Thank you ccgllc. I think my main question might be how ramp down/up with five hours of off time might affect it. I don't think it would be noticeable but I wonder how I might be able to calculate that.
If you turned your miners off for 5 hours every day, they'd be mining 19 hours. That's roughly 20% less hash rate. You can take your hash rate and subtract 20% from that and run your calculations. The ramp up and ramp down won't really matter.
Thank you. I ran my calculations basing it on the total hash rate of the pool for the week and then of my % of that.
With a single machine there's about a $2.25 difference per week at the current BTC-USD rate. Maybe worth it if I get more machines running.
I ran it also if I ran it during the very expensive portion of the peak time and I would lose $.25 per week there. So, I could probably talk myself into giving the pool that hash and not stop it. But I'd still be saving using the peak/off-peak instead of just the straight cost.
Also to work out what to expect to lose from mining 80% of the time, as stated above that's 20% less expected reward.
How the ramp down and up works is that instead of losing 20% on the next block, and of course the luck of single block finding has very high variance, you instead lose it over 5Nd - i.e. you expect that 20% loss spread out over 5Nd after the outage - or 4% each 100% expected block
If it's a daily thing, then you should see the rewards settle close to the expected 80% each block reward as the daily 4%s overlap.
Thanks Kano. And it isn't a true 20% as it was only M-F, I would still be up 143 of 168 hours. But those 25 hours are so miniscule it may not be worth the hassle.