I know the feeling. I was also debating buying S3s but now holding to see what happens. I'm still mining with 8 S1s and they're down to pulling in about 1 BTC a month. At my electricity cost of $0.13/kWh this cost me about $340/month. So I'm still making a small profit at the current BTC price. May upgrade using the kits, but not worth it yet. Waiting to see what happens.
You really need to look at the pencil mod of your S1's I did my 9 miners and now they mine at only 140GH but use @ 200 watts less apiece. So now my electric cost (.125kw) is about .51 day each. You will make more profit doing so. Then this also freed up PSU to run some S3's
Not sure what you mean by pencil mod? I guess you mean lowering the frequency. I'll PuTTY in and try that. Thanks for the advice.
It's this - https://bitcointa.lk/threads/guide-undervolt-antminer-s1-1-19w-gh-at-the-wall.286480/
I've done it on my S1, works great. As aurel57 mentioned it'll increase your profit margin
Thanks for the info. I've been experimenting and using the technique I was able to go from an average efficiency of 2.11 J/Gh to 1.15 J/Gh for a 45% reduction in energy usage for the same amount of hashing
. The calculations show that the reduction in hashing rate is offset by a much greater reduction of energy use. This means my 8 S1s will now cost me $5.72/day vs. $10.48/day. Not as efficient as S3s, but pretty good for S1s! That will keep them profitable a lot longer. Since they've already ROI'd, it's more profit for a longer time.Also, I was using 4 Corsair RM850s to run my 8 overclocked S1s (had 2 on each). With each S1 now pulling only about 150 W at the lower ASIC voltage (from 420 W when overclocked and running at full ASIC voltage), I can now run all 8 S1s on 2 RM850s! I have 5 S1s on the 1st and 3 S1s on the 2nd. That frees up enough power supply capability to run 5 S3s, if I decide to get. Will be able to run 2 S3s on each of the 2 freed up RM850s and run 1 S3 with the RM350 that has the 3 S1s.
