Miners

For a first taste, start with a solo miner like the Bitaxe: around 15–20 W, silent, runs over Wi-Fi on your desk — you'll learn pools, wallets and firmware without the electricity bill hurting. If you want to mine seriously, an Antminer from the S19 class is the classic entry: proven hardware, affordable, and tameable for home use with a fan shroud. In between sits the Avalon Q — a 90 TH miner built for living spaces out of the box.

Stock ASIC miners reach 70–80 dB — vacuum-cleaner territory, nothing you want in a living room. Quieting happens in two steps: a fan shroud plus ducting hose route the hot exhaust outside or into another room, which already helps a lot. Replace the loud stock fans with an external inline fan on top of that and you get below 40 dB — quieter than a fridge. The waste heat can be put to work for heating at the same time.

A full-size ASIC miner draws roughly 2 to 6 kW around the clock depending on the model; small solo miners need just 15–140 W. Whether it pays off comes down almost entirely to your electricity price: at typical grid rates mining alone is rarely profitable — it gets interesting with solar surplus, dynamic tariffs, cheap off-peak power, or when you use the waste heat for heating, since every watt is converted 100% into heat. Run the numbers honestly for your own setup.

Yes — a miner is an ideally controllable load for a solar system. With firmware like Braiins OS an Antminer can be throttled smoothly, and devices like the Avalon Q are adjustable between 800 and 1,600 W out of the box: ramp up at midday when surplus peaks, throttle down in the evening. Small solo miners at 15–140 W even run entirely on the base surplus. The waste heat stays in your house instead of on the roof.

This is exactly where mining gets interesting: feed-in tariffs have been falling for years and, for new installations, temporarily drop to zero when exchange prices go negative. Instead of feeding a kilowatt-hour into the grid for a few cents, you "refine" it in the miner into sats — and in winter into usable heat on top. How much comes out depends on your hardware and the Bitcoin price: run the numbers for your surplus window before you buy.

In solo mining you work directly against the network without a pool: if you find a block, the full reward of currently 3.125 BTC is yours. The network finds a block roughly every 10 minutes — each one is a new lottery ticket, and your odds equal your hashrate divided by the network's. You'll find compact devices for this, with a full explanation, in our solo miners category.

Antminer (Bitmain) is the market leader with the widest model range and the largest accessory and firmware ecosystem. Whatsminer (MicroBT) is known for being especially robust in 24/7 operation. Canaan was the very first ASIC manufacturer and also builds home-focused devices with the Avalon Q and Avalon Nano. Bitdeer is the youngest of the four, developing its own chips for the Sealminer series. Efficiency across current generations is close — what matters is where you run it, the accessories, and the price.

Yes — physically, a miner is an electric heater that happens to compute: every watt becomes heat. With a shroud and hose you can route an Antminer's warm exhaust into living spaces, a workshop, or water pre-heating. The comfortable ready-made solution is the 21energy Ofen 2: a miner in an insulated heater enclosure, quiet and app-controlled. Part of your heating cost comes back as mined sats.

Refurbished units cost considerably less and are often the more sensible choice for beginners and heating miners — an S19 doesn't lose hashrate from age, only from failing components. What matters when buying used: tested hashboards, an honest condition statement, and a seller who is reachable if something goes wrong. In our shop the condition (new or refurbished) is stated on every product page, and worn classics can be revived with spare parts like hashboards or control boards.