What is the best hardware to do this with? I'm told by several places the bitcoin miners they sell are useless for mining other coins??
For Scrypt coins, you'll want to use an ASIC of some sort.. there are various options from manufacturers like Zeus, Gridseed, etc. For X11 or X13, you would use video cards (GPUs) like the Radeon R9 280x / 290x or Nvidia 750 TI, etc.
I have two AMD 7950 GPU resting peacefully. What you recommend to do with them?
I get electricity for 5 to 6hrs daily from solar and rest from the grid.