How a solar and battery system runs a Bitcoin mining site
What is inside the WildWatts plant room: Victron Quattro inverter/chargers, SmartSolar MPPT controllers, an Eco-Worthy LiFePO4 battery bank and Cerbo GX monitoring, and how they keep rented miners running through the night.
WildWatts rents miners that run at a solar and battery site in the UK countryside. The live solar figures on the home page come from that system's own monitoring, and this guide explains what the hardware is, how the day runs, and what "renewable-first" actually means in practice.
The equipment
- Solar array. Ground-mounted panels on a steel frame built on site, feeding DC into the charge controllers.
- Victron SmartSolar MPPT charge controllers. These sit between the panels and the battery, tracking the array's maximum power point so the battery charges at the best rate the light allows.
- Eco-Worthy LiFePO₄ battery bank. Lithium iron phosphate cells in cabinet form with their own battery management system. LiFePO₄ is chosen for cycle life and safety: it is cycled every day and tolerates it.
- Victron Quattro inverter/chargers. The Quattro converts battery DC to the AC the miners run on, and can also charge the bank from a supplementary AC input when there is not enough sun.
- Victron Cerbo GX. The monitoring and control hub. Every component reports to it, and it publishes the figures to Victron's VRM portal, which is where the home page's live solar, battery and load numbers come from.
A day at the site
Morning. The MPPTs start charging as soon as the panels produce more than the miners draw. Surplus goes into the battery.
Midday. The array covers the full mining load and recharges the bank. On a clear day this is where most of the day's kilowatt-hours are made.
Evening and night. The battery carries the site. Miners keep running at full speed; the bank discharges through the night and the cycle restarts at dawn.
Dull spells. The system is renewable-first, not renewable-only. If a run of poor weather would otherwise interrupt a customer's session, the Quattro can take a supplementary supply so the miner keeps running. You never pay for electricity either way, and the energy details panel on the home page explains how each live figure is measured.
Why this matters for a rental
Mining hardware only earns while it is hashing. A home miner stops when the owner's power or internet does; a rented miner here is monitored every 30 seconds and backed by a battery bank sized to run the facility overnight. If a unit still stops producing shares, your rental clock pauses and the time is credited back, which is a promise we can make because the site is built to keep units running in the first place.
What it is not
It is not a hashpower contract. Each rental is one physical miner at this site, with your pool and wallet on it. It is also not a guarantee of profit: solar removes the electricity bill, which is the biggest running cost of mining, but rewards still depend on pool luck and network difficulty. The buy-versus-rent guide and the home page calculator compare costs honestly; neither promises an income.
Watching it live
The home page shows solar production, battery state and site load from the Cerbo GX, refreshed continuously. Once you rent a miner, your dashboard adds the unit's own telemetry on top: hashrate, temperature, accepted shares and best difficulty, every 30 seconds.