who build solar systems and understand Bitcoin mining.
if you find a way to do it without being in brutal loss, let me know. but show numbers.
with current solar systems, assuming you use everything it produces over lifetime, the cost per kWh is 6-8 cents. if you want to use batteries, the price doubles.
assuming a 3kW miner and 6 hours of peak sunshine (that's way overblown though), you need at least 12kWp of panels. that will not fit on most roofs anyway, but if you have a greenhouse or a parking lot, you can use that, along with let's say 3x3kWh batteries.
you still have not made anything for the house, just for the miner, which also costs a lot of money and if you want to see that money back, you can't not run it, the difficulty increase will kill ROI.
the professional miners get 3-4 cents per kWh and that's 24/7.
just buy Bitcoin instead of the miner and use the solar system for all your other energy needs.
p.s.: I have not talked about cooling. you need another 3kW AC unit to cool the miner.
What about mining for fun in the summer with an old asic (that doesn't cost much)? Of course it won't mine much. I wonder if it's better than selling the electricity to grid at low (negative?) prices.
But yeah, no AC has to be involved. 🤔
summer in Europe is not the best time for solar. there's more sun, but it's also too hot. best months are may and June.
in summer, you are more likely to also need ac to cool the house, so the consumption will be also much higher, so there'll be less excess.
selling to the grid is usually not a good idea. virtual battery means you don't have to pay for energy you consume later, but you have to pay distribution costs, which are around 40-60% of the price. you can also sell for money, but that involves a lot more territory compliance and income taxes. it's much better to consume what you produce. so batteries are a good idea.
or look at it like this - the cost of electricity is 6-8 cents per kWh when produced by a system without battery, double if you have battery. if you can use it in any other way (even storing in battery), it is a better deal. because the old miner will not produce more that much per kWh, probably less than half.
Mining for fun is always profitable!!
😏
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You are thinking on it in the wrong way:
- It's not installing solar to do home mining.
- It's using home mining to consume your wasted or unused solar energy.
It's not about building a mining operation in your house. It's about making more profitable your solar installation while helping the decentralization pleb-mining.
So, for your opex calculation your energy costs are zero, as you are going to consume unused energy.
The good old S9 has a breakeven of $0.04/kWh right now, operating in efficient power range ofc.
A pair of them can chew up something between 10-15 kWh per day, that could be $0.4 or $0.5 a day.
You are not going to be financially independent with that, of course!! 😊
But in a few months your (small) miner capex are paid, and your mining rewards would be 100% profits, although small! 😁
You can scale this up with newer miners adapting to your wasted energy case, or reuse the produced heat to help warming up your house.
Btw, buying Bitcoin is not exclusive to home mining with wasted solar energy, of course!
🫂
that means you overpaid on solar, if you have 10kWh day excess (even sometimes), you paid good 15k for energy you don't need and can't store.
so the cost is not zero, you overbuilt the solar farm.
if you have the system set correctly, you don't have much excess you can't store, certainly not 10kWh per day, even if there are some exceptional days.
also, in many countries, there's a limit of 10kWp, if you go more than that, you enter into commercial producer area - regulations, taxes, ...
As you said several times, batteries duplicate energy prices rn.
Imo, it's cheaper to 'overbuild' in kwp to guarantee that even not the best productive days you produces enough energy.
Solar panels are really cheap right now.
By the way, what I've said several times is that home mining is a perfect match to consume your unused solar energy.
If you don't have wasted energy, good for you, home mining it's obviously not for you.
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it duplicates the price, but still cheaper than the grid. and you have backup when the grid goes down.
giving excess to the grid using virtual battery (tax free) and then consuming it later is still better deal than mining. for the saved amount, buy BTC.
do you actually do this BTW?
Regarding if solar+batteries give cheaper energy than the grid, it's vastly depends! Where and when in the world you are.
It's not always that case.
You are assuming too much things, sorry.
Regarding virtual batteries: that's why I said:
"all while maintaining independence of the possible grid surpluses subsidies."
🤷
"Sending power to the grid and then consume it later" is sometimes tricky.
Depends on the contract - devil could be in "small letter's paragraphs".
Many times you sell power for low price (it's a sunshine, spot price is low) and buy it expensive afterwards (it's a winter).
Just small note, that the cost savings are not always as expected ones.
For homes, it's actually hard to get the spot price. You usually get either flat fee or two prices (day/night or alterning hours for heat pump).
So it does not matter much. If you have two prices system, you can even charge batteries from the grid and don't consume anything during the high price times.
I personally don't use virtual battery though, I have real batteries and I can use everything I make.
No, no. As ordinary homeowner you usually cannot get spot prices. But they could be used as financial background in case of "virtual battery".
Not always, just to be not "surprised".
Virtual battery is not based on prices. You give them kWh, you can get kWh back (but you pay distribution fees).
I am just using argument of guy from Signal group you are member probably too.
If it's in your contract, then you are fine.
Wish Australia had "virtual batteries"!
Instead we just have a regulated feed-in rate, and the grid supplier retaliates by charging higher supply charges for customers who have solar.
I don't sell any of my surplus. F--- those monopolists. My BIL was selling back to the grid, until we ran the numbers and found it was actually cheaper not to.
Euroland has a lot of stupid in its regulatory systems, but less outright fraud.
if you don't have batteries, you are covering only small part of 24h of your consumption. still reliant on grid.
also, panels take a lot of space, so overproduction takes space, costs money and ROI is smaller.
panels are cheap, but you need often permission to build more and of course inverter (you can't connect infinite amount of panels to an inverter) and then you don't even mine enough to buy energy for night for that money. if you had batteries, it would be better. 😀
You are thinking on solutions in order to minimise a solar installation and make it more useful (through batteries) based on some existing energy consumption and needs.
I'm proposing a way to consume (already existing) wasted solar energy through home #bitcoin mining.
They are opposite views.
🤷
This is why I mine #monero with my surplus solar.
Everything better without ASICs!
What makes it better? Unless you need the machine anyway for something else, the capital costs kill it too, don't they?
Capital cost for an older general-purpose computer are usually $0. Heck, I could pick them up from council hard rubbish collections if I was so inclined.
they will also mine 0.01 xmr per year. not worth even the time to set it up.
Per fortnight, not per year, but yes, if you're only setting up one its hardly worth the trouble you go to the first time.
that's actually better than I thought.
I think the problem is really with the excess. It is either rare and not enough to mine, or you have overpaid on the fv system, so your energy is actually expensive.
I can imagine two situations where it makes sense:
- you are traveling and not using the energy, nobody's at home
- you get access to spot prices and have batteries. when the energy is cheap or negative, you both mine and charge batteries (you can do this with Victron systems for example)
From a probabilist POV, there's no such thing as overbuilding for every scenario.
But you're broadly correct - I don't have the ability to sell back to the grid. Financially, I'm better off wasting the power than signing the contract that would allow me to sell it.
(Conservative governments here hate the free market more than Communists do lol)