My New Miner Has Arrived! First Impressions.

(Synopsis: it’s ugly as brick and loud as mother******, but I love it anyway!)

Hello everyone!

As I was commuting from work today I checked into the shipment’s service tracking page and – lo and behold! – it showed that my miner had made it to my town and was waiting for me in one of the city supermarkets (yep, that’s how it works in Sweden). Finally! I was very excited and wished for the train to run faster. I biked from the station to the aforementioned supermarket, did some shopping for tonight’s dinner, and then had to stand in a long queue of people, all of whom apparently had some urgent postal errands that afternoon. A supermarket’s employee grumbled at the photo of my passport that I presented on my smartphone. He wanted to see the original document. Fortunately, I managed to convince him to release my parcel to me anyway.

When he appeared from the storage room with the enormous package in his hands, I was a little shocked at its size and weight. The thing was massive! Huge! And heavy!

I was standing  there, with a lost expression on my face, the heavy package slipping from my hands, the earlier traces of happiness quickly being erased by doubts… What shall I do? Shall I call a taxi? I cannot possibly carry this thing all the way home. Nor would it fit on my bicycle… But, as the time was quickly approaching 5 pm, I decided to give it a chance and called my colleague and a friend who had a car. He was just wrapping up the day’s work in the office and was about to head home. I was in luck! He arrived to the supermarket within five minutes, helped me to load the monster into his car’s trunk and off we rode!

Huffing and puffing, I made my way from the parking lot to my apartment (thankfully we have an elevator in our building). And then I tore and slashed at the layers of cardboard and bubble wrap for good ten minutes or so. I was certainly glad the miner was packed so carefully. But, rushing like a fool, I managed to cut two fingers and stained the floor and the packaging material with blood. After some more time lost due to emergency clean up and treatment of my wounds, I got back to it. I documented the whole process on video, so you may witness for yourself – and laugh at – my idiotic shenanigans during the unpacking, setting-up and installation process:

(I keep saying ‘KCPool’ throughout the video. Of course I meant Kano’s CKPool and nothing else. I apologise for this mistake!)

Some first impressions: it’s loud! It measures at 60 dB, which is a legal maximum level of noise in many countries. A loud conversation in a crowded place is about 60 dB. I had to wear earplugs to do some work on my computer later that afternoon. I even had to escape to the bathroom and shut the door tight behind me, in order to type this post and edit the video above. I will try to sleep with earplugs tonight, but I already have a hunch that I’m going to have to keep this thing turned off for the night and only run it during the day, while I’m away.

It’s hot! I don’t mean its external appearance – it’s actually kind of industrial-ugly. I mean it heats up quickly and it heats the air in my apartment amazingly fast too. I am still experimenting with how much I can open the balcony door that faces the air intake of the miner. The temperature outside is near 0˚C / 32˚F (it’s Swedish autumn, everyone) and the intake side of the miner is 13˚C / 55˚F, while the exhaust side is at 62.5˚C / 144˚F. So the miner manages to heat the air very efficiently. A pleasant side effect of this (if we forget the noise for a second, which is kind of hard to do) is that the temperature in my apartment is now quite comfortable, despite the open balcony door. A constant inflow of fresh air from the outside is a welcome bonus as well. Usually I run an electric heater in winter, even with all the windows shut tight. Now I can keep a window slightly open and still enjoy a pleasantly warm indoor temperature.

I am going to wrap up this post here and will come back to you in a day or two, once the miner have run for a while. I will be reporting about its performance, how much it generates in terms of rewards, how I deal with the excessive noise and heat, and how crazy people think I am, when I tell them I now mine Bitcoin at home. We are having our Blockchain Meetup in Uppsala tomorrow (its main topic is going to be Steemit, by the way) and I am eager to share my first steps in home mining with its participants. Stay tuned for more!