This winter will mark 8 winters of heat-capture Bitcoin mining in our home.
Here are a few lessons I’ve learned from having mining be the wintertime heartbeat of our home:
• Get your wife and kids on board: Sarah wouldn’t have become a super Pleb Miner Wife without convincing her that this is our family doing it—not just daddy playing with his Bitcorns in the basement. The same can be said for our daughters; mining noise is as soothing and comforting to them as the sounds of the ocean or the rain.
• Start small: Just try heating one space or area to get your feet under you.
• Keep it simple: Over-engineering is fun and all, but if you’re tinkering constantly, it can be frustrating.
• It’s certainly not a one-and-done investment: Keep money aside for repairs and upgrades.
• Safety: Unmolested miners aren’t purpose-built for home use, and modified miners… well… just be careful out there.
• Noise: Air-cooled is noisy, as you all know—plenty of tips and tricks to mitigate. Shrouds and ducting go a long way. Immersion (but more so hydro) are the future, but expensive.
• Firmware: Scale up and down constantly? IDK—for me, I don’t get obsessed with having the exact right temps. Sometimes shunting waste heat outside is the better choice.
• Don’t spend a ton of money—not until you’ve done it for a couple of seasons.
• KNOW YOUR STATISTICS: power rate, profitability, hash price, hash value, efficiency, $/TH. They all still matter—maybe even more so, as this is now part of your household/family budget (your wife will certainly give a shit about these numbers).
• Keep it clean; do your PMs.
And last but certainly not the end—as I want to hear more from the Pleb Miner Mafia—love it, love what you’re doing, and have fun doing it.
Stay warm,
-Jon 🖕🏻💀🖕🏻
