Got Solar? How Much & What For? \ stacker news ~bitcoin

1786 sats \ 10 comments \ @OT 17 Jun bitcoin

We’re looking at getting solar panels installed on our house. There’s still a government subsidy of about 20-30% so we think it might be worth taking advantage of now as it diminishes every year. The plan being sold to us seems enough for everyday living. They don’t like too much excess electricity going back into the grid and from 2025 they are planning on putting a tax on houses sending too much back during the day (they obviously don’t know about mining bitcoin yet!).

So, I’m thinking about getting many more solar panels than we actually need now and setting up some mining gear to use it. At the moment I just have a nerdaxe for solo mining, but if we have zero costs of electricity during the day I’d like to get into something more serious.

There’s also an idea I recently read about GPU’s with all the “AI” hype going on at the moment, to rent them out for sats or to use as my personal AI assistant.

Batteries are still expensive so it’s not going to be the ideal self sovereign setup. We’re in the suburbs, not the countryside so it makes sense that if the sun doesn’t shine for a week we’ll still be connected to the grid.

Anyway, interested in hearing from anyone mining at home primarily on solar. Should we get a lot more than we need or just enough for everyday living? Anyone else planning on up scaling their energy consumption over the coming years?

Thanks

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101 sats \ 2 replies \ @TheBTCManual 17 Jun

Oef this is a tough one, so many variables, I went down this rabbit hole a few months ago, when we had 6-8 hour a day black outs and still decided to not pull the trigger, but it doesn't mean it will all apply to you, but here's my experience

The government here also promoted a 15% saving on your taxes for 2 years if you adopted solar for homeowners
However prices for the panels and batteries inflated due to the high demand
As demand rose, lower quality panels and batteries were imported, that also retailed at way higher prices, which a lot of people are finding out now they got shafted as their battery life deteriorated a lot faster than they thought
You were also going to pay a premium on home insurance (solar panel theft is the fastest growing sector in the country)
You can buy special brackets for your panels making them harder to steal but they come at an additional cost

While businesses may be able to work around the cost, households are now finding they paying a lot more vs grid power

https://mybroadband.co.za/news/investing/541129-solar-warning-for-south-africa.html

When I ran the math, based on replacing batteries every decade and the known variables, i'd always pay 3-4x the grids power,

Capex on adding 2 ASICS can bring that down and ofcourse according to my calcs could get me down to 6 years to break even in a best case scenario, hoping nothing breaks down during that time

1 sat \ 1 reply \ @OT OP 17 Jun

Thanks for sharing

Right, that’s the other thing, the cost of the ASICS and where to put them (submerged or some kind of sound proof box). Still probably better off just buying bitcoin.

101 sats \ 0 replies \ @TheBTCManual 17 Jun

Lol yes, sadly that's the realisation I came to, buy some UPS's to cover my electronics and so I can continue to work, and then buying Bitcoin straight up

Maybe it changes if things get really bad here in South Africa, or solar becomes alot cheaper with more scale and innovation.

101 sats \ 2 replies \ @030e0dca83 17 Jun

Batteries becomes cheaper too. Have you considered to aquire it in China?

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @OT OP 17 Jun

The quote we got with batteries was about 4x higher than just installing solar panels.

They’re are definitely cheaper in China, but it’s difficult trusting the quality. I’m ok to wait longer for better batteries at a lower cost.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @030e0dca83 17 Jun

In this case you should investigate Chinese battery elements and customes taxes in your country cause yesterday I discovered Poland doesn't allow parcels more than 150 euro if you get it through "Meest China post"

101 sats \ 0 replies \ @bartoli 18 Jun

I started with one 400W panel to try this year. It's those panels that you can simply put in your garden, plug in a regular outlet, and it will inject directly in the house. Nothing goes back to the network as long as it is consumed locally first, so no need to have a specific contract to sell it, you will just lose the occasional extra watts that are reinjected in the network bt not paid. You just declare them to the enrgy distribution company. Those panels will however only work if you are connected to the network (for example, to avoid injecting power on the network while there is an outage and risking the life of the people working on the power lines)

That panel should produce about 500kWh per year where i live, for an estimated 100$/year at my current energy prices, and should be ROId in 7 years.

On a few sunny days where nothing is running at home, there will occasionally be more production than the house consume at noon.

For the next panel, there should be more energy that is not consumed at peak sun time of sunny days, so i considered buying the model with an integrated battery. But After calculations for my cases, the 'not wasted' extra enrgy would cost more than the current energy prices on the network. So either i'll buy a second one without battery and mine something with the extra power, or i'll just keep only one and just buy 1% of bitcoin with the money, i have not yet decided.

One small detail to know with those panels. They give you a 'smart plug' that will measure how much is produced, and connect to your wifi so yu can see the data in an app. That thing consumes at least 5W consistently. My single pannel should produce on a yearly average 50W. So by simply using it on a single panel setup, you are already losing 10% of your production! I keep it because it is a cheap way to know from wherever i am if there is still power and internet at home, for me this is an important information because i run things at home. But some people might have an interest to not use it and trade the loss of production monitoring for more 'usefull' power production

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nyan 17 Jun

Don’t know what’s your feed in tariff, but under most circumstances you can amortize a miner in 1-2 years with a solar panel

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @NaOD 17 Jun outlawed

stackers have outlawed this. turn on wild west mode in your /settings to see outlawed content.