Introduction

Hello fellow Steemers, My name is "Gregan" which is ofcourse a derivative of my real name.
I'm your typical thirtysomething average joe with an interest in ecology, nature but also technology, space and running.

I've registered to Steemit as I found out this is mainly the medium in which people post quick updates about Gridcoin which I started dabbling into exactly a month ago. And learned alot from it.

As an on and off BOINC'er for the past decade I stumbled upon Gridcoin while installing the application again because I wanted to do something useful and meaningful with my excess electricity saved due to investing into new more economical household appliances and solar panels.

I had some prejudices about cryptocurrency because of it's bad rep it has been getting, but this Gridcoin was different.. It didn't solve meaningless math exercises while gobbling up huge loads of electricity, it monitored and rewarded scientific advance!

It has been a month now since I joined the pool and I have something to show for:

I acquired around 100 GRC from pool mining a month with these machines:

2 laptops that are on a cooling stand which are running 24/7 at halfspeed crunching only cpu tasks: I chose the lesser pace after checking temperature sensors and opted for the sustainability and "fire and forget" instead of overheating and constant tweaking. They're, as you can notice, the main source of magnitude.

But the funniest part in my opinion are the phones. They all had a bigger magnitude before but it has been a week now that I changed them to solo:
The samsung a5 is a new phone I got after I bricked my Xperia Z2 (unresponsive screen) and it's 8 cpu's was also a deciding factor: after a small week it already reached 1 magnitude just crunching the hours when I was sleeping! It actually gets way more credit than my desktop computers from a couple of years ago.

They could complete tasks even faster but I set them at 70% cpu time and stopped the crunching at 30° degrees to avoid swollen Li-ion batteries due to overheating and constant charging.

Tip: If you ever switch a host in a pool to solo, never delete it from the pool! As magnitude increases slowly, it also decreases in the same manner of time! Still rewarding but diminishing for weeks to come as you can see from the picture.

Well there you have it. As you can notice by the machines it isn't quite the server room I have earning a gazillion but more of a fun passive hobby doing something worthwhile for me.

With regards and keep the crunch strong!