A while back, I met a guy on Facebook Marketplace whose house had been hit by a tree. He had 30 solar panels rated at 300W each and needed them gone. I rented a U-Haul and bought them for $30 a panel.

A friend of mine, Joe, works with forklift batteries. He told me batteries below about 60% usually get scrapped, even though they can still have plenty of life left. He gave me two 500Ah, 24V forklift batteries for free. That got the project rolling.

I set up 15 of the panels at my house—about 4,500W of solar—with a 100A charge controller, the two forklift batteries, a 4,000W inverter, and a step-up transformer for 240V. In full sun, I can run one miner with no problem.

The panels cost $450 total. The inverter was $400, the step-up transformer was $150, and the charge controller that finally worked was $500.

The word finally is doing a lot of work there. I smoked about four charge controllers before I got it running.…