Wednesday, March 26, 2014

My home is turning into something like a data center

Following my previous post on Bitcoin......

So LiteBanc (our project name) has been steadily making its way to full power...steadily.... One thing about this project is that if you aren't familiar with computers and have to learn from the basics, its such a pain to figure out why certain things just won't work. I can't recall how many times my partner and I broke night just to figure out the problem and ended up not being able to figure itout until one morning, it just suddenly works. I mean suddenly. Like, you just turn on the power and viola! it just worked! Mind you, my partner is very familiar with computers.

So after all the painful hours of getting these rigs to start, we've steadily progressed to building more and more, to the point where these rigs are taking over the house. (pictured here)

7 MSI R9 280X and 4 Asus R9 290X in the office room
If you were one of those serious PC gamers, you would drool over the amount of GPU power I am capable of running.

15 quality GPU's (9 on standby at the moment) are waiting to hash out as many Alt coins as it possibly can. Of course, the current rates are a little under, but, we are micro-managing these coins so we are hopeful to obtain a better result than just mining coins.

One positive from all this computing power is that I am currently quite cozy in the room as one of the rig is turned on.

If all three were on, it would be a free sauna. The setback, if all of them were running, is that my electricity bill will be off the charts and I will be waiting for the utility company to notify the local police about a suspicious spike in electricity, hence leading to them ringing my doorbell and explaining to them that, no, I am not running a drug scheme, but merely computers making me money.

These rigs are running 24/7, like a server, so the electricity bill is quite expensive. Each GPU runs about 300-350 watts. Having 3 of these running can cost you near $100/month at the rate of $0.12/kWh. So yeah, if you have free electricity, than its a great investment.

My other rig in the guest room (another 4 MSI R9 280X)
I am seriously considering solar panels. Anything to lower the cost of electricity will benefit to your profitability at a large rate. At this moment, we are dealing with paying the electricity bill. What surprised me was that New York, where the other 25 GPU's are currently located, has a much higher electricity rate than New Jersey does. It was quite a surprise to hear that my partner pays 4-5 cents more than I do. In mining, that's a huge difference.

So here we are, steadily growing and moving along. This post seemed like I was everywhere, but honestly, my brain is all over the place right now and with the lack of sleep, I need to let it all out somewhere.

5 years from now, when all these coins will be valued at a much higher rate, I'll look back at this and smile.

Yes, I'm quite optimistic.





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