This year, I installed solar panels on my roof, and in addition to optimizing my power usage for tasks such as water heating and charging, I find myself with surplus power that I’d like to put to good use. My plan is to increase the power consumption of my computer hardware deliberately in order to indirectly heat my house. OpenHAB is aware of the excess power generated by my solar converter, which could trigger a specific rule to initiate a process.
I’m contemplating either contributing to Folding@home or running a cryptocurrency miner. However, since the available power fluctuates and isn’t consistently higher than the maximum power consumption of my computer, I need a way to control the computing power of the FAH client or the cryptominer. Has anyone in this forum undertaken a similar project? Do you have any suggestions or recommendations for software that could help me achieve this goal?
That’s definitely an idea… putting hardware to use in science projects to use excess power produced is definitely something I had not considered… note taken!
Alternatively, let’s say that your final objective is heating your home, have you checked the infra red heating panels? Got one under my fathers desk, 250 watts, super thin, zero noise, and keeps the bottom of the desk toasty
Heating panels are nice, had one in my old house under the coding desk in the basement!
However current project is to crank up PC power based on solar excess power
Besides Folding@Home there is BOINC, a framework for many distributed computing projects. However my searches did not find a ready-to-use solution for my above stated task.
As I still had a FAH client in my PC (Xubuntu, FAH version 7.4.4) I started to fiddle with this. When the client is running, it’s computing power can be controlled by commands. Set the max. CPU usage to 50%:
FAHClient --send-command "option cpu-usage 50"
The same command for GPU is accepted, but my GPU does not throttle - maybe it’s hardware dependent. But I can start/stop the FAH client
FAHClient --send-pause
FAHClient --send-unpause
so, a bash script waiting for command by mqtt from the OpenHAB server should do it…
