How I Built a Solar Powered Cryptocurrency Mining Computer

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Thomas Smith. I'm an entrepreneur and a crypto experimenter based in San Francisco, Bay area. You may have heard that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency networks now use as much electrical power as many countries. Incredible use of electrical power. One way to remedy this is to switch a lot of cryptocurrency mining. That's the operation by which new cryptocurrencies are created over to renewable energy and in particular, solar power is a great option. Now this class Chronicles a experiment that I did to actually build a small-scale off grid solar-powered cryptocurrency mining computer. And I went through all the different steps that I took exactly how I built it and run through how profitable it is. Really, this is a small-scale experiment intended to illustrate a bigger point, which is that if the world can switch all of the cryptocurrency mining operations that are currently happening to renewable power of this can be done off grid. It can be a way to create demand for solar power and also to use land that gets a lot of sunshine, but as otherwise unusable for this renewable energy generation. So checkout, this experiment. Checkout what I did, how I did it. I'll go into as much detail as I possibly can. And you'll actually get to see my real system in operation. 2. How I Built a Solar Powered Cryptocurrency Mining Computer: Enzyme can do it yourself home automation and I'm super excited to share my new solar powered cryptocurrency mining computer. I've been working on this for a while. It started with my off-grid solar panel system and I've added on a crypto mining computer. Why would I want to do this, I think is the first question. Really, as people have been doing more mining, there's more of a realization that the environmental cost of mining cryptocurrencies is very high. Right now the Bitcoin network alone uses as much power as many countries. So that results in a huge amount of carbon emissions and a lot of environmental impact. One potential solution to that would be to use renewable energy to mine crypto. And it's actually, I think a great way to especially use off-grid solar panels in inexpensive places that got a lot of sun to generate cryptocurrencies and create profit from these off-grid solar panel operation. I want to demonstrate that at a small-scale. I also want to show how this could work for an individual miner at home. And so what I've done is to build this solar panel system connected to a cryptocurrency mining computer that is actively mining moment. And I'm going to walk through exactly how I did that. Let's start with a solar panel system itself. This is an off-grid system that I built using panels from rennin. Rennin is a company that sells off grid panels for, for use in mobile homes, campaign boats, that kind of thing. These are really great, well-built 12-volt panels. They should last many, many years and they're really easy to set up. This is not connected to my house in any way. It's just sitting out here in my backyard. You can see it's in full sun right now. And I've got a 100-watt panel from energy over here. It's about a $100 and then I've got 350 watt panels each, about $50 from refugee. Ideally, I would have panels at the same wattage and probably not getting an optimal output from this 250 watts theoretical power, a 100 plus 350 each. Probably in reality, I'm getting about 200 watts out of this. So again, if I did two bigger panels are three bigger panels and probably get better output. But this is what I happened to purchase for other experiments. All of these panels are going into a MC4 splitter on the back. And that is combining the output from these into two MC4 cables, industry standard, and combining them in parallel. If I wanted these up in series, I'd be taking the 12 volts from each and adding them together instead by wiring them up in parallel, I am getting the same 12 volt output, nominal output, but I'm actually combining their amperage, some combining all of that power coming out of them, getting a higher amperage at the 12 volts nominal output that's coming into cables. They're tucked away behind here. You can see some of them down at the bottom here. I don't want to move this out of the way right now. It's going into this adventurer solar charge controller also from refugee. This is not a waterproof controller, by the way, this is o under a little overhang on the side of my house. It doesn't get wet. But the power is all coming in here. And you can see on the readout here some information about what's happening. And if I scroll through here, I can see the different settings here. So let's start. The panels are generating 12.5 volts. So that's a good output there. Then let's take a look. The panels are outputting the moment about seven amps. We'll get into why that is in a little bit. Then let's take a look at mount that they've generated so far since I started this particular round, 1.6 kilowatt hours. And then my battery voltage, 12.6 volts. And we'll take a look, a battery in a second. The battery temperature, I don't think this is actually connected at the moment, but basically this is taking in the power from these panels and it's using it to charge a battery. And getting that power ready to actually use. All of that is coming from the adventure charge controller into this refugee deep cycle battery. And this is in a battery case to keep it protected from the elements. But this is a deep cycle solar battery from refugee. And it's useful to use a battery that's specifically tailored for use in solar panels systems. So that it's