A while back, I met a guy on Facebook Marketplace whose house had been hit by a tree. He had 30 solar panels rated at 300W each and needed them gone. I rented a U-Haul and bought them for $30 a panel.
A friend of mine, Joe, works with forklift batteries. He told me batteries below about 60% usually get scrapped, even though they can still have plenty of life left. He gave me two 500Ah, 24V forklift batteries for free. That got the project rolling.
I set up 15 of the panels at my house—about 4,500W of solar—with a 100A charge controller, the two forklift batteries, a 4,000W inverter, and a step-up transformer for 240V. In full sun, I can run one miner with no problem.
The panels cost $450 total. The inverter was $400, the step-up transformer was $150, and the charge controller that finally worked was $500.
The word finally is doing a lot of work there. I smoked about four charge controllers before I got it running. At roughly $500 each, my solar education was not exactly free.
I also have a separate 24V bank made from 12V UPS batteries, with its own inverter. I switch over to that sometimes.
I found some cracked-glass 500W panels for $10 each, too. Didn’t fix them. They still make around 400W after four years, because apparently they’re tougher than the charge controllers.
I’ve also had a cable get hot enough to nearly catch fire and burned up a couple of inverters before I figured out what the system could handle. I’ve since upgraded the wiring, and the setup has been working great.
I have a video of the whole thing. It started with a tree-damaged house, a U-Haul, free forklift batteries, and a questionable amount of confidence. Now I can run a Bitcoin miner on sunlight—and I only had to sacrifice four charge controllers to get there.
—Nick Squires
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