It's amazing that the mining hardware just keeps piling in --
Yes, but than again it is still profitable. I thought mining would be over by now, but it just does not want to give up.
My 8 miners acquired 3.5 BTC in the last 22 hours. Even at $10 per BTC, that is $35. My electricity max per box (4 PCs), is roughly $1 for the day, therefore $4 in total.
I reckon that a lot of the new miners are just people using equipment that they already had, maybe with a gfx card upgrade or two. They've watched and listened while someone they know has had their computers making money for them, and finally they have decided to give it a go. "Hell, even if it's just a few dollars, a few dollars a day pays for fuel
", they may reason.I seem to have about the same mining income as you -- only I have 12 cards. All pretty efficient ones, too (5800 series). I run a pretty lean ship here. But my electricity cost is around 74 kW/h per day. I keep close tabs on my electricity usage. I regularly write down what the meter on the side of my house reads, so I'm familiar with my normal daily kW/h usage. I also own a Kill-a-Watt meter.
I'm including the cost of extra air conditioning. I live in Texas, where we haven't had a cloudy day in weeks, and the temp hits 105 some days.
I think some guys are reporting less cost, because they don't (or can't) count the cost of fans, A/C, etc.
Anyhow, 74 kW/h comes out to $6.51. And that's a 8.8c per kW/h, which is certainly average if not cheaper than most. And that figure is super-accurate as well. I took my electric bill, subtracted the Statement Fee ($15.00), and divided what was left by the number of kW/h I used -- which equaled 8.8 cents.
You're saying $1 each for 4 machines, which have enough graphics cards to produce 3.5 BTC/day? That's 3.3 GH/s.
I think everyone needs to go back to the drawing board and double check how much they're REALLY spending on mining. You might be surprised.
Matthew
Im also mining in texas... and I have 0 AC costs. Running my cards in the garage yields ~5c higher temps than running them inside, only added cost is my 4 box fans @ 75w each. My 4 rigs @8.5c/KwH are using ~5.25 in cost per day, while putting out ~2.5g/hash. Each rig is pulling down around 500-750W, Unclocking the memory to ~340 helped cut the machine usage by almost 100W per box.