Out of pure curiosity for a new thing to tinker with, I decided to buy a small scale crypto miner to run at home. I’m not massively interested in crypto, but actually more interested in solar as a power source. That sounds like a weird starting point but, my home has lots of tree shade so I have no idea how much actual power I will be able to generate. I feel like if I ask a solar installer, they are going to oversell it, so I’d rather experiment myself to get some data to work from.

In the UK at the moment, I can’t plug solar into my home without having an electrician doing it and certifying it, which means the overhead costs are too high without committing to a full solar setup, so I want to run a setup off my power grid. For that I decided I needed a load, and the two things felt like they overlapped somehow.

So I bought one from Mineshop.eu, specifically the NerdQAxe++ Rev 6.1. The one I bought came pre-overclocked which means it’s running at around 6.1TH/s. It also comes with a specific power brick and a note stating to not use another 12V supply, only the provided one. I assume it relates to voltage stability for the overclocking.

Getting it set up to connect to Wifi was slightly faffy as it uses a captive wifi portal to show the config UI, so if you’re using an iPhone, you can’t just switch apps to get the wifi password. That’s a slight annoyance, and I guess normally people have their wifi password to hand!

That said, once I’d worked out which solo mining pool I was going to use, then created a wallet address for it to use as the destination for funds, the rest of the setup was easy via the portal it serves on your network.

I decided to use solohash.co.uk and to mine in a solo pool for Bitcoin Cash (BCH). The reason for that currency rather than Bitcoin (BTC) is the complexity of the blocks and the likelihood of being able to find them given the low hash rate of this device.

In terms of energy costs based on my tariff, electricity is 22.3 pence per kWh, and the unit pulls 103W continuously, so 2.472kWh per day, meaning running costs of 55p per day, or £16.77 per calendar month (12th of 365 days). So running it for pure profit makes no sense as pool profit will get me £4.75 per month.

Running it on a lottery basis gives me a 0.015% chance of finding a block, giving me 3.07BCH, which on today’s rates is £1,010. As I can’t make it profitable as a background income in a shared pool, I prefer the idea that I could cover a few years running cost in just finding a single block.

It’s pretty loud, I assume due to the overclocking and the manual fan speed set to manage the extra temps created. At the moment it’s on my desk, but I’m going to have to move it elsewhere at some point.

The next question I’m asking myself is, what is the cheapest off grid solar setup I could create to negate as much of the running costs as I can. If it’s costing circa £200 every year, if I can get a solar setup for £300, it pays back in 1.5 years and then is free to run beyond that. That said, from what I’ve read the next “halving” of BCH is in around 2 years. That means that the yield of block mining at 6.1TH/s will be halved, so the chance of finding a block halves. So getting the cost down does also mean that it's not such a problem if finding a block takes a long time.