Farming with Solar Power

Hey everyone It's been a while, but I'm back! I used to have a solid setup with x13 Newpacs and x2 R606 pods running on x2 Pi4s, hitting a steady 3.4TH/s for weeks. Most of my gear is retired now, but I'm thinking of jumping back in with solar power. Has anyone tried this? Are there any good threads here about it? Is it really sustainable to run 24/7 with the right equipment? I'm looking at using x2 12v 100Ah batteries in parallel, a 600W solar panel, a 60A charge controller, and a 3000W inverter. For now, I’ll just be running x1 Pi4 and x1 GS hub. Any advice would be awesome. Thanks Cohenpol

okay  use a 5 for low and a 6 for high 5 x 600 = 3000 6 x 600 = 3600 the gear will provide 3.0 to 3.6 kwatts over 24 hours so 3.60/24 = 150 watts max power 24/7/365 or 3.00/24 =125 watts more likely 24/7/365 So you can do a bit of gear a few usb sticks maybe 4 or 5 sticks. or maybe 1 apollo at 110 watts.

It sure would be cool to figure out how to skip the inverter and keep everything low voltage DC. If you got some lithium batteries, everything could run on 5V I wonder if it would be better to take any money you would have spent on batteries, and just buy more miners and solar panels — and just mine during the day. Either way that sounds like a great project! Excited to hear more about what you end up doing.

If you're running a GS hub, just make sure you're feeding it actual 12V (the input voltage tolerance depends on the version of hub you're using) and you won't need the inverter and power supply.

Think you're off there mate. You're assuming the sun shines 24 hours a day, producing 5*600watts = 3000watts * 24hours = 72kilowatt-hours in the full 24 hours of sun. Actual solar production will vary but I promise it won't happen all day long -

and I used fact of 5 and factor of 6 not factor of 24 so 5 x 600 = 3 kwatts or 6 x 600 = 3.6kwatts. across 24 hours since he is charge batteries he can run 24 hours if he uses 3.6/24 =  150 watts best case 3.0/24 = 125 watts worst case average full sun is 5-6 hours most everywhere which is what I used. his batteries are big enough to charge the 3 to 3.6kwatts of energy. although he may lose 5-10% to his invertors and thus my 125 to 150 may be more like 110 to 135.  24/7/365 basically an Apollo may work. If I use 24 hours of charging he could do far more than my estimate.

Is solar-powered mining a thing? I thought to mine BTC, you need a very heavy energy consumption. People all over the world are concerned about the high energy consumption of mining. This just blew my mind. I was not very curious about mining since where I am from, the electricity bill is so high, and can only get a limited amount of electricity for usage. If you can tell me the total amount of cost to set up this rig, that should help a lot. I want to try it out myself. With this, I think we can finally call BTC the green currency, LOL.

Not really as far as I'm concerned, due to the sun only shining 1/2 the day.  The amount of batteries to do something like this at any decent scale is much more expensive than people think.  However, using solar to offset your mining consumption is a great idea.  A lot of times people pay "peak" electricity rates, and this peak is exactly when you'd get the most from your solar panels.  So if you're mining, it's of course great to have the most expensive energy provided by the sun, then cheaper grid energy is available when the sun isn't shining.  I think this is the more realistic approach to using solar panels for mining.  I do have solar panels and batteries running my mining operation, but I don't use the batteries to keep me off the grid during the night, as it wouldn't make sense with my power plan.

Oh, thanks for the clarification. I was thinking the same as the expense should be very high. And you won't get the maximum output as good as actual electricity. Maybe someday we can do it with solar-powered energy. I have seen some news about next gen battery which could hold up much more powers and are metal instead of liquid inside to transfer the current flow. Maybe that could change the game somehow. Here's the news article if anyone is interested. Next Gen Battery

Solar is great if you can net meter. Sucks if you can't

What's your take on people living in Norway where during April till August, sun sets rarely? Won't solar mining be helpful in such areas of the world? This is a personal question because I have some relatives residing there at study visa, so if this can be profitable for them even with USBs presently, I'd recommend this to them. And what is the timeline of recovery of the cost of solar panel that they will purchase?

It is interesting but the performance of the panels is lower in those latitudes, so you probably need at least twice of them or so. Certainly near the poles you can have half a year of uninterrupted sunlight, but then you have the opposite for the rest of the year (no sunlight).

the discourse of the panels is very complex. the geographical position has a great impact, and so does the country in which you live, because if, like in italy, you sell the extra energy you produce in exchange when the sun sets, you obviously have to buy it back at their price. It's also a big investment and it would probably be cheaper to buy 200m of shed in a state where electricity costs less than 5 cents. Difficult choice but definitely better. Even in norway where there are 6 months of sun you would only have 50% efficiency if the sun shines every day, but this is not the case, fog and rain clouds drastically reduce production.

