So a couple months ago i made this post

I was downvoted pretty heavily by lemmy standards but there were a decent amount of constructive comments so i deduce that there is some interest in this topic, so thought i would update.

I’ve gotten through the coldest months of the year here in the UK and i have been mining less and less as a result now that spring is springing.

This isn’t a professional set up at all, I have an AMD 3900x processor and a Radeon 6800X GPU running Manjaro. I decided to mine Raven on the GPU (seems to be a dead coin tbh) and Monero on the processor. I also have an old quad core intel media server that runs Ubuntu server with Folding@home in the same room, so generating heat, but not crypto income. As far as actual crypto earnings are concerned it didn’t really yield a whole much; i am the proud owner of 546RVN (current market rate about $6.74USDT) and 0.033 XMR (approx $6.84USDT value). so not even going to bother selling it, will just hold it and hope it pops one day.

The real return though is the reduction in electricity usage. The flat was kept not quite as warm as previous years but still warm enough to be comfortable so long as you wear socks and occasionally put on a jumper on the really cold days. With this experiment i was for the most part only heating a single room. As a result my power usage plummeted for the normally heaviest months.

2024 peaked at around 1,100kWh in Jan normally heating my flat with its in built resistive element electric heaters (no gas here)

2025 peaked at 800kWh in Jan

Costs are generally averaged out over the course of the year here in the UK and my energy supplier has told me they’re reducing my Direct Debit by -£30.48 a month, i’ll assume this holds for the rest of the year.

So with that in mind my net gain was (£30.48 * 12) + (13.58USDT converted to GBP at current rate of £0.77… £10.48)

£376.24

Admittedly there are other variables i’m not really controlling for, the cost of power peaked in 2023ish and has been reducing since for instance.

i had fun though, will try again next year

  • Grimpen@lemmy.ca
    0·
    2 days ago

    That’s kind of what I was thinking.

    I used to run Folding@Home, as well as others, as a screensaver. It’s been a while, but I think you had some control of how hard to work the computer. As someone who regularly works with 30 year old computers that run 24/7, it seems weird to kill a GPU by running it,but if it runs cooler maybe it will last longer? Although that defeats the purpose kind of.

    Now you need to use the money you saved and the $15 in crypto to buy two identical computers, then run one flat out and the other at around 50% and see how long they last. Report back every couple of years.

    Excuse me while I look at extreme uptime posts.