How To Mine Cryptocurrency Using Solar Power

If you don’t want to read the full article, the video below goes over everything written.

Why Solar

Since the Ethereum merge, there is only one option to stay profitable when mining. This is through free electricity or if you have extremely low energy costs of around 0.04 kWh. So it’s either you have free electricity via your circumstances or you have some form of renewable energy. Obviously there are options of wind and water power but solar is the most readily available so we will focus on this form of renewable energy.

Calculating Power Output

The first step before buying anything is to calculate how much energy your mining rig takes up. There are many ways to do this and the most obvious is looking in the miner. Most miners will display average watts used, as you can see in this screenshot it shows around 340 watts used. The only problem is that this is only the amount of power used by the graphics cards and not the whole PC. There are a lot of programs which you can download that give a power draw for the whole PC, it’s normally around 100 watts more than displayed in the miner. However there’s still a problem as the power supply you’re using will have a certain efficiency which means it has a slippage amount of power it can allow for. So the only way to get the real power draw is you buy a wattmeter for your plug socket. These record the full amount of power being drawn at the wall. It won’t differ too much from the programs you can download. So if you want to be really precise then you could buy a wattmeter or you can have a less precise reading from these watt reading programs. We are just going to use a round number for our example, so let’s say our rig takes up 800 watts of power overall. This means everyday it takes up 19.2kW, so if we times this number by 365 it gives us a figure of 6,835kW per year. Now personally when it comes to solar power then I would do CPU mining as it takes up much less energy and then you can buy a smaller amount of solar panels.

Solar Power Measurement

Now we have the watts calculated, we need to figure out how many solar panels to buy. Solar panels work in a strange measurement as you would think an 800 watt panel would produce 800 watts but that’s not true because at certain times in the day you won’t be able to generate that amount of power. They are measured in kilowatts peak, which means at the peak power generation it can generate that amount. For example a 4 kilowatt peak set will only be able to generate 4 kilowatts at 12 o’clock in the day when the sun is at its highest. So typically 1kWp will generate around 1,000 kilowatts per year. Now we mentioned that our made up rig would need 6,835kW per year which means we would need to get a set that equals 6.8kWp.

Solar Power Options

Now there are two options here, either you want to run your rig 24/7 or you just want to run it when the sun is out. If your running your rig 24/7 then you’ll need the full 6.8kWp unit, however if you only want to run it when the sun is out then you can take this number and half it to 3.4kWp, I would do this if you don’t have the money to buy a lot of solar right now and then upgrade to the full set when you start making more money.

Solar Power Setup

The set up for solar panels is very easy and the different options I just talked about require two different setups. So if you’re choosing to do the half method then that’s very simple. First you need to choose your kit size. Once you have it you’ll need to decide to either put them on your roof or you can install them in your garden if you have enough space. If you install on the roof then you don’t have much choice on the angle of the panels which is very important as you want the sun to hit directly at the angle that generates the most power. The best angle depends on where you live in the world. In the northern hemisphere you’ll want to have your angle set around 45 degrees in the winter and as it turns to summer that angle should change to 30 degrees. If you’re in the Southern Hemisphere then it’s the opposite. Then you’ll want to either manually rotate your panels to follow the sun or some panels come with mortars which follow the sun. So once you set up the installation you’ll need to connect to your house’s grid. As I said if you’re choosing the half option all you need to get is an inverter for the power. All power generated from solar is DC power but your house runs on AC power, so this inverter will convert from DC to AC and then you connect into your house grid via your energy box. Now this part is a bit daunting for some people but if you’re not completely sure then just ask an electrician to see what to actually do, many people have different types of fuse boxes for their house so it could be different depending on where you live. When it comes to the full power option you need a battery to store excess energy that can be used after the sun goes down and the panels aren’t generating energy. To do this you need a battery plus the inverter. So it’s the same as the step above but all you have to do is put a battery between the panels and the inverter. This battery will then charge using the excess energy and allow for 24/7 power. The capacity of the battery will be half of the power needed to run the rig per day, so our example rig takes 19.2kW per day so the battery would need to store around half of that to be released at night. Just to be safe you’ll want a slightly large battery, so for our example rig we would have a 10kW battery because that is more than half of 19.2kW. As I said before, if you don’t know how to plug it into your house grid then call an electrician and they can advise you on the installation.

Location

The location that you live will also affect how much power each panel can generate. Sunny places will obviously produce more output but as a generalisation, any place that has over 200 days of sun would be very good. Places like texas or the south of spain have these number of sun days. So if you’re closer to the equator then you’ll be able to generate more power around the year. To put that in perspective the countries like UK, Norway and Sweden have an average of only 85 Days of sun. This amount of sun will have less power generated over the year. So typically if you have over 100 days of sun then I would consider getting solar power for your mining rigs.