Seasonal Mining?

[MeDownYou]

So, I have electric heat and was wondering if it would cost more to heat (per watt) by mining versus space heater basically. 

 

Also, My electric rate is $0.08 this sounds like a cheap kwh price, what do some of you who mine pay?

 

I sorta just wanna mine and hold onto the coins, if it would allow me heat about as efficiently. Otherwise i looked into selling my card since they are pretty expensive right now (r9 280 btw)

[TheGlenlivet]

It's funny, I saw this last winter too and the discussion was all about theoretical efficiency and space heater wattage hehe.

You will heat your house (a little) by mining, but a heater was designed to heat, not mine and is better for it.

I have solar panels so my power rates a skewed a bit, but I am having success with Zcash lately and I just did the math and realized I have paid for all of my gear with the mining and speculating I did in 2017.

That sounds good, but honestly, bitcoin and eth going crazy have made it pretty easy...

[Daniel644]

heat is heat, most of the power used by the card ends up as heat, that said a single GPU isn't going to do much heating, remember the average electric space heater that only does 1 room is between 750-1,500 watts i'd be surprised if that card even came close to pulling 300 watts, I've got 2 1080ti's dialed in to the point the ENTIRE system draw from the wall is 400 watts from the wall and the ONLY warm area is the foot or so behind the tower, it is NOT heating the room, you won't heat a room with a setup that small, you'll need a like 5-6 GPU rig to provide any level of heating.

 

Here are my rates for electric, it's a sliding scale depending on how much you use, without Mining and since we have gas heat we only ever reached about 600 KwH's for the whole month, mining is going to change that number a LOT.

 

 

just start mining and see how much you can earn, if you are making a profit over your power costs DO IT, you WILL likely earn more in mining then you would selling a card even at the current crazy prices. the coin values are so high I just ordered a pair of the Galactic Empire Titan Xp's (actually CHEAPER then ANY 1080's on Newegg) because with my pair of 1080ti's combined with the 2 titan Xp's I'll earn enough to pay off the titans in 2 months flat and the 3rd month (plus the mining i've done since Christmas) will pay for the rest of the Tower and the 1080ti's (provided Bitcoin doesn't crash completely).

[MeDownYou]

4 minutes ago, Daniel644 said:

heat is heat, most of the power used by the card ends up as heat, that said a single GPU isn't going to do much heating, remember the average electric space heater that only does 1 room is between 750-1,500 watts i'd be surprised if that card even came close to pulling 300 watts, I've got 2 1080ti's dialed in to the point the ENTIRE system draw from the wall is 400 watts from the wall and the ONLY warm area is the foot or so behind the tower, it is NOT heating the room, you won't heat a room with a setup that small, you'll need a like 5-6 GPU rig to provide any level of heating.

 

Here are my rates for electric, it's a sliding scale depending on how much you use, without Mining and since we have gas heat we only ever reached about 600 KwH's for the whole month, mining is going to change that number a LOT.

 

I've got all electric heat, here's the rates i have, also a sliding scale. I'm trying to debate either selling this gpu and getting a new one and still mining, or keeping this one mining on it, and getting a new one and running them both. So, depends if i can get something out of keeping this 280 or should i just sell it basically

[Daniel644]

Just now, MeDownYou said:

I've got all electric heat, here's the rates i have, also a sliding scale. I'm trying to debate either selling this gpu and getting a new one and still mining, or keeping this one mining on it, and getting a new one and running them both. So, depends if i can get something out of keeping this 280 or should i just sell it basically

run both, if the GPU makes a profit you are better off mining then selling, think about it, even at a profit of a DOLLAR a day you would earn more from that then selling, I stupidly sold off the 1070 I bought as part of combo with the HTC vive, that GPU could have paid for itself in the 2-3 months since i got the Vive.

[MeDownYou]

6 minutes ago, Daniel644 said:

run both, if the GPU makes a profit you are better off mining then selling, think about it, even at a profit of a DOLLAR a day you would earn more from that then selling, I stupidly sold off the 1070 I bought as part of combo with the HTC vive, that GPU could have paid for itself in the 2-3 months since i got the Vive.

makes sense, i tested the card overnight and got 20.6 MH doing ETH which i'm not sure if that's good or not

[Wh0_Am_1]

Think of it this way if you turn on the heater you are paying for heat, if you mine your are being paid to heat, so yes, if you have enough equipment it is significantly cheaper to mine in the winter, (you can even earn some money.) than to pay for an installed heater to do it. (P.S. your are going to want to have enough modern cards to be able to eat at least 500 Watts. due to a recent update Nvidia's cards are almost as good as AMD's for mining as long as you aren't using a 1080, or 1080Ti, which have GDDR5X which is horrid for mining anything but ZCash, which it works just fine for. If are in the market for new GPUs try the 1070Ti, it uses the same GPU as the 1080 with some locked CUDA cores. therefore it is almost as powerful as the 1080, but the defining factor is that it also had GDDR5 which is great for cryptocurrency mining.

