PC power usage a month (Litecoin mining)

[zqwerty]

Down here in Chch in Wintertime the bitcoin mining computers situated in strategic rooms could be used for heating thus offsetting some of the costs, since all of the losses will manifest as heat.

[dugimodo]

Absolutely, even if they make no profit during winter it's free heating
Summer is a problem though, my garage hits 40 degrees or more in the afternoon and that's not a good environment for litecoin mining (not bitcoin, need special hardware for that now).
Putting 1500W of mining rigs in the house is not a great environment for me to live in either and If I run the A/C to keep it all cool I'm blowing all my profits. You can see the power consumption drop overnight as the temperature lowers, it's quite noticeable.

[zqwerty]

How about using water cooling and thereby preheating the cold water before it goes into the hot water tank?

[dugimodo]

A nice Idea, the trouble with water cooling graphics is the expense. By the time you source GPU blocks, tubing, radiator, pump, reservoir, etc you are looking at hundreds of dollars - bearing in mind I am using 5 cards - and have to pull the graphics cards apart to do it.
Might work out in the long haul but short term I've already spent more on litecoin mining than intended and need to recover some costs now. Also the water flow into the hot water cylinder would need to be fairly constant to use it for that and it isn't, I'm sure it could be done but not cheaply or easily.

[Chilling_Silence]

I've got my 7970 running at approx 650kH/s and my wife has her 270X running at approx 460kH/s, so we just leave those going when we're not gaming. Rate of return isn't quite as high in the wemineltc.com pool as I was expecting, but it's not bad.

I went out yesterday and decided to get 2x R290X cards, and a 91% efficient (So it says) 1000w Coolermaster PSU. The goal will be to get them to around 900 -> 950kH/s per card, so I'm aiming for 1800kH/sec minimum.

http://i.imgur.com/f8tvxTD.jpg

[dugimodo]

Wow, shoot for the top end then. I was doing the same with my 7970 but I tweaked the clocks to 1050/1500 and it gets 700+ KH/s had to put them back for games though as it wasn't stable. I got a 760 to game on (deliberately because I don't want to mine on my gaming PC) on put the 7970 in another machine. The 7970 needs to stay at stock 1.2V to be stable at those clocks, my 280X's run exactly the same clocks and hash rates but do it @ 1.1V at slightly less power.

Not sure about your timing the price of litecoins has been steadily dropping for a while now, profits are dwindling. Maybe it'll turn around again who knows.

[Agent_24]

Rate of return isn't quite as high in the wemineltc.com pool as I was expecting, but it's not bad.

I don't know much, but I saw some posts on btc\ltc etc forums saying that wemineltc.com is a bit of a scam, and they siphon some off for themselves.

[Chilling_Silence]

I don't know much, but I saw some posts on btc\ltc etc forums saying that wemineltc.com is a bit of a scam, and they siphon some off for themselves.

I've been wondering that based on my hash rate vs expected returns. Have you seen any better recommendations ?

[Agent_24]

I've been wondering that based on my hash rate vs expected returns. Have you seen any better recommendations ?

No, but then I didn't bother looking; my hardware isn't fast enough.

[Chilling_Silence]

So with wemineltc I estimate I was mining approx 0.1 per-day with both my 650kH/s from my card as well as the 450kH/s from my wifeys card.
Switch to coinotron and within 15 minutes it's already estimating I'll mine 0.155 per day with just my desktop card alone, let alone adding in my wifes card too!

Something _very_ fishy with wemineltc.com !