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I did this in an apartment I lived in years ago, and do it now in my house. My computer room in the house is the lowest point in the house, so naturally, it te
by Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
I did this in an apartment I lived in years ago, and do it now in my house.
My computer room in the house is the lowest point in the house, so naturally, it tends to be a couple degrees cooler than the upstairs. This means that if I set the thermostat so that the computer room is comfortable, the bedroom is too warm. If I run the house circulation fan constantly, it's not an issue, but that consumes a decent amount of power.
If I'm going to consume that much power, I might as well mine crypto and make a few dollars. Mining for NiceHash, a service that lets people rent hashing power from miners, I'll average $100-400/month worth of Bitcoin on my RTX 3080, depending on current hashing prices, and how much of my time I spend gaming, since mining is effectively paused while gaming. The mining happens while I use my computer with no noticeable loss in performance, and it puts a few watts of energy into the room to heat it up a bit, evening it out with the rest of the house.
- lupire 6y agoWhat is the $ cost of the power?
- hnuser123456 6y ago$0.10/kWh @ 300W = $0.1/kWh * 0.3 kW * 720 hrs/mo = $21.60/month
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Sohcahtoa82 6y agoAbout $20-25/month. But it's not as if the cost of power is wasted. It's generating heat which I desire. If my GPU is consuming 300W, then that's 300W of heat that my heater doesn't have to generate.
- ericd 6y agoElectric resistive heating is the worst form of heating, though - heat pumps are something like 3-4x the heat per kwh used. So not totally wasted, but a much worse way to get heat into your house, if that's your goal.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Sohcahtoa82 6y agoFair enough, but my goal isn't to heat my whole house, just add a little bit to this one room. My whole house is heated with gas anyways, which AFAIK is more efficient than a heat pump, or at least, is more cost-effective.
- tialaramex 6y agoCost effective yes, efficient no.
- lotsofpulp 6y agoThe efficiency of a heat pump heating a home depends on the temperature outside of the home. I imagine a gas furnace is far more reliable and efficient during times when the outside temperatures are near or below freezing.
- ramraj07 6y agoI'm stull struggling to understand this concept can someone explain further
- Cu3PO42 6y agoThink of the way your fridge works, but your house is the outside of the fridge and the ground is the inside of the fridge. That is, the heat pump uses electrical energy to move heat from the ground (more specifically a deep hole that is drilled) into your house. It takes less than 1J of electric energy to move 1J of heat, therefore one can claim an efficiency >100%.
- salawat 6y agoYou're still maximizing power generation demand. That makes environmental issues worse even if it does make fiscal sense. You aren't "using power tgat would go to waste anyway". All power is JIT. It makes a difference.
- Sohcahtoa82 6y ago> You aren't "using power tgat would go to waste anyway". That's not what I said. I'm not "using power that would go to waste anyways", I'm generating heat that I would have needed anyways. In other words, I need to add a little bit of heat to this room. I can either run a small space heater on Low and consume about 300W and get nothing but 300W of heat, or I can mine crypto and consume around 300W, generate the heat I wanted, and earn about $200/month on top of it. In either case, I'm consuming 300W. I might as well make money in the process.
- srcmap 6y agoIs there any cost analyze for using solar panel power for Crypto? I am installing Solar from Tesla, wonder if I should just use the external power generated for crypto than to send them back to PG&E.
- sgc 6y agoSince you can make money mining crypto paying for power, and the power company pays you less than they charge, or course using it for crypto makes financial sense.
- qvrjuec 6y agoAren't you concerned with hardware degradation with your GPU running at 100% most of the time?
- polyterative 6y agojust limit power to maximum efficiency. My card mines eth 52MH/s@100% and 49MH/s@55% power
- coralreef 6y agoThe only thing that really degrades is fans. Running a GPU for ~3 years at 75-82c
- cwkoss 6y agoAt those rates, the GPU will likely pay for itself before it fails.
- Sohcahtoa82 6y agoNo. My GPU hovers at around 55-60 C while mining with the fans at 77%. Years ago, I was running an AMD R9 290. THAT ran HOT. Even with fans at 100%, it would hover around 95 C and constantly fight with thermal throttling. EDIT: And as someone else said, at these mining rates, it will pay for itself in 3-4 months.