[Daniel644]

53 minutes ago, Wh0_Am_1 said:

Think of it this way if you turn on the heater you are paying for heat, if you mine your are being paid to heat, so yes, if you have enough equipment it is significantly cheaper to mine in the winter, (you can even earn some money.) than to pay for an installed heater to do it. (P.S. your are going to want to have enough modern cards to be able to eat at least 500 Watts. due to a recent update Nvidia's cards are almost as good as AMD's for mining as long as you aren't using a 1080, or 1080Ti, which have GDDR5X which is horrid for mining anything but ZCash, which it works just fine for. If are in the market for new GPUs try the 1070Ti, it uses the same GPU as the 1080 with some locked CUDA cores. therefore it is almost as powerful as the 1080, but the defining factor is that it also had GDDR5 which is great for cryptocurrency mining.

hey, i'm making 9-11 dollars a day (before electricity costs of about a dollar per day for everything including my old gaming laptop, which earns enough to pay the electric costs for everything used for mining) per 1080ti mining Nist5 (drawing about 170-175 watts per card), that is in no way "horrid", it's better then any other single GPU out there from what i've seen and given that I bought my 1080ti way back before the mining craze extended to engulf them and actually got it well below retail to start with (paid $583 USD after all the rebates and cashbacks) it is an EXCELLENT earning card. You need to remember GPU pricing has gone completely INSANE, 1070's are selling for $940 on Newegg and 1080's are more expensive then Titan Xp's directly from Nvidia, due to this insane price shift it is actually a better overall value to just get the Titan Xp's, they'll pay themselves off in 4 months (less if coin values increase).

 

1 hour ago, MeDownYou said:

makes sense, i tested the card overnight and got 20.6 MH doing ETH which i'm not sure if that's good or not

it depends do you know how many watts the PC is pulling from the wall? have you tuned the power settings of the card to be lower (I for example reduced my Power Limit on my 1080 ti's down to 72%) have you done any tweaking to the card settings at all, when mining you want a completely different profile then what you use for a gaming overclock, Ether was no good for me personally earnings wise but my settings where to push to insane Mem clock OC of like +800 and a mild core OC, Ether responds more to Memory speed then core clock, you may be able to get a higher hashrate for example for me bumping the mem clock improved my hashrate by 8-10% (a combined 76Mh/s for 2 1080ti's), if we assume a 400 watts overclock draw level of power pulled from the wall (which honestly is probably pretty high of an estimate) and a 2% pool fee for something like Nanopool you would still be profiting over 2 dollars a day after factoring in power costs, you're about 3 dollars a day without factoring in power costs based on that hashrate.

[Wh0_Am_1]

17 minutes ago, Daniel644 said:

hey, i'm making 9-11 dollars a day (before electricity costs of about a dollar per day for everything including my old gaming laptop, which earns enough to pay the electric costs for everything used for mining) per 1080ti mining Nist5 (drawing about 170-175 watts per card), that is in no way "horrid", it's better then any other single GPU out there from what i've seen and given that I bought my 1080ti way back before the mining craze extended to engulf them and actually got it well below retail to start with (paid $583 USD after all the rebates and cashbacks) it is an EXCELLENT earning card. You need to remember GPU pricing has gone completely INSANE, 1070's are selling for $940 on Newegg and 1080's are more expensive then Titan Xp's directly from Nvidia, due to this insane price shift it is actually a better overall value to just get the Titan Xp's, they'll pay themselves off in 4 months (less if coin values increase).