something that can be discharged and recharged over and over again without having any kind of damage there. This is specifically designed to be connected up to this charge controller or getting power into this battery from the solar panels and it's keeping that topped up. Again, I built a system originally to be a mini off-grid system for use during public safety power shut off. So she got here in California. We get these rolling outages. Sometimes the shut offs can last couple of days. So I wanted to have a power system. I could use power appliances. And so normally in normal times, I don't need that. And again, it's a great way to leverage that power to use it to mine crypto. So going into this deep cycle battery that's storing the power, and it's important to have a battery for this mining operation. For a couple of reasons. One of them is that right now we're in full sun and it's a bright sunny day in California. But imagine a Cloud went in front of these panels, or even a person walk by and their shadow ended up on the panels for a couple of seconds. It could drop the output from the panels low enough that it wouldn't be able to run my computer, which again, we'll look at in a second. That would be really annoying because every time a cloud came out, the whole system would be shutting down and then starting back up again over and over. And so the battery offers some buffer because this charge controllers charging the battery, battery is supplying power and it's got enough charge in there to last for awhile. So even if there's intermittent clouds or it's not a fully sunny day, can continue to mine and my computer is not shutting off over and over again. It's also good because it gives me a bit of a buffer. On the beginning, end of the day. I can mine as long as the sun is out and I've got pretty much full or partial sun on these panels. But charging up and tapping up that battery gives me some extra runtime at the beginning and end of the day where I'm running on battery power. And that eats a little bit more profit out of the system, which again, we'll get into it a bit. So there's the power going into the battery. And then the next step is this energy, 500 watt power in bird. So the power in this battery is 12 volts. And that is not actually computers run on 12 or five volts, but the input to a typical mining computers 120 volts from the wall in your house. It wouldn't be able to run right off of the battery without modifications. So instead, what I've done here is use this power inverter, which takes in the 12 volts of the battery. It turns it into a standard 120 volt outlet here. That makes it easier to connect on my computer to the battery. It also means that during the power shut off, I can use this system to power normal appliances, lights and computer or work and that kind of thing. That's really helpful to have this inverter for that purpose as well. So again, this is a dual-purpose system for me. In good times, it's reminding and bad times shut off the mining PC and there's an outage. I can use the power from this to run other appliances. So this is taking that 12 volts, making it 120 volts. You do lose a bit in the conversion, probably around 10% the power. So there's a bit of a power loss, but I think that's the price to pay for that conversion. Now, power comes out into this extension cord and goes behind the panels, runs along the wall here. And it's taking power into my garage. And I just don't want to have the mining computer at an elements. So we'll follow this extension cord into the garage. Okay, here's the terminus of that cable. Probably make this a little prettier looking. But you can see it goes into this kilowatt hour meter that we'll look at in a moment. And then up and into my mind NPC, here's the mining PC, talked a lot about this in other videos. So this is a custom build. It's based on a bill of materials from my friend Adam, who's a computer engineer. So thanks to Adam for designing really nice bill of materials here. When you're doing a building, a simple mining computer, basically the computer itself should be as cheap as possible because it's basically just a wrapper around this. This is my GPU. This is a Nvidia G4 GTX 1070 GPU. And that's what's doing the actual mining operation. The rest of the computer is really just there to assist it. To run the operating system, to connect to this and run the software that's doing the actual crypto mining. Really you want it to be as inexpensive as possible. That means you want to build it yourself. Again, this is a really simple bill. So it's just a gigabyte motherboard, really basic motherboard, and it's A320 PM. We've got a simple AMD processor on. They're going to eight gigabyte RAM stick. Originally I tried an M2 memory stick. I couldn't get mine to work. I don't know if it was a driver issue or just a bad stick. So instead I just repurposed and old state of drive that I've got plugged in here. And then the whole thing is in a rows. We'll case really easy, simple, cheap case. There's two things I invested in, again, the actual GPU, which again these days can get pretty expensive since crypto is kind of taken off. And I also invested a bit more in this FPGA supernova, platinum power supply. This is a very efficient power supply. The name of the game is to get as much power for mining out of his little input power as possible. So I thought it platinum power supply would help to do that. And again, great Bill of Materials I put this all together is really easy. Shown that in other videos. The only thing I did wrong was I forgot to put the standoffs on the motherboard the first time around. So shorting out on the case may have brick VM2. I'm