Chia Farming Watts per TB Power Efficiency Calculation

Let’s take a look at the power used per TB on a chia farm in the context of # of plots, impact on monthly mining income, and ways we can improve this metric. This is something very useful in farm planning, especially if you are planning a PB Chia Farm.

My farm at current is 153 TiB of plots, or roughly 1544 plots. I consider this server in the rack to be pretty full currently, so let’s look at the power efficiency of the system. The total amount of space used in TB for this about 168. Let’s answer a few questions around this.

1. How many watts per TB am I consuming on a monthly basis?
2. What impact does this have on my profits?
3. How can I improve this?

Let’s go in order as these feed into each other.

Watts per TB of Chia Plots farming

So, we need 2 pieces of information. The watts our farm is using per hour on average and the total size of the Chia Farm.

I have a SC846, which has a BMC that logs power usage statistics over time so I can see I average over the past week, 383 watts/hour. Let’s do some math.

383/168 = 2.27w/TB/hr

Now let’s multiply this by 730 (hours in month on avg)

2.27 * 730 = 1657w/TB/mo. avg

Now let’s multiple this out by the number of total TB we have, 168 in this case.

1657 * 168 = 278,376w/Farm/mo. avg

This can also be written as: 278.376KW

Now you need to kn0w the cost per KW hr you pay. I pay .10 cents per KW. Let’s get the monthly cost of this.

278.376 * 0.1 = $27.84 per month on average. Not bad, not great. It is a server, with dual sockets running E5-2697v2’s and 128GB ram and it is running in Highest Performance mode. I also use this server as an UnRAID machine which runs all my dockers and home media shares.

Impact of Electrical Costs on Monthly Profits from Chia Farming

Currently farming 168TB is worth 0.99502 XCH ($242.96) per month according to the Flexpool Calculator

So 27.84 = 0.1144 or 11.44% of our profits are eaten by electrical fees. On a server spinning 24 3.5 hdds full time and several SSD’s and addon cards, there is room for improvement.

This is MUCH different than what you would see with a GPU farm taken into account.

Our final bottom line number is 242.96 – 27.84 = 215.12 per month after electric.

How can I improve these figures?

Use the largest HDD’s you can in a single server or computer with as many addon drives as possible. The drives are not using exactly 10w/ea but close. The more TB on a drive, the lower the watts per TB goes.

Use the most energy efficient computer you can for the operation level you are doing. Just farming or harvesting? A RPI is going to do a great job. Full node, you may want additional resources to that computer or a higher end RPI4 with 4 or more GB of ram. We will be diving DEEP on this over the next weeks.

Maximize your uptime. Seriously, this is possibly the most impactful thing you can do and one of the things people report to me having the hardest time ensuring. Again, we will be going deeper into this topic, but uptime is critical. Can’t earn if you don’t farm!

Reduce latency. Have you heard of a “STALE”, but you don’t get what that exactly means? You should, because it is impacting your earnings. How do you get fewer stales? Reduce latency. It is less simple than just getting great internet, it has to do with lots of internal response timings as well, which tie into the above 2 points.

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