- barkingcat 6y agoThis is usually a non-concern. It's likely that the GPU will become obsolete in the time that it fails due to being run at 100% of the time. The other question to ask, if you compile programs, write webpages, and edit photoshop images: are you concerned with hardware degradation with your CPU if you run at 100% all time time, for example, compiling chrome that takes 3+ hours, applying photoshop filters to an image to get a production quality output, or for rendering a 3 hour long animated movie? Do you worry about the GPU when you are retraining a GPT-2 or GPT-3 scale AI framework? These questions are kind of ... dependent on each person. Presumably you buy a computer in order to perform computations. That is its purpose. Just because it's crunching bitcoins/cryptocurrencies doesn't degrade it any more than ... say running an AI framework on a GPU for 3 months continuously to generate a self driving model ...
- bolasanibk 6y agohttps://www.nicehash.com/ https://www.nicehash.com/ got the HN hug of death!
- gkfasdfasdf 6y agoI would really like to try NiceHash, but the fact that I have to add it as an exception to Windows Defender antivirus, and that one of the founders has previously been convicted [0] and served time for writing botnet malware, really gives me pause. [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NiceHash https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NiceHash
- kiddico 6y agoI'd bet that writing botnet software was pretty good training for writing distributed processing software like NiceHash, though I think your concern is still valid.
- gkfasdfasdf 6y agoYes absolutely, I'm sure writing a botnet is not trivial so I respect the technical ability!
- xienze 6y agoNiceHash is on GitHub and you could always build it yourself if you’re worried. I think the reason it flags as malware is because virus scanners flag anything crypto mining-related as malware by default.
- Sohcahtoa82 6y agoWindows Defender flags all crypto miners. It is not unique to NiceHash. You don't have to add an exception for the whole NiceHash directory for it to work, but it makes it easier. NiceHash updates the miners occasionally, and if you don't add an exception for the whole directory, then every time a miner gets an update, it's disabled by Windows Defender until you manually allow it.
- gkfasdfasdf 6y agoSeems like there should be a way to have NiceHash sign their binaries or otherwise vet with Microsoft so Defender can automatically allow it. Setting an exception seems like it makes it a target for other malware to hijack or piggyback on.
- alasdair_ 6y agoI have a 3090 and cheap-ish electricity. Is it actually worth doing GPU mining again? I thought that died out long ago.
- abiogenesis 6y agoNvidia even offers dedicated mining GPUs: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/ In related news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26192201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26192201
- bseidensticker 6y agoMining bitcoin no, but other cryptocurrencies yes. Sounds like with the run crypto is on right now, you can make some pretty decent money.
- bigiain 6y agoNot for Bitcoin. Other crypto currencies can work better though. https://www.nicehash.com/profitability-calculator/nvidia-rtx-3090 https://www.nicehash.com/profitability-calculator/nvidia-rtx... Claims you can earn ~$17 per day if you can get electricity to 10c/kWhr running a single RTX3090 but that's all mining Etherium (DaggerHashimoto) not BTC.
- deepakhj 6y agoThe 3090 runs super hot. You probably want to look into a heatsink/fan for your vram. https://www.reddit.com/r/EtherMining/comments/loxagu/improved_vram_cooling_on_124mhs_3090/ https://www.reddit.com/r/EtherMining/comments/loxagu/improve... https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/optimize-your-gpu-for-ethereum-mining https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/optimize-your-gpu-for-et...
- tablespoon 6y ago> If I'm going to consume that much power, I might as well mine crypto and make a few dollars. Mining for NiceHash, a service that lets people rent hashing power from miners What's the benefit of this vs. just participating in a mining pool?
- mschout 6y agoI'm not sure I get it either. Maybe just simplicity / path of least resistance in that NiceHash provides a quick way to get up and running potentially without needing to install mining software and decide on a pool to participate in etc?
- bseidensticker 6y agoYou're not actually mining Bitcoin with your GPU. I think nicehash automatically picks the most profitable coin to mine at the time and just pays out in bitcoin. It hasn't been profitable to mine bitcoin with a GPU since 2013 or 2014.
- randomhodler84 6y agoNo, nicehash pays you in bitcoin for the specific hash rate that you sell. It’s a hash marketplace denoted in BTC. Nicehash doesn’t mine, it’s customers do.
- bseidensticker 6y agoSure, but nobody is buying time on your GPU to mine Bitcoin. They are buying time on your GPU to mine some other cryptocurrency. One that uses a different hashing algorithm.
- Sohcahtoa82 6y agoI'm well aware of all this.
- bseidensticker 6y agoCool