not sure. Hopefully not. But in any event, once I fix that issue was fine. Installed Windows on it and I just got this USB stick with Windows and install that on the computer. And the total cost for this bill of materials minus the GPU was $249. That's about as efficient as you're gonna get from a price perspective. Putting this together, you could go even cheaper if you eliminate the case and did a bear board, for example. You may be able to get even cheaper components or repurpose existing components. But for a brand new build, super easy to put together all of this I sourced on Amazon. That's a really good low price. And again, it was pretty simple to assemble. The G4 GTX 1070 I got several years ago now. So it does a great job mining. And it was $349 when I first got it. The total cost on this guy is about $600 for the PC, including the GPU. So let's see what it actually looks like. It's right now it's mine and see how that looks. To do the actual mining, I'm using nice hash. This is nice hash. It's a easy to use software. It's a one-click operation. And instead of doing the mining directly, you're actually selling your hashing power that other people can then buy and use to mine the currency that's best suited to your computer. It's basically like a pool of hashing power and you're selling that hashing power. In my case, it's probably mining ether, I would guess based on my configuration. And it's using that GPU to do that mining operation. You can see it's making 200 or $2.50 rather per day of profit. And this really is pure profit. Normally you have to factor in the cost of electricity, but because this electricity is coming from solar from my panels out there, I'm actually not having to factor that in. We do have to, of course, think of the overall system cost. I'll get to that in a minute. But once you actually got it up and running, and this is just pure profit. My average, it's based on crypto prices and the demand for hashing power and also the power of your actual hardware. My average is actually closer to about $3 per day. And see, even as we're looking at this, the prices are fluctuating. I find it's usually about $3 a day on average. You can see to do this mining, It's using this video G4, GTX 1070, and it's running at full blast. I could probably use software like afterburner to eat a little bit more performance out of that card by tweaking the power settings, overclocking it a bit. But this is just a total stock bill and I'm still getting again, on average at the moment, It's like two hundred fifty two hundred fifty point to there. And an average, I'd say it's about $3 a day of profit from the mining. Let's take a look at what kind of power we're using and at the overall picture here, Here's my kilowatt. You can see it's using it about a 150 watts to do this mining. That's really good. That means the computer itself is probably only using about 50 watts, and most of that power is being used by the 1070. Again, I could probably overclock bump that up and get even more more juice out of that. It would increase my watch here, but I could probably do that and get a bit more mining performance, but 150 watts coming in here, that's a pretty good power consumption, I think for the amount of profitability and getting out of this mining, Let's go back to the solar panels and we'll talk a little bit about what they're outputting and also the overall system cost and considerations there. Okay, so here we are back at the solar panels and you can see we're getting still pretty consistent performance degenerating about five amps right now. Battery voltage stayed fairly consistent there. And why are we only getting five amps when the system can output 200 watts, which should be probably that would be what? 15 amps or something like that. The reason for that is I started with this battery fully charged. And your panels are only going to output power proportional to the load that they're under. Because the battery is fully charged and we're generating we're using only about a 150 watts from the mining computer. I'm not really putting a lot of load on these panels at the moment. So they're just providing enough power to keep this battery topped up, not run it down too much. But if I'd started with a totally depleted battery and we're pulling 150 watts out of it. And then presumably these would be generating enough power up to their capacity to recharge the battery and to run that to computer. One day I'll try fully discharging or actually you don't want to go fully. You only want to go about halfway to avoid battery damage, but I'll try halfway discharging this battery, then running this and we can see a fee amperage bumps up. Definitely should. But any event they're supplying definitely enough power along with this battery to continue to mine indefinitely as long as the sun is out. And that part is important. Again, remember it was about $3 a day on average, I would be getting from the mining and if I was running all day. But in practice, I can really run for about as long as the sun is out, which is usually about seven hours per day here in California as a south-facing, I'm getting full sun as long as the sun is out. Then with the capacity of the battery, I can probably add another hour or so of mining to this. So that's definitely something to keep in mind. That means that my actual earnings per day or more like a dollar when this is running. Again, because there's no electrical class, that's just all profit minus the cost of the system. So let's look at the overall picture there. As I said, the bill of materials for the computer, It's about 250, the GPU is about 350. And so that's about $600 for the mining