I'm in Southern California. On a south facing exposure we get a MINIMUM of 6 hours of full sun. Whole house solar out here runs roughly $36k for the Tesla 30 year systems (installed), so it could be pretty economical.
I've also looked into other grid minimizing options like wind turbine (especially given the flow created by the output heat) and water turbines in the greywater reclamation system.
How many cards can you run off of that 1600watt psu? How long would it take you to recover the almot $10,000 it would take you to set it up? Also, wind turbines would help tremendously, they're a bit cheaper than solar I think. They're not really an option in my area as we don't get much wind unless it's raining. You could also just go grid-tied and mine for free during the day. That would cut your bill in almost half. Just a thought.
6 GPU on one 1600w (Radeon R9 390). According to nicehash, each has a return of 0.00163142 BTC/Day or +0.00981854 BTC/Day for all 6 together. https://www.nicehash.com/?p=calc
If I were to spend $12k on the rig and Solar, the ROI would be a little over a year (380 days). Alternatively, I could pay the high cost of grid electricity ($0.43 kwh) and recoup $2500 in 6 months then upgrade to Solar when it becomes economically feasible.
I would need to research more to see what it would pay direct mining vs pool
Wow.. youre electricity costs are $0.43? That's insane.. Yea, I would definitely look into getting into solar at that point. Mine is only $0.12. You can get solar panels for less than $1/watt. If the ROI is less than a year, I say you should go for it if your prices are that expensive.. After 1 year and you get your roi, you will be mining for free. Not to mention that if the price of ETH keeps going up, you'll get your roi a lot quicker.
Yeah, for "peak" power (which mining puts you into really fast) electricity is just obscene here)
Yea.. I've heard about "Peak" power. It's basically in the afternoons when everyone gets home. I'm so glad I don't live near a big city. We don't have to deal with stupid things like that. That's just robbery it sounds like to me.
Pretty much.
If burst can be mined on Raspberry pi, would I be able to run it on an Older Windows 10 computer that gets barely any other usage? Since the machine is on anyway I really should be using it to make a few bucks a day ...
Of course it can. All you need is some extra hard drives. Then, just follow the setup guide I linked to plot then and click the "Start mining" button. If you already got the computer running 24/7, then it's free money as you won't be using enough more electricity to even notice it.