Frequently Asked Questions

For a single home PC, no - the increase is typically a few dollars to a few tens of dollars per month, similar to leaving a gaming session running. Multiple cards or a dedicated rig will draw more, but Malairte mining is fundamentally household-scale, not industrial-scale.

A single CPU-only desktop mining flat out usually pulls 90-180 watts from the wall. Add one GPU and you are looking at 250-450 watts. A dedicated two-GPU rig sits at roughly 600-900 watts. Laptops are much less, often 35-90 watts even at full load. These numbers are an order of magnitude smaller than industrial ASIC operations and roughly comparable to running a desktop game for the same number of hours. The only way to know your exact figure is to measure with a plug-in energy meter; nameplate PSU wattage is the maximum the supply can deliver, not what your computer actually draws.

Per watt, modern laptops are usually more efficient than desktops because their mobile CPUs and integrated GPUs are tuned for battery life. A laptop pulling 65W can mine respectably while costing only $5-8/month in electricity at typical home rates. A desktop pulling 350W earns more MLRT but costs five to seven times more to run. If your goal is to mine "for free" alongside normal computer use, a laptop is hard to beat. If you want to maximise hashrate per dollar of hardware, a desktop with a dedicated GPU wins. Laptops also have weaker cooling, so prolonged 24/7 mining can stress the keyboard and battery - many laptop miners run only 8-12 hours per day.

Computers are designed to run continuously - most servers, scientific workstations, and home NAS boxes do exactly that for years. The real risks for a home mining rig are heat and dust, not the uptime itself. Keep the case clean (compressed air every couple of months), make sure airflow is not blocked, and consider undervolting the GPU to drop temperatures by 10-15°C. Standard consumer warranties from major manufacturers do not list mining as a disqualifying use, though some board partners have policies about overclocking. Stock or undervolted operation is essentially indistinguishable from gaming or video editing from the hardware's perspective.

Essentially all the electricity a mining PC consumes is released as heat. A 400W rig outputs roughly 1,365 BTU per hour - enough to noticeably warm a small office or bedroom over a few hours. In a 10x12 foot room with the door closed, expect the temperature to rise 5-10°F (3-6°C) above the rest of the house. In winter this is welcome free heat that offsets your furnace. In summer it makes the room uncomfortable and can force your air conditioning to work harder, doubling the effective cost of those mining hours. Most home miners scale back during the warmest months for this reason.

Yes, at small scale this is increasingly common and one of the cleanest ways to mine. A modest rooftop solar array (5-8 kW) typically produces more than enough during daylight to run a 400-900W mining rig directly, with surplus going to the house or back to the grid. The economics work best with net metering or a battery, because most mining benefit comes from running 24/7. Pure off-grid solar mining is feasible only with batteries large enough to cover overnight, and the battery cost usually outweighs the modest MLRT earnings. The most practical pattern for home miners is grid-tied solar that offsets daytime mining hours, with the grid covering nights.

A kilowatt-hour (kWh) is the unit your electricity company bills in: one kilowatt of power used for one hour. To find your rig's daily kWh, take its measured wattage, multiply by hours run, then divide by 1,000. A 400W rig running 24 hours uses 400 times 24 divided by 1,000, which equals 9.6 kWh per day, or roughly 288 kWh a month. Multiply that by your effective rate per kWh to get the cost. This is the single most important calculation in home mining, because every cost estimate flows from it. Always use your real measured watts, not the number printed on the power supply label.

Probably not at full tilt. Every watt your rig uses becomes heat, and in an air-conditioned home your AC then has to spend extra energy removing that heat. In effect you pay for the mining electricity once at the wall and a second time to cool the room, which can roughly double the true energy cost of summer mining. Many home miners reduce hours, run only cooler overnight periods, or shut down entirely during the hottest months, then ramp back up in autumn when the waste heat becomes a welcome offset to heating. If you do mine through summer, position the rig in the coolest room, keep airflow clear, and consider undervolting to cut the heat load.

Yes, and it is worth knowing about. Many electronics draw a small standby or phantom load even when switched off or idle - monitors, chargers, the PC's own standby circuit, and networking gear all sip a few watts continuously. For a mining setup, the relevant figure is the rig's idle draw, which can be 60-100W on a desktop just sitting at the Windows desktop. That idle power earns no MLRT, so it is pure waste during hours you are not actively mining. Measuring the off and idle draw with a smart plug shows you exactly how much; if it is significant, scheduling deep sleep or a full shutdown between mining sessions removes it entirely.

For a typical home rig, no. A standard household outlet on a normal 15A or 20A circuit comfortably handles a single PC drawing a few hundred watts - the same outlet you would use for a vacuum cleaner or kettle. A 400W rig on a 120V circuit pulls about 3.3A, a small fraction of the circuit's capacity. Caution is only needed for unusually large multi-GPU rigs, or if you run several rigs plus other heavy appliances on one circuit, where the total can approach the breaker limit. Never daisy-chain rigs through under-rated extension leads or cheap power strips. If you are unsure about a big setup, have an electrician confirm the circuit rating; for one ordinary PC, you are fine.

Break-even here is purely an arithmetic comparison, not a forecast. Work out your daily electricity cost: measured watts times hours divided by 1,000, times your effective rate. Then look at the MLRT your rig actually earned that day from your miner or pool dashboard, valued at the current MLRT price. If earnings exceed electricity cost, you are net positive on power that day; if not, you are subsidising the network. Both numbers change daily as difficulty, your hours, and the MLRT price move, so this is a snapshot, never a promise. Nothing here predicts future prices or earnings - it simply tells you whether today covered today's power.