PC. Not counting the cost of the monitor, and I'm not counting its power consumption because I wouldn't normally use it. I just wanted to plug it in so you can see the readout of what I was mining. But normally, I believe the monitor out out of that and I would access the computer through a remote desktop. So I don't have to use the power from that monitor to account for that. In the overall picture here, that's $600 for the PC. Again, it's about a dollar per watt for these panels. So it's about $250 there. And then the battery and the inverter or the charge controller was about another $250. If you use something like a car battery, you could get that lower. Again, because this is a dual-purpose system for me. I wanted to deep cycle solar battery so that I can use it for my off-grid system in the event of power outages. But you could probably go lower if you used lower-end components for this part of it. Any event though about $500 here, but $600 for the computer, the total system cost is about $1100. Now remember that I'm generating about a dollar per day. That means it's a little less than three years of runtime. I would make back the total system cost, panels, battery, charge controller, computer GPU, the whole thing would be paid off. And beyond that, any mining I did for the lifetime of the system would be totally pure profit. That's not bad honestly, for something that's this small of a scale. It's probably not super practical for most people to build something like this. But I think it's a good proof of concept that even if this tiny, tiny scale, you're looking at a sub three year turnaround to replace or to pay off the entire system. Now a couple of factors could change that if crypto prices went down, then I would need to mine for longer, be able to recoup the cost of the system. However, a crypto prices go up, then my payback time would probably be a lot shorter. So it could be as little as a year if Bitcoin doubles again, some people think it could. I have no idea what crypto prices are gonna do in the future. So there's no way to predict that. I know when I first started experimenting with Bitcoin mining, Bitcoin was about $3 thousand and now it's around $50 thousand. So certainly that can happen, but of course it could go in the other direction. But that's one thing to factor in. I could mine all this and I could double in value or more. Or it could go down to the, my runtime to recoup my costs would increase. But I think the more important things demonstrates again that even at a very small scale, it's possible to mine using solar power and to do it in a way where the replacement costs for the system is not that long. If we added in, for example, another GPU to that computer, bumped up the number of panels to accommodate that. You could probably reduce that and get even more efficient operation out of that $250 computer because he wouldn't have to rebuild the whole computer to just drop it in another GPU. You could probably get bigger and more efficient panels. You can start to see how you could scale this up to something that would be, if not necessarily grid scale, something that could be a solar farm size. And one of the great things about using solar power for mining crypto, again, it eliminates an environmental cost. You're looking only at the environmental cost of manufacturing these panels and components not at beyond on carbon emissions of the electricity, because this is all just coming from the sun. That makes all of the Bitcoin that I'm creating their cost-free in terms of carbon emissions are much lower cost anyway than if I was using electrical power that was coming from coal or from another dirty power source. That's really great from an environmental perspective. And I think it demonstrates that you could use solar to do crypto mining and actually make that good use of renewable power and incentive to generate renewable power. But the other thing I think is great here is that this is a proof of concept of an off-grid system. So you can imagine this is something you could do in the middle of the desert where land is super cheap, just put up a ton of solar panels, feed them into some batteries, run them into a mining farm out in the middle of nowhere. And you wouldn't have to be tied to a grid. You wouldn't have to be negotiating contracts with utility to sell that power. You can generate it, use it to mine crypto right there, and immediately be making profit from that. And again, efficiencies of scale. If you scale this up massively, your economics will look even better. But again, I'm pretty happy that even in my tiny scale here, it's a sub three-year time period to pay back and break-even system cost. I think there's a lot of potential that you could pursue with something like this. And there's also some advantages just at the local scale. And that's the fact that I built the system to be an off-grid solar panel system in the event of an emergency or power outage. And by adding in the mining component and basically paying for that system. So I'm not just having this useless capacity. It's sitting around not doing anything on a day-to-day basis. I can use this to mine Bitcoin, hopefully ultimately make some profit. Then it's because it's a dual-purpose system. If there's a power outage, I'll just shut off my mining computer and I've already got great off-grid solar power that I could use for lighting or for running my work PC to continue working through an outage for any other purpose that I need. Yeah, I'm really excited about demoing crypto on solar power. You can see a lot of ways that this could be scaled up. But even for me at the small-scale, it's already a functioning, helpful system.