 

it depends do you know how many watts the PC is pulling from the wall? have you tuned the power settings of the card to be lower (I for example reduced my Power Limit on my 1080 ti's down to 72%) have you done any tweaking to the card settings at all, when mining you want a completely different profile then what you use for a gaming overclock, Ether was no good for me personally earnings wise but my settings where to push to insane Mem clock OC of like +800 and a mild core OC, Ether responds more to Memory speed then core clock, you may be able to get a higher hashrate for example for me bumping the mem clock improved my hashrate by 8-10% (a combined 76Mh/s for 2 1080ti's), if we assume a 400 watts overclock draw level of power pulled from the wall (which honestly is probably pretty high of an estimate) and a 2% pool fee for something like Nanopool you would still be profiting over 2 dollars a day after factoring in power costs, you're about 3 dollars a day without factoring in power costs based on that hashrate.

Sorry man, I guess that I may have used biased sources, that recommended the 1070Ti. I am personally have never seen an actual 1080 or 1080ti, way out of my price range, I am stuck mining with a 1050 earning $2 a day on nicehash.

[Daniel644]

1 minute ago, Wh0_Am_1 said:

Sorry man, I guess that I may have used biased sources, that recommended the 1070Ti. I am personally have never seen an actual 1080 or 1080ti, way out of my price range, I am stuck mining with a 1050 earning $2 a day on nicehash.

what you said WAS true at one point in time, when GPU's where at normal pricing, like 400 bucks for a 1070 and 700 for a 1080ti because the 1070 costs 57% of what a 1080ti costed but properly configured would do stock 1080ti hashrates (properly set 1070 for example could do 32 MH/s in Ether where a 1080ti did 32 out of the box and could be tweaked to about 38 MH/s) when this was the case you could buy 2 1070's for 14% more then a 1080ti and have 64MH/s which would be a 68% higher hashrate so the performance per dollar was stupid more efficient but with GPU pricing being all crazy and 1070's going for $940 the hashrate relative to card costs is basically equal between a 1070 and a Star Wars Titan Xp (which will hold it's resale value much better since it's an officially licensed collectible) so when the mining craze ends and you sell your cards you'll get a better return on the Star Wars card, your information wasn't wrong, it was simply out of date.

 

also, uninstall Nicehash Miner 2 and download the legacy miner that says it's for AMD cards, then go in and uncheck EVERY algo from the benchmarks except the Nist5 algo, run that benchmark and mine just that coin, you will see a noticeable improvement in earnings, like 10% or more compared to the v2 miner.

[Wh0_Am_1]

4 minutes ago, Daniel644 said:

what you said WAS true at one point in time, when GPU's where at normal pricing, like 400 bucks for a 1070 and 700 for a 1080ti because the 1070 costs 57% of what a 1080ti costed but properly configured would do stock 1080ti hashrates (properly set 1070 for example could do 32 MH/s in Ether where a 1080ti did 32 out of the box and could be tweaked to about 38 MH/s) when this was the case you could buy 2 1070's for 14% more then a 1080ti and have 64MH/s which would be a 68% higher hashrate so the performance per dollar was stupid more efficient but with GPU pricing being all crazy and 1070's going for $940 the hashrate relative to card costs is basically equal between a 1070 and a Star Wars Titan Xp (which will hold it's resale value much better since it's an officially licensed collectible) so when the mining craze ends and you sell your cards you'll get a better return on the Star Wars card, your information wasn't wrong, it was simply out of date.

 

also, uninstall Nicehash Miner 2 and download the legacy miner that says it's for AMD cards, then go in and uncheck EVERY algo from the benchmarks except the Nist5 algo, run that benchmark and mine just that coin, you will see a noticeable improvement in earnings, like 10% or more compared to the v2 miner.

Ok! Thanks! I never would have thought of that! 

[Daniel644]

1 minute ago, Wh0_Am_1 said:

Ok! Thanks! I never would have thought of that! 

in the grand scheme the profit switching really just loses you a lot because it changes to often causing downtime and not always to the best coin and the 2 miner doesn't support Nist5 which is a shame because it's the highest earning coin on Nicehash right now, when you run the benchmarks you will see a profitability per day for each coin you benchmark, Nist5 is the highest one, my 860m in my 3+ year old gaming laptop is bouncing upwards of a .0001 BTC per day by itself

[Wh0_Am_1]

3 minutes ago, Daniel644 said:

in the grand scheme the profit switching really just loses you a lot because it changes to often causing downtime and not always to the best coin and the 2 miner doesn't support Nist5 which is a shame because it's the highest earning coin on Nicehash right now, when you run the benchmarks you will see a profitability per day for each coin you benchmark, Nist5 is the highest one, my 860m in my 3+ year old gaming laptop is bouncing upwards of a .0001 BTC per day by itself

Nice. Well I GTG, thx for the advice!