Miner efficiently and the cost of running your miner are important factors but so is safety. We do not want to be over loading circuits and creating fire hazards or tripping circuits all over the place. I wanted to cover a brief post on this, I am not going to go into massive detail its just to cover the basics
All the big ASIC miners I have had over the years have been between 500w and 800w. It seem to be an ongoing trend for one reason or another that they fall into this bracket and I am sure it will continue.
Mining Safety
The first this we need to be aware of is can our circuit handle the amount of miners we are going to put on it. I employed a contract electrician to come and check my wiring and fuse box, he recommended I add a new circuit breaker to the power board rated at 30Amp and run a new ring just to cover the miners. This will isolate the miners from the rest of the house. The wife would have been extremely annoyed at me if the miners had tripped the standard house wall sockets and she couldn’t dry her hair or something.
There is plenty of info on the net around Volts ,Amps and Watts but its something along the lines of
13A Per socket, so 13×240 = 3120 Watts.
If we have some Bitmain L3+ miners at 800watt we can only put 3 on a 13Amp surge protected gang plug.
My 30 Amp Circuit we can calc like this
30A Breaker, so 30×240 = 7200 Watts.
I wouldn’t want to max it out and be on the edge so I am not going to use any more that 7000 Watt. = 8.75 L3+ Miners or 8 to be safe
Electricity Costs
If we take one of my L3+ miners as an example, it runs at approx. 800watt at the wall. Its on for 720 Hours a month (24/7) and I pay £0.12 for a unit. There are plenty of online calculators for power and I have based my calculations on the UK Power website
Each L3+ costs me approx. £70 a month to run. As I have a British Gas smart meter I can verify that this is true. I have to take this into account when planning to pay for my electricity bill each month.
DO NOT get caught out as I once did and ended up with an unexpected £1800 bill.
Pay your electricity monthly as you mine!! Plan to cash out 30% of the coins each month to cover this, if you have left over then hold for the price pumps