The (not so) Grand Plan

 TL:DR

Hi, welcome to my blog. This follows my journey of creating a CHIA (XCH) farm on an almost zero budget and keeping environmental impact down. 

Quick intro

My name is Gee and I started getting into Chia farming back in June 2021. I have been trading crypto on and off for the last 2 years. 

How did I find out about Chia?

A contact of mine had mentioned that he put some serious investment into hardware for a 'Chia farm' buying 10 x 16TB drives. I have traded crypto on and off for the last couple of years or so but had always wanted to get into mining but could never afford the upfront capital investment in hardware to get started.

What is my current farming status ?

As it stands currently I have 3 windows 10 PCs and a raspberry pi running in my farm. 

I have split my farm up so that my node is separate from the machines that I use for harvesting and plotting. I found very early on that having my Full Node and plotters on the same machine caused issues with stale plots. 

Full Node:

A beaten-up old Intel i3 laptop with 6GB of RAM and my only machine with an SSD this runs full nodes for Chia (XCH) , Chives (XCC) and CryptoDoge (XCD).

Harvesters/Plotters:

2 x i5 PCs with 8GB of RAM both with a 500GB Plotting Drive separate to the OS drive which take 2 of the 4 SATA ports. The other two SATA ports have the drives containing my plots, currently at 105 plots at the time of writing this article.

Plotter two is also running two extra fork nodes. Maize (XMZ) and Staicoin (STAI).

So what is the grand plan?

Plan is to create a functional financially self sufficient chia farm on a next to nothing budget and trying to hold true to the ideals of the chia project.

I am making a small investment every month into the farm which pays for at least one HDD and maybe some USB or network infrastructure this is normally around $50.

Ideals I want to stick to:

• plot storage HDDs are all at least second had so no new drive where I can avoid the only exceptions are the IO drives and temp drives but they will be small as possible to avoid global space wastage.
• Infrastructure will be free, e-waste or second-hand purchase. I want to keep the infrastructure overhead to a minimum in terms of cost and environmental impact if I can give hardware a second life I will.  

I feel that these are in line with Chia's overall vision there may be times that I cannot stick to these rigorously but I will always make my best effort to I don't want to generate unnecessary waste of any kind.

** Just to be clear I am not shaming the folks buying new drives or hardware for their farms everyone is entitled to do as they wish without an upstart like myself ridiculing them. Besides my methods have their own faults having more smaller HDDs than one big one increases overall power consumption which I intend to work on in the future. (main rule be kind to one another)***  

Next steps   

Keep slowly adding more drives, make improvements to network topology work towards the point where the chia farm is generating enough to XCH to pay for its power consumption and extra drives.  

Finally......

Feel free to drop comments here or follow me on Twitter

@PoorChiaFarmXCH

If you wish to leave a tip my XCH address is.

xch1879zv8nwgqsfmw85q8e5s7xgf8hcygnl4egdmwsngarmsf5xe2nskjz852