diy solar

diy solar

Solar Powered Mining Farm

theclam

New Member
Joined
Feb 15, 2022
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5
I am in the process of finalizing my design for my solar powered mining farm.

72 - panels @ 450watts each = 32.4kw (5 hours of sunlight on average)
4 - Growatt SPF 8000T DVM-US Inverter/MPPT
9 - Trophy 220ah rack mount batteries 48v220C-1
Mining Farm Power Consumption: 5kw 24x7 -- 230v * 21.75 amps

Consumption: 5k*24=120kwh per day
Generation: ~150kw per day
Storage: 220*48=10.5kw * 9 = 94.5kw

Thoughts on this setup? Did I size everything properly?

 
If you already have grid power available, what you are doing is just wasting your time. Grid power is simply the cheapest, most practical solution to powering anything, and an off-grid system will ALWAYS produce electricity that is more expensive than the grid.

So, if you are doing this to save money, then forget it. It's not going to happen.
 
My system will pay for itself in 7 years.
Life expectancy of the system is 25 years.
Are you sure that you are on the right forum?
If you already have grid power available, what you are doing is just wasting your time. Grid power is simply the cheapest, most practical solution to powering anything, and an off-grid system will ALWAYS produce electricity that is more expensive than the grid.

So, if you are doing this to save money, then forget it. It's not going to happen.
 
I am fully off-grid. If you indeed have the grid available for backup, then you won't have to design a system as robust (expensive) as one that must be 100% independent. My system must be 100% rock-solid, or 100+ orchard fruit trees die.
 
If you already have grid power available, what you are doing is just wasting your time. Grid power is simply the cheapest, most practical solution to powering anything, and an off-grid system will ALWAYS produce electricity that is more expensive than the grid.

So, if you are doing this to save money, then forget it. It's not going to happen.

I think there's some details that @MichaelK implied here and were lost in translation...

Fact: Off-grid systems can be cheaper than on-grid systems - and/or have a (relatively) near-term pay pack period.

Fact: Grid power is incredibly cheap on a "per kwH" basis.

Fact: The up-front costs (either off-grid hardware or on-grid transformer/cable installation) take a long time to amortize down to something reasonable.

Fact: Having two systems is more expensive and complicated than having one system.

@timselectric Michael was just saying that for someone "invested" in grid power by being already hooked up, it would be very hard to beat that price with a large off-grid style system like OP described.

They need to do their math very carefully.

Free electricity, is the cheapest electricity.

There is no free electricity.
 
I disagree,
After 7 years, I will be receiving free electricity, until I have to replace equipment.
But, everyone is entitled to their own opinion.
This is a diy solar power forum. Not for large commercial solar systems.
Good luck, have fun, and be safe.
 
You may have underestimated your solar requirements. You will likely need at least 2 times more solar panels. 5 hours of sunlight each day does not mean you'll get maximum wattage from your panels during those 5 hours. You may need more batteries as well because if you intend to run the batteries down to 20% or 30% everyday, those batteries will die in a couple of years.

Have you considered that your mining rigs might be fine for now, but as hash difficulty goes up, it'll render your mining rigs obsolete in 1 or 2 years? And don't forget about when the mining rewards gets halved. That is expected to happen in 2024. If mining for Bitcoin, you'll get 6.25 bitcoins for every solved block right now. In 2024, it will drop to 3.125 bitcoins for each solved block. Halving occurs about every 4 years.

Traditionally, miners have constantly upgraded hardware and change their mining strategy every 6 months or a year. If you stay with what you started with, you'll be left in the dust after a year.

Based on your numbers above, assuming that you have recent mining rigs, I estimate that your rigs will be mining at around 10 TH/s. Using the profit calculator at https://bitcoineval.com/calculator.php your daily expected revenue is $2.88, with free electricity. In a year, that's under $700 with the assumption that hash difficulty will not increase. Is making $700 a year really worth your time in doing this?

