Just ran the numbers for our effective 2025 electricity costs at home. We have an all-electric high-performance home with solar and energy storage. The surplus solar is exported to the grid, and during the summer we allow the grid to pull from our batteries too and get compensated for that (Virtual Power Plant events run by ConnectedSolutions in the north east, USA). So although our winter electricity bills are really high in Massachusetts, they are counter-balanced by almost zero bills in summer plus what we receive for the energy from our batteries via the VPP events. In addition we get incentives from our utility for charging our car only during off-peak hours. For 2025 our total net costs for electricity were just $483.55. Then when I calculated our total consumption of home plus car, it works out that our effective energy rate is $0.026 per kWh, which is AMAZING! The VPP events are the lifesaver here, without them we'd be toast. What this tells me is that there might be some logic to increasing our mining. Currently we have just one Bitaxe Gamma (cheers to @b1e11858…1e06134c) which is mining in the Braiins pool most of the time, and it joins the @5eb3fabe…35a033cd block parties when they occur (we also buy hashrate for those). Obviously, increasing our mining means also increasing our consumption and our effective energy rate of $0.026 per kWh would increase – although that could be offset by efficiency gains elsewhere in the house. And clearly, the rewards from Braiins alone will never recoup the costs of the mining hardware itself. But I can't help be tempted by a NerdQaxe++. Does anyone else have any guidance or suggestions here? How should I be thinking about this, and what steps should I take, if any? I should add that the incentives we receive from exporting to the grid from our home batteries and charging our car off-peak go straight into Bitcoin. So the question becomes, is it even worth investing in more mining hardware, or does it just make sense to keep stacking by funneling the income into Bitcoin? I suspect it's the latter... -Tom #massachusetts #massachusetts #newengland #newengland #mining #bitcoin