Phill,  I would like to add a few corrections. 12*100 = 1200w*2 = 2400w is the max energy he can store in those two batteries. Also, the 100Ah label on many batteries could be misleading, it depends on the manufacturer (you need to reach the sheets), if it says 100Ah C100 it means it's only capable of providing 100Ah if discharged over a period of 100 hours, so a 100ah C100 battery could very well be just 80Ah C10. Also, most batteries will have the highest number of cycles when the depth of discharge doesn't go past 50%, going 100% on the battery will probably kill it in a few hundred cycles, I think for the average battery you find the market if you go near 100% DoD you will hardly get 300-400 cycles on the battery which means for daily use, every year he will need to get a new set of batteries. To keep this pretty simple, if you want to achieve max economic gain from the setup, you need to account for the following: 1- 20% power loss from the DC<>AC conversion (which means the total power you can store is 2,400w a day (hopefully will get your two batteries fully charged) 2- Use no more than 50-60% of the battery capacity to get a good number of cycles, so anywhere between 50-60Wh If you need to use a miner that needs more than 50-60W, you are going to need to increase the size of your charger (be it a solar pannel or wind turbine or whatever) and the size of your batteries.

Note I left out battery draining to zero. Above so I will correct what his 600 watt panel could do. @mikewith Not exactly what you or I said , but here goes a longer explanation. Most of the world averages 5-6 hours full sun.  WTF am I talking about? Sunrise 6am your charge rate sucks.  9am or 10 am your charge rate gets better. 12 noon it peaks. 2 or 3 pm it drops you sunset at 6pm so right before that it sucks. So even though it was 12 hours of sun most of the world average 5-6 hours of 12 noon full sun. That is how I got my 5 or 6 factor. so 600 watt panel x 5 = 3000 watts of charge or 600 watt panel x 6 = 3600 watts of charge this counts charging losses. Now for doing ac to dc  some invertors  are really good they do 95% even 96% but they cost $$$ shitty invertors do 85% so a 600 watt panel at best is 3600 x .95 = 3420 watts at worst it is 3000 x .85 = 2550 watts now do 2550/24 = 106 watts constant draw 3420/24 = 142 watts constant draw. and as you said this will be very hard on his battery since drawing down to 0 fucks a battery up. So he could run 19 hours a day to save his battery and do between 106 and 142 watts. at best he can do a few usb sticks and a rasp pi   with his setup

Please read my post again where I explain about the total capicity of the batteries, he can not store 3kw in 2*100ah, a battery can only store volt*amps so 12v*100A = 1200w MAX per battery, and that is not even always possible, charging the last 10% takes forever and the battery ages it becomes impossible to hold 100%. But eitherway the best case scenario is 1200w per battery so 2400w for his 2*100ah batteries even if he uses a billion solar panels. Also the inverter loss is not everything, there is still charging loss and transmission loss, unless you use the highest quality of everything it is safe to assume a 20% in the whole system.

you are correct.  so he needs 3 batteries. I know a guy that had a deal with a golf cart dealer. He would get scrap dead golf cart batteries and refurbish them. Basically this battery was one he could get at a 90% discount https://www.batteryequivalents.com/group-gc12-batteries.html https://www.batteriesplus.com/product-details/golf-~-scrubber/battery/magna-power/sligc12vt they run 330usd new. the dead ones can be refurbished but they may have 1 cell missing so they are 10 volt not 12 volt. he would string 5 of them to get to 50 volts and 150ah about 50 x 150 = 7500 watts.  and run them done to 3500 watts then recharge. even at 80-90 percent off they are about 50-60 bucks apiece say 300 usd and refurbing them is about 50 more. so 350 . They don't last long since they are old and died once. Battery solar is a hard road to do. We are Grid tied here in NJ much cheaper to do.

It would be cheaper to get 2*150A batteries instead of 3*100A batteries, it would also be easier to set up and requires less cabling since he is going to need to wire them in parallel, although I think it would be wise to run them in series and get a 24V inverter instead of the 12V, a 24V system has a few advantages over 12V system, with the exception that you can't expand your batteries with 1 battery at the time, you will always need to do them in twos.

Sorry guys this might be a little bit out of topic, and maybe a newbie question but it is possible to run 24 hours when mining with solar panel? Today electricity is getting expensive, as far as I know that we need a battery to store but this need a huge battery and since miner hardware is very hungry and battery, converter is expensive too   is it efficient? using solar panel

Well most people won't average even 8 hours a day of usable sun, so there's really only two options if you wanna mine 24/7 on solar. One is batteries, but that's gonna require a lot of stored power and you'll only get enough power stored, if you are generating many times as much power as you use, to cover those 16+ hours a day. Maybe 4? times to cover the losses. i.e. a single 3.3kW miner would require more than just 10kW solar generation. The other, requires putting enough of it back into the grid to cover the 16+ hours of mining without solar, but again is only possible if your solar generation is multiple times what you use. That will depend on your electricity supplier, if they meter it out fairly - i.e. what you send to the grid = what you can use - or how much more you have to send vs what you use in those 16+ hours without solar. There's other options to source power like wind and hydro, but you need to see how much you can generate to cover that 16+ hours a day needed. And of course if you have that extra source, it may well be better to use that 24/7 anyway. Of course if you simply reduce your power bill by using solar + grid, that's another option that may fit in with what you can afford.