BTW I used to have a small mining farm back when Bitcoin was $600. It is $42,000 today. I made my money back then and got out quickly. It was not worth the time and effort and the possibility of burning the house down. These machines run extremely hot and back then I was only mining the in GH/s range. Any mining now has to be done in the TH/s range. They use tremendous amounts of power and create a lot of heat. It's like running multiple space heaters 24 hours a day.
 
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After 7 years, I will be receiving free electricity, until I have to replace equipment.

It all depends how you want to do you math.

I assume what you mean is that it's free relative to grid-power because you've gotten enough killowatts from your hardware at 7 years that the expected cost of getting that power from the grid equals the cost of your hardware.

That's definitely a useful way to look at the numbers.

My point is that it's not free. You're still getting a return on an initial capital investment so I'd divide the total return by the initial capital to figure out how well the investment is doing.

In this case you're probably not getting any actual cash back into your pocket from an off-grid install so the easiest way to make that math work in meaningful numbers is to look at your effective $/kwH by dividing the total system and maintenance costs by the total number of kwH used. (gross vs net here would be with vs without self-consumption like inverter load or battery heaters.)

That effective $/kwH should approach $0.0000, but will never get there. It's not free, but after 7 years you are expecting to get a bigger # of kwH from your system than if you'd spent the same amount of money on kwHs being on-grid.

I'm making a few assumptions about your system here, feel free to correct them, but the overall principle should hold true.
 
There are two ways to look at cost. And, both are acceptable. I am looking at it from an out of pocket expense. Compared to money that would have been spent on grid.
 
You may have underestimated your solar requirements. You will likely need at least 2 times more solar panels. 5 hours of sunlight each day does not mean you'll get maximum wattage from your panels during those 5 hours. You may need more batteries as well because if you intend to run the batteries down to 20% or 30% everyday, those batteries will die in a couple of years.

Have you considered that your mining rigs might be fine for now, but as hash difficulty goes up, it'll render your mining rigs obsolete in 1 or 2 years? And don't forget about when the mining rewards gets halved. That is expected to happen in 2024. If mining for Bitcoin, you'll get 6.25 bitcoins for every solved block right now. In 2024, it will drop to 3.125 bitcoins for each solved block. Halving occurs about every 4 years.

Traditionally, miners have constantly upgraded hardware and change their mining strategy every 6 months or a year. If you stay with what you started with, you'll be left in the dust after a year.

Based on your numbers above, assuming that you have recent mining rigs, I estimate that your rigs will be mining at around 10 TH/s. Using the profit calculator at https://bitcoineval.com/calculator.php your daily expected revenue is $2.88, with free electricity. In a year, that's under $700 with the assumption that hash difficulty will not increase. Is making $700 a year really worth your time in doing this?

BTW I used to have a small mining farm back when Bitcoin was $600. It is $42,000 today. I made my money back then and got out quickly. It was not worth the time and effort and the possibility of burning the house down. These machines run extremely hot and back then I was only mining the in GH/s range. Any mining now has to be done in the TH/s range. They use tremendous amounts of power and create a lot of heat. It's like running multiple space heaters 24 hours a day.
Thank you for the feedback. I currently have a mining farm with 400amps of electrical service and have been mining since 2012. I currently have 70 GPUs, a bunch of ASICs so I am very familiar with mining and have new hardware that I cycle every 6-12 months.

I am assuming 416watts production for each panel on average.
My current solar systems are a 10kw array I built 9 years ago using micro inverters and I also have Tesla solar panels 30kw on my roof and 3 Tesla PowerWalls. My estimates are built off of my existing production for my solar today. I am being a little optimistic on the Panel Generation these panels have a much higher efficiency and this inverts have a lot less loss than what I run today. But the Average might be closer to 400watts per day. Once I have the system built I will just move the most profitable miners per watt from my existing mining farm into the shipping container that is fully powered by the new system and 100% off-grid.

