Going solo!
Letting a few devices go out of the pool in september this year and seeing them score silver, gold and now ruby badges for scientific projects in no time, I decided yesterday to commit all the devices I own to the solo adventure.
Although I am very thankful that the pool exists plus that I love the high quality layout on the website itself, there just seems to be an inherent satisfactory effect on seeing your own personal contributions and efforts grow.
After spending a few months crunching data in the GRC pool and reading up on info in Gridcoin's helpful community in Steemit - thanks guys! - I built up a very humble amount of Gridcoin to start staking.
I heard wild stories in the past of needing thousands and possibly ten thousands of coins to go solo. And perhaps this may be needed to stake daily, but if your content and have enough patience with monthly rewards like I am, then that won't be an issue.
So like I said I saved up GRC until I could earn a more or less a monthly reward before going solo, this amounts to about 500 GRC as you can see by this picture with varying estimates depending on the total net weight at that time (less or bigger crowd staking):
Although it sure isn't a server park (nor a powerful one at that) I commited all devices totalling up to 7:
the top three devices in the list getting credit are the 2 phones and SCB I put solo in september, I added 2 laptops and 2 more mobiles now for more oomph. - Screenshot taken from boincstats.
Seems that mobile devices have an effect, either the amount of credits being rewarded increased or hardware really improved over the years. Exceeding my old i7 desktop pc contributions and dwarfing my old core2duo pc before that in the '00's.
Looking forward to that : 
icon turning up! So exciting!
Interesting links:
- http://www.gridcoin.us
- https://boinc.berkeley.edu
- https://www.grcpool.com
- https://boincstats.com
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You should not let the wallet predicted time to stake value guide your decisions. It is highly inaccurate. @dutch done some calculations to fix it and IIRC not yet submitted a code change.
I think that most profitable would be to return all, but one device to the pool. Keep the one device solo, to keep your solo magnitude nonzero. Wait until you actually stake. Based on how long it took, consider switching full solo.
Combining solo and pool projects on one machine definitely works, but is not advised as problems with beacon might arise.
Thank you for the concerns, I realize the estimates can be way off but I'm patient enough to wait it out. I have 5 x estimated time considering the beacon is around 1month old, let's hope those estimates aren't that bad ;-) I'm viewing it as a test, that hopefully doesn't turn into a lesson in the end. At any rate, the data being boinced is still being done and the stats added to my name and I'll keep you guys posted if it was achievable or not.
Until 3.7 is released, you will most likely get only one GRC in your first stake.
Erm...you may be disappointed. I've got more than 2x your gridcoin and haven't staked in the past 7 weeks. If I went with the wallet's staking timeframe estimate I should be staking every week or so.
I'm back IN the pool (with wallet taking my pool earnings while still trying to stake the ~400GRC I was owing before I reentered the pool) and now trying to build up to over 2k in the hopes I stake sometime in the 6 month 'window'.
I'm having now 2.5k GRC and the stacking frequency is at about 2 weeks since 23.9.2017 (had then 2k GRC). The wallet is open for 18h per day.
I see that you are, that gives me some hope! I confess I was trying to stake with ~1k GRC to try and verify some of the calculations that others were speculating about. Now I'm on about ~1200 with no stake in 8 weeks, so presumably if we draw a line between our two wallet totals, I should start to see an upswing in staking shortly as the pool coins come in...
Alright, thanks for the heads up. Gonna see how it fares, the beacon is young and I got the time :-)
Wishing you all the best! Please update when you get your first solo reward; it will be good for the community to know it can be done!
Will do! Thanks!
I like that the pool is also rewarding in SPARC. I look forward to this being implemented. I too wish to switch to solo, but only one or 2 of my 5 devices.