The 6 Things Nobody Tells You About Your Solar Surplus
The real story: what happens to your surplus, why selling it back isn’t worth it, and the one way to make it work. No crypto hype.
Right now, your extra power goes one of two ways: out to the grid for a few cents, or into things you switch on just to soak it up.
If you sell it back, you buy it again at night for three to four times the price. If you don’t, you go looking for ways to burn it off. You run the AC harder. You might add a second freezer, or buy a gadget you didn’t really need. Either way, none of it actually uses the surplus. It just finds new ways to get rid of it.
You went solar to optimise your energy consumption. The surplus is the part you’re still not using.
The feed-in tariff isn’t a reward for your power; it’s the consolation prize for not letting it vanish.
Even if you have a battery, it fills up. Once it’s full and you’ve powered everything you need, the rest of your surplus has nowhere to go. You’re simply not harvesting that energy. So the real question was never how to sell your surplus. It’s how to make the most of it, and there’s one answer that actually works for you.
That 70% isn’t too much power. It’s just power nothing in your home is using yet.
Typical home without a battery. Source: European solar self-consumption studies.Point that surplus at a Bitcoin miner. It earns you Bitcoin, and the Bitcoin is yours to keep or sell.
A Bitcoin miner is just a computer. You use extra electricity that would go to waste to power it. It does the math that keeps the Bitcoin network safe. In return, you earn small amounts of Bitcoin. That Bitcoin lands in your own wallet, and it’s yours: hold it, or sell it for cash whenever you like. Nothing to feed it but the power you weren’t using anyway.
Spare electricity in; Bitcoin out.
Mining lives or dies on one number: the cost of power. Yours is already zero.
You’ve probably heard about the big Bitcoin mining farms: warehouses packed with thousands of machines, running day and night. They don’t win because their hardware is magic. They win on the cheapest electricity on earth. A home miner paying normal retail prices can’t compete, which is exactly where “mining is dead” comes from. But your surplus was going to be wasted anyway, so the one cost that sinks everyone else, you’ve already taken to zero.
The thing that makes mining “dead” is the exact thing you have already solved.
We won’t throw a euro-per-month figure at you, because it depends on your surplus and your rates. The calculator runs it on your actual kilowatt-hours.
The power doesn’t stop working once it mines. Almost all of it comes back out as heat, and that heat is yours too.
A Bitcoin miner is a computer, and like any computer it produces heat while it runs. So the energy doesn’t disappear: your solar becomes electricity, the electricity powers the miner, the miner mines Bitcoin, and the by-product is warmth. It’s the same energy, simply changing from one shape into another. You can use that warmth for useful things. You can use engineering to heat a room or workshop. You can also pre-heat water, so it doesn’t escape outside. One stream of surplus energy, doing two useful jobs on its way out.
Solar in. Bitcoin and heat out. Use your energy twice.
Bitcoin mining can get technical fast, so we built Port to let anyone start without the learning curve.
Run your miners the easy way with Port
Bought your first miner and don't fancy wrestling with pools and configs? Plug it into the Port and it handles the setup. The simplest way in, and it grows with you as you add more.
- Plug and play, running in minutes
- Up to 4 miners on one Port
- Automatic detection, real-time monitoring
- Control everything from one app
The 6 things, at a glance
- Your surplus goes to waste
- Feeding it into the grid was never the answer
- Point that surplus at a Bitcoin miner and earn Bitcoin
- Mining only fails when power costs money, and yours doesn’t
- The same energy pulls double duty as heat
- The Port runs it all for you
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