As for calculations go mining profitability, here are a few examples below:

With Batteries (24x7)
GearAlgoWattsKwhUnit Cost24hr EarningsProfit per wattHours# of MinersKwh ConsumptionProfitMiner Break EvenFull Break EvenSolar w Bat.
GoldShell KD6Kendena - K62,6302.63$53,900$150$0.06242.2136.08$3230.981.41$118,035
Antminer E9Ethash - ETH2,5662.566$30,000$120$0.05242.2136.08$2650.681.20$96,783
JasMiner X4-U1 520Ethash - ETH2400.24$8,699$22$0.092423.6136.08$5201.081.35$189,709
JasMiner X4 2.5Ethash - ETH1,2001.2$52,000$110$0.09244.7136.08$5201.301.56$189,709
Innosilocon A11 ProEthash - ETH2,5002.5$23,600$80$0.03242.3136.08$1810.811.56$66,226
Antminer z15Equihash - ZEC1,5101.51$10,000$11$0.01243.8136.08$412.495.79$15,076
Antminer S19j ProSha256 - BTC3,2503.25$9,000$12$0.00241.7136.08$212.058.57$7,641
Antminer L7Scrypt - LTC3,4253.425$23,300$60$0.02241.7136.08$991.062.44$36,255
2,1652$26,312$70.63$0.03242.6136.08$1851.022.872373674$67,507

Those specific batteries are supposed to last 10,000 full cycles.
 
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I just have a smaller 12 GPU rig that im running and only have enough solar to cover about half of it. My off grid solar system will be paid off in 3 years (1 year already down, 2 years to go) and my miner will be paid off in 12 months (4 months already done, so 8 months left)

Don't let them tell you it's not possible
 
Can you do it and should you do it are completely different things!

Everyone can participate in the wild west of cryptos, just DYOR. If your not ready for a 5 acre solar field, inverters, cooling costs, asic miners, noise, and ginormous batteries and systems costing $xxxxxx dollars, you can still participate in the crypto space and do it for very little cost, very little power, and most definately have fun learning along the way. Maximalists will always disagree with me, so what! They are not smarter than me, nor smarter than you, just stubborn. This is where I want to stop but without an example many here will cry so here is a single example (of over a hundred other possibilities). As always, do your own research!

T1646703384905.pngThis example is a gross negligence to PIVX as the system would actually run with a 100w panel and a much smaller battery. Also if cold staking was implemented, your net energy costs would be zero!!! All your rewards could then be exchanged for your coin of choice. (Prices effective from a few months ago and have most definitely changed since then.) You can agree or disagree with the math and the numbers would change plus or minus a little for each method but that's not the point. The point is, cryptos are accessible to everyone.
 
Figured I would provide an update:

IMG_2826.jpeg

Currently 32 540w Bifacial panels, 5 Growatt SPF 5000 Inverters, 8 220ah Trophy Batteries.
Solar-Assistant to monitor the entire system, weather data etc to manage and control the farm.
A collection of Bitmain, Goldshell, iPollo, FPGA, GPU, Evergreen and other miners...
Using point to point wifi at the moment for connectivity, I tested a wifi hotspot which worked and could also use starling etc, but no point with free wifi via the point 2 point system from my house.
The system is running 24x7 off of solar (90%+ of the time). I monitor the sun brightness and turn on and off miner groups based on sun brightness & weather data to ensure the batteries will last through the night. I do use Grid as a backup if I get multiple days of clouds and can't charge the batteries properly. That protects the batteries and lets me continue mining with my most efficient miners when there are several poor solar production days in a row.
The 4 intakes vents (not shown) and the exhaust fans have been working perfectly so far. The batteries were also great during the winter since they have internal heaters as well.

Next steps:
Add an additional 32 solar panels (I have most of them sitting in the horse trailer just need time to do it.)
Add more batteries with the mining farm profits.
Entire project is looking to ROI with existing mining profits in a little over 3 years. Bull market should accelerate that to under 2 years.
Replace less efficient miners with better ones over time and keep that cycle going...
 
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