RE: My Solar Powered Bitcoin Mining Setup
AAh OK re Nicehash. Yeah I've had a play with it since your message. I was mucking around with an old Sony Vaio AIO PC with Radeon graphics - gets about 6 hashes a second. See Sony at https://zcash.flypool.org/miners/t1W1pBsaXuSoKddGuLbPkotprsz5awAsVPH
I have two full time miners at the moment
- one is an AMD 7870. It seems to get about 160 Hash/Sec on Zcoin.
- The other (card I actually bought) is an RX 460 which seems fairly slow, but has enough memory to mine Ethereum at 10 MH/Sec
I have a third card on the way from eBay - a Radeon HD 7850. Not sure what I'll get it to do yet.
I'm actually mining for heat and fun rather than making much money - I'm in a cold climate where we get down to freezing many nights over winter with tops 7-14 degrees c; so the waste heat is useful.
Re the Prospero X1 - would you be interested in selling one? I enjoyed having it as a novelty item up and running, and was sad when it got fried. I still have my old BFL 5GHz miner which also died.
PS - Great idea with the LiIon battery packs, glad they're all fused to 3A since they seem to be in parallel - there's a heap of potential current there if one shorted internally. I'd still be nervous having them near or in my house though since they can be unstable.
That sounds like your getting some really good speeds out of hardware that is now technically obsolete, I'm quite jealous. I do not blame you at all for mining for heat, last winter I had 2TH of sha256 asic's mining bitcoin just to raise the temperature in my cold house, it was very effective and the bitcoins I mined were also very helpful.
As for my battery packs, I was concerned by thermal runaway at first that's the reason I fused at 3 amp rather than 5 like most go for, but I've had the set up running for at least 3 months now, I'm yet to have a cell even start to get warm, trust me I'm testing regularly feeling for any heat. The day a cell shows me any kind of heat is the day the battery bank gets migrated to the shed, hopefully this day will never come though as the shed is a lot colder and may affect the chemistry of the cells. There is always something else to consider isn't there. :)
Sorry but I regret selling some of my other miners, id rather keep hold of what I kept a hold of now, just in case something happens and I can use them again.