I have a Antminer Bitcoin miner that I am controlling from Home Assistant where I start, stop and adjust the power by automations depending on electricity hour price, solar power production and heating need. I am using the GitHub - Schnitzel/hass-miner: Controll your Bitcoin miner from Home Assistant integration which has been working great so far.
I was wondering if anyone else in the HA community is doing the same and what experiences you have from this?
One thing that I have not been successful to find information on google is how changing power and turning off/on is effecting mining rewards. As every change will cause delays to get mining up to speed again, I try to limit my changes to a few a day, not more. But I do not have exact numbers on this. It would be fun to know if it makes sense to adjust speed more frequently to adapt better to solar production and heating need
@BJ-Axel , I have set my miner to have minimum consumption of 1800W which I use for economy, more efficient mode. Max power I set to 3000W when I have excess solar power or grid electricity is very cheap or even negative price which occur quite often where I live lately. The automation turns off the miner when the grip electricity price is higher and the automation is setup to use most possible from my solar panel production.
Last year my solar panels exported power to the grid when the price was negative several times, it was then I figured out that a bitcoin miner us useful to consume at least part of the solar production during those periods.
My miner have 3 hash boards. I see there are discussions regarding to make it possible to turn off individual hash boards from HA. Then one can get seamless power consumption to very low values which could be useful to adapt to solar production and needed heating.
I’m running an off-grid system. 15 kW solar, Victron and Fronius inverters and I’m struggling to keep up with the generation which means that I’m spilling a lot of solar.
I’ve just started to research crypto mining as a way to utilise the max capacity of the system instead of spilling it… In this case power is free but supply varies.
What kind of rig are you running and would you mind sharing your learnings around profitability and ROI?
I am running Braiins OS on my S19 and my brother has a S19 Pro+ hydro. If running Braiins OS, then can regulate power limit and with the HA integration, can regulate from there as well. I am regulating based on electricity price and solar panel production. I have defined three miner running conditions:
Off: When expensive electricity prices
On_low: When more affordable prices but not cheap, thus running on lower power when the miner is more efficient.
On_high: When cheap electricity prices and solar excess power, then full power possible.
I added a Nicehash integration so I can monitor how much the miner is earning. Then I filter the value as it is fluctuating and made a template sensor to see the earnings in EUR/h as I then can compare to how much EUR/h the miner is consuming.
I did not do much ROI calculations. But I know that I need the heat from the miner for many months and I have many hours through the summer with “free” electricity. So roughly estimated, ROI 1-2years if I make a guess. I do not like to pay to export excess solar power(which is happening quite frequently lately), therefore converting it to BTC appeals to me
