Hi Nick,
I wish I had found your thread earlier. You are nearly 3 months ahead of me. But I may have missed a lot of teething trouble. Congratulations on the 2 XCH. Well done.
I am 2 weeks into this by now, with my first plot completed on 27Jul21. I just went over 50 plots in total and aspire to reach the next two milestones - 100 plots, then 1,000 plots. I have about 90TB of capacity, but not yet built into systems - just second hand spinning disks from eBay.
I have two ancient PCs and one modern PC (low spec - only cost £200) generating about 3 + 3 + 7 plots per day. They need looking after though. I have a lot of downtime. We have had intermittent internet over some days - not sure if it’s me messing with our home LAN continuously building and rebuilding PCs and putting them on the network. In total I have downloaded the Chia blockchain 4 times on 4 different machines. An added attraction is also that I got back to the CLI, and have started to use Powershell instead. Around 2Aug21, I found the MadMax plotter and watched countless Youtube vids until I could understand how to put together the most basic of scripts. I felt like a kindergarten kid.
So for me this was a pilot - the first of four mining pilots intended to create some diversification from only investing in crypto. I assigned 2 weeks for the pilot but each time I calculate an interim return on investment, the figures just keep on improving. About a week ago, I found the Chia leaderboard and could not believe that there is someone hosting 10 petabytes (now it’s 20 PiB). So I scaled that down and decided, like you, to complete about 1,000 plots then let a slower system continue in farming mode.
It doesn’t help that at the same time, I have been clearing out my workshop at home, and repurposing it as a potential crypto mining space. It’s clean, dry, not insulated at all but it’s over 200 sq ft and already had a 36U 19 inch rack cabinet (ex bp global datacentre Hemel Hempstead). I am forcing myself to relearn what I forgot about 20 years ago - LAN, WAN, hosting, high level coding. Nice as a hobby and whilst I am not contracting, but I guess I should get back to contracting some time soon.
Anyway, please keep this post going. I am contemplating mining some Helium as the next pilot. The last few days have helped, in that if I need any additional moolah for investment, Cryptos seem to have woken up again, and we are heavily into XRP. Treated my wife to some retail therapy today, invading three local clothes shops and finishing it off with a 5pm coffee and light snack. Truth be known, I think that is something I am becoming really good at - taking my wife on retail therapy trips.
Now back to mining. Just need to watch Max Keiser, Michael Saylor and Bitboy Crypto sell BTC to the moon. They are back on track for predicting a year end price of $200K to $400K plus or minus a bit. God bless them, and I hope they are right. Mega retail therapy sessions would follow for us