My solar PV thread

[oil pan 4]

October sucks. Even on a clear day the panels are down. About 40% from summer production.

[redpoint5]

October is up from September so far. Seems the state not in flames helps. CA is currently sharing some of their smoke. I still haven't gone on recon to assess the damage.

[oil pan 4]

After the February freeze I found out that all my neighbors had their power cut off at some point.
I didn't. Being a registered new mexico power generation facility has its perks.

[redpoint5]

Now that I'm mining Ethereum, which adds ~300 watts of continuous power consumption, I finally used up my banked credit and had a $60 bill last month. The sun has been out enough that I've generated an excess the last 3 days. My bill should be smaller this month and finally zero out next (hopefully).

I've almost mined 10% of a Ethereum, which at the moment is worth about $130.

[freebeard]

This is newly relevant to my interests.

duckduckgo.com/?q=mine+ethereum+bitcoin+on+raspberry+pi

I've got a persistent connection and a 2nd computer. Is the 300W to run a desktop machine?

[redpoint5]

Crypto probably isn't worth mining unless you have free electricity or are given an ASIC.

I have both free electricity (after I paid for it upfront with solar) and free GPUs. My 300 watts consumption consists of 200 for the powerful rackmount server and 100 watts for the GPU. If I'm successful adding another GPU tonight, I expect that to consume another 100 watts.

[oil pan 4]

My solar is back, after a pretty bad showing in January and February looks like I'm back to making 50kwh on a typical day.
I had some 0.9kwh production days this winter. I didn't even think less than 1kwh on a nearly 10kw array was even possible unless the panels were buried under at least several inches of snow and the sky clouded over. I didn't have any snow on my panels on most of those days, it was just cloudy.
In that scenario series wired panels with a high voltage DC string inverter may have the advantage.

[redpoint5]

My best day this year was Monday at 31 kWh. Lowest days can get down to 0.6.

I had a $65 electric bill last month due to my Ethereum mining rig. It was pulling 400 watts continuous, and now that I've added a GPU, it's running 500w. I'd like to figure out how to get that down to around 350w, but probably won't be able to until I get a different PC (something with less than the 28 cores I'm running now).

My idle consumption in the dead of night is 735 watts.

[freebeard]

How much of the 500 Watts is for cooling? Maybe you could rig up a passive cooling chimney.

How much Ethereum did you get for your 65 Lucky Bucks?

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by freebeard

How much of the 500 Watts is for cooling? Maybe you could rig up a passive cooling chimney.

How much Ethereum did you get for your 65 Lucky Bucks?

Of course, the street value is volatile, but currently at $210 mined in 2 months. Just Sunday I added 50% mining capability and brought consumption from 400 watts, to 500. Should be earning ~$150/mo now at the current value. Should have zero electric bill from here on out since it's getting sunnier. I'm showing about $2.50 net consumption for the month.