I think Mike is well on through that project already!! :D

Isn't Mike (Conan) working on that? :rolleyes:

Edit: Great minds think alike!

Come on, we're nearly there..... Steam engine!

Maybe an old donkey engine, Lister 4bhp uses about a litre an hour

What would it take to spin an 100ah altenator fast enough to power what you're needing?

I think Mike might be doing that :p

If i ever get my digger back down there :o

4bhp is about 3KW. Given an alternator efficiency of 50% it could probably power one 1.5KW miner at full load. Gear the pulley sizes so the alternator is spinning at ~4000rpm at whatever speed the engine is making its max output.

Unfortunately, one miner will only make ~35p an hour, so a litre an hour of fuel doesn't add up unless you can get a huge amount of chip fat for free! You need scale for this stuff to work!

Not sure I'd fancy feeding a steam engine 24 hours a day ;)

Only £2 earned, It does suck a bit. :-(

My electricity costs are £0.1243 day rate and £0.0729 night rate. Running 100W 24/7 it costs a bit under £8 per month.

I did notice that nicehash calculator is a bit optimistic. It only takes in to account GPU power consumption not the whole system, electricity price is 0.1USD by default and GPU prices are from USA and quite cheap. So they might choose $250 for a card, electricity price $0.1 and power consumption 160W. Reality is card price is £300, electricity £0.14 and power consumption with 1 card for older motherboard with lower efficiency PSU can be up to 400W

1 card is not going to do much and if you put 4 or 6 cards on one motherboard you are spreading the cost and power consumption of MB, CPU, RAM, HDD/SSD.

For example my old MB/CPU with 1 card would consume 100W in idle, new only 50 W with the same card and PSU. So on the old system running one card extra electricity costs on top of what card consumes would be £8 per month per card. If I run 4 cards on the new MB it's just £1 per card per month.

Regarding PSU's it's worth to remember that they are most efficient around 50% load and the quoted efficiency is usually based on this and efficiency can vary a lot between PSU's as well. If you use near 0% or 100% efficiency will be worse. For example I was running 2x1080Tis on 650W 80% PSU and it was consuming 700W from wall. Switching to 850W 91% PSU reduced it to 500W. That's 200W or £16 per month saving at a cost of £100 so will pay back in 6-7 months and there is some value in the old PSU which I can sell or reuse on lower lower load. Over 4 years I am £300 better off.

ROI time is important but I am looking at overall costs for expected lifetime. 4x RX480/580 cards will cost about £1200 an the rest of system £300-400. I expect to use cards for 4 years and to be able to sell them for £200 at the end. I think the rest of system should be usable after that with new cards. So the hardware cost is about £30 per month and electricity cost is about £50 for 600W and it is earning is varying £140-180 at current rates. In the winter it will also provide part of the heating for the house so little bit of saving there as well.

2x 1080Ti cost me £1300 +£100 for PSU, I already had the rest. I expect them to be £200 after 4 years, so about £25 per month hardware costs, £40 electricity at 500W and they are earning £90-£120 at current rates. I could cut costs about £4 per month switching to new MB/CPU/RAM but it will cost about the same to buy as what I will save over 4 years so no point really. I am planning to move them over to my HP Microserver anyway just need to build a frame the frame to hold them and sort out the wiring.

Useful data thank you. I was trying it with one card and extrapolating, but I hadn't considered efficiency of the PSU. I have a 450W unit consuming 350W at the wall with a single 980ti so perhaps I could reduce that a bit with a larger unit. I do have a few 1KW Proliant PSUs so I might hook those up and see what they do. I can run the 960 then as well - the 450W PSU can't run both at once. I could get another 980 too. My Proliant DL380 consumes 70W at idle which I can probably reduce with a lower power CPU.

I will persevere before I throw in the towel with the GPUs :)

70w at idle is not that bad, which generation DL380 is it? While there are some nice low power Xeons out there, most of them are fairly pricey and I don't know how much saving just changing CPU would provide and how much is motherboard, RAM and other stuff like fans consuming. I would expect similar ECC and buffered RAM will need more power than desktop RAM and also DDR4 running at 1.2V will be better than DDR3 at 1.5V or DDR2 at 1.8V. Not sure how efficient server PSU's are, I guess later models should be high efficiency but probably not the older ones. When I had old Dell PowerEdge 2950 with 2x quad core Xeon X5450 CPU's, 6xHDD's and 2x750W PSU's it was consuming over 300W at idle. CPU fans alone were rated for 1.68A at 12V so 4 of them going at full chat would be 80W without even taking in account losses in PSU. It was going like a leaf blower in hot summer days.

This here is a new miner, no data on nicehash yet and very expensive http://www.innosilicon.com/html/news/18.html $10k from manufacturer, minimum order quantity 5 and currently not available. But can be preorder from here https://asicminermarket.com/product/...-miner-30-2gh/ for $13k for delivery in October. Manually entering data in calculator shows that it should pay back in first month



http://forum.a8parts.co.uk/attachmen...1&d=1501695272

Wow! :eek:

The Dash mining difficulty is going to shoot up when those things start coming online!

Very tempting but at $10K-$13K each that a lot of eggs in one basket.

It is a lot but I cannot ignore potential returns. it's not going to be what it could potentially be at the moment but still should be pretty decent. $13k + VAT would be a bit too much for me to risk. But I would be interested to share the cost, risk and returns if somebody else joined in. 50/50 is probably a bit out of my comfort zone as well but if there was possibility to split it 3 ways I would probably go for it.