So - I’ve got a small mining farm in my house at the moment, two four module Avalons and a couple of BFL SCs, that I will be moving fully over to PPC once my KNC miners arrive to take over the BTC mining.
Obviously everyone knows that ROI and operating margin on mining is razor thin at the moment (My calculations are that a KNC Juniper delivered in mid-November would probably make around 3-4% mining BTC at current difficulty once you’ve factored in shipping/VAT as I’m in the UK) so as miners we need to focus on driving efficiency of the system as a whole.
In my non-crypto life I run a data centre business where we’ve gone through a similar curve but with efficient cooling/efficient heating and I think the same logic can largely be applied to mining.
Currently I see three issues with larger scale mining farms running in the house:
Supplying sufficient air volume at the right temperature
Dealing with and removing exhaust heat
Minimising noise
The exhaust heat is something I really want to look at going into winter, at the moment I have it venting up the chimney in my house as it was recirculating back into the miners before I had it vented away which was causing issues with controlling supply temperature.
I was wondering if anyone else has looked at using the heat off the miners to supplement or replace central heating in the house? My estimates are that I’ll have about 5KW of heat being kicked out the by the miners which is wasted at the moment.
If this heat could be pumped under the floor or distributed through the house it would reduce the need to run the central heating, bringing down the gas bill and making the mining more efficient than a straight electricity in/out calculation.
Anyway, just some thoughts and a bit of a ramble to see what people are thinking on this. I suspect these are problems that have already been covered for GPU/FGPA mining somewhere before on Bitcointalk, but I couldn’t find anything here so might be an interesting discussion!
Yup I ran 1 x 7970 as my heating last year… agreed I only live on a boat so my area to heat is a lot less but it kicked out enough heat to save me turning on a 1600W halogen heater.
Interesting you mention the noise… that is now my biggest problem, the BFL single is just noisey as hell!! am waiting a week more before I open it up and see if I can replace the fans in them for quieter ones, but waited long enough for the device last thing i want to do is break it before i have mined a whole BTC with it
some people I saw had tubing running through to different parts of the house… some very messy and ugly jobs, others seem to do a professional job, so it is possible, just depends how good you are at DIY, the size and shape of your house, how close your room with your miners in is compared to the rest of your rooms you want heated… people were insulating the tubing carrying hot air to not loose heat in unwated rooms as their miners were running in basement and bedroom on first floor.
hope this helps and yes there a LOT of people back in the GPU days only that would not turn on heating and utilise the miners heat to cut down on electricity bills…
When do you expect the KNC miner to arrive? How noisey are the Avalons compared to the BFL?
Glad to hear it’s already been done I’ll have to think about how I can duct the heat around the house weekend (I suspect I’ll be more of a DIY job than a professional job) and it’ll probably have to go under the floor but that’s not too much of a problem.
The noise isn’t too bad for me at the moment, I have the miners in a back room but I’m sure once the two KNC’s arrive it will be another matter… I’m also torn between ordering some more KNC with a potential delivery end of November or picking up some 60 GH/s Avalons for 6 BTC for delivery in a week. Both are pretty low ROI, but I’m leaning towards mining PPC more than BTC now (especially about half the PPC hash rate seems to have disappeared).
The Avalons are generally better than the BFL kit in my opinion; the case isn’t as nice but the build is a lot of more sensible. Fan noise is about the same, although the Avalons will ramp down very quiet when I open the back door to let some cool October air in while the BFLs continue with a very irritating whine (I can only think the fans have to run at a high speed to get the air moving through the small case).
I’ve seen a few posts with people running the SCs with the case off and the fans rotated around to the top, so they are pulling air up rather than pushing it and also getting around a metal sheet at the front that seems to just be there to block airflow - Seems to make quite a bit of difference as the fans don’t need to run 80% plus all the time.
KNC miners… I’m still hoping for before the 15th as promised, but from what I can see on the forums they are still working on day 2 orders from mid-June with my orders in mid-July (really should have paid more attention to the forums) either way provided they arrive before November should still give a nice ROI with about 550 GH/s.
On an entirely unrelated note - I’m playing with setting up a new PPC mining pool (taken me forever to get to grips with python) so I’ll post that up here when it’s live and I’ll dump my 800 GH/s onto it as a start. Thinking about seeing if I can make it a PPC/BTC with load balancing to redirect connections to a PPC or BTC pool depending on which is more profitable for the day.
Also want to play with a more user friendly block explorer and online wallet (much like Blockchain.info) but for PPC - Suspect that will take me a lot longer though! I think we need these services for PPC though as people will expect them to be available, and as easy to use, as they move from BTC.
Deliver the heat to warm up the room efficiently without letting the noise in seems to be a lot of work. You could also consider heat your hot water. There are already water cooling heat sink sold but I have no experience with them.
I’ll have to think about how I can duct the heat around the house weekend (I suspect I’ll be more of a DIY job than a professional job) and it’ll probably have to go under the floor but that’s not too much of a problem.