With the months ahead of us and profitability massively decreasing, you might have to shut down your mining rig. This is due to the summer peak hour electricity rates being about 50% more expensive than regular hours.
When Should I start Shutting Down
Each state has different "Peak Hours" so make sure you look up what times it is for you. Some states like California only have peak hours between 5pm-8pm while others like Wisconsin is from 4pm-8pm.
Calculate Mining Profits with Variable Electric Rate
Base Rate / Profit
Once you have figured out how many hours of the day are peak electricity hours we can calculate the average cost of electricity for your miner. Lets take my extremely inefficient 3x 1060 rig for example.
The GPU's while mining consume 272w at 69.69 MH/s (nice). We also have to consider the power consumption of the rest of the computer, the CPU takes about 25 watts at idel, case fans around 15 watts and NVME 10 watts. This takes our total consumption to 322 watts, we could get extremely technical here but this is close enough. Now we head over to What to mine and enter in our hash rate and power consumption. Currently with the standard electricity rate of $0.10 $/kWh we would be making $0.20 a day on ETH and -$0.02 a day on ETC.
Variable Rate
My state has 5 hours of peak time for electricity rates and with these tight margins on profit this is important to figure out. We can start off by figuring out how much of the day is taken up by peak hours. 5/24 = 20.83% but we will round up to 21%, this means 79% of the day is standard. We can then use this kWh calculator to see we are using 7.728 kWh/day. Let find out how many of these kWh are during peak times by doing 7.728*.21 = 1.6228. We can find the cost by doing .15*1.6228 = $0.24 to run during the peak hours. Lets calculate the non-peak hours: 7.728-1.6228 = 6.1052 * 0.1 = $0.61. So our total cost of electrity if we ran all day during peak times would be $0.85 while mining $0.97 worth of ETH. This would give me a net profit of $0.12 a day.
Shutting down during peak hours profit
If we shut down during peak hours we know from the calculations above that I would be paying $0.61 for electricity on this rig per day. Lets figure out how much I would mine. To do this we can just take the daily revenue of $0.97 and divide it by 24 to get our hourly rate of $0.04041. We can then simply multiply this number by 19 as I will only be mining for 19 hours out of the day. That leaves me with $0.77 net and a profit of $0.157 per day or about an extra $0.04.
Is it worth shutting down during peak hours
With the extremely inefficient 1060 rig I used as an example above, it is. The net profit increases by $0.04 which does not seem like much but this is a 20% increase in profits for the day by doing this, if you are running a large mining operation this could help you in the upcoming months.
How To Automatically Schedule a Shutdown on Windows
Windows 10: Open the search bar, type task scheduler, and then click the app Task Scheduler.
Windows 8: Pres the Windows key, type schedule tasks, and then click Schedule tasks in the results.
Windows 7: Click the Start menu, select Control Panel, and then choose System and Security. Click Administrative Tools and then click Task Scheduler.
Click Create Basic Task in the "Actions" panel at the top right.
Enter in a name and description for your task
Schedule the task to run daily
Set the time of day you want the event triggered
Have the task start a program
Select C:\Windows\System32\shutdown.exe and add the argument /s -This argument runs the shutdown.
Hit Next and then Finish
