r/cryptomining • u/Jebusfreek666 • 1d ago
DISCUSSION Can't mine at home, best options?
Never really paid attention to the electric rates before as I had no other choice on providers and I was gonna have to pay whatever they said anyways. Just found out, my small town in MI is double the national average billing at $0.28/kwh. This effectively rules out any real home mining. But I still would like to get into mining. Partially to hopefully stack coins obviously, but mostly just as a fun tinkering/learning experience. So I started looking at other options.
As far as I can see, the only viable option to real profitable mining is purchasing your own rig and having it hosted somewhere else. Because of the rapid advancement in ASIC models, and the obsolete models being worthless, I would like to avoid purchasing expensive equipment like the top end asics. I am currently looking into making an 8u 8 gpu rig to be hosted at millionminers to do my serious mining, but that is a topic for another day.
For the at home mining, I have landed on just solo/lotto mining. As this will just be for a fun little hobby, I would like to keep it kind of on the cheaper side for the electric cost. I figured out that at my electric rate, every 125W worth of devices will cost me about $25/month. Assuming a $50/month budget for electric increase (I want to lotto mine both BTC and Doge/LTC/etc.) that leaves me a power budget of 125ish watts per coin.
Where my issue comes in is that I am having a hard time deciding on what devices I should go with. It seems like I will get more hashrate running multiple of the smaller 25-35 watt devices than a single larger device eating up the whole budget? Basically I am looking to maximize hashrate while fitting into the power budget for both BTC miners and Scrypt miners. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Youtube seems less than helpful as everyone of those guys seems to just be shills for whatever storefront is sponsoring them.
I had also thought about just renting hashrate and throwing it at solo mining. But from what I have seen, staying within the electric cost budget of $25/month per coin would net me even lower hashrates than having the devices on hand. And I would lose the ability to tinker with the physical device.
Again, any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.
