Mining at home vs GoMining: the real cost of electricity

"If I buy the miner myself and run it at home, I save GoMining's service fee." That's the reasoning almost everyone reaches for, and the fee part is true: it's $0.0089 per TH per day, a small amount. The problem is stopping there, right before the number that actually decides this comparison: what you pay per kWh.

Here's the maths with a real machine sold today, not a made-up example, and with real electricity rates from the US and Spain.

Same miner, two very different power bills

For the comparison to be fair, both sides need the same hardware. Bitmain's Antminer S21 Pro — 234 TH/s, 3,510 W, 15 W/TH efficiency — is one of the best-selling models in 2026 and costs about $2,089 on the market. It's not a coincidence that its efficiency, 15 W/TH, is exactly "the other common level" also sold on GoMining: it's essentially the same piece of hardware being compared.

What changes is how much each side pays for the electricity that machine draws:

GoMining: help.nft.gomining.com/faq/mining, verified July 2026. United States: Q1 2026 residential average per electricity-market sources consulted in July 2026. Spain: average PVPC price for July 2026 per tarifaluzhora.es, which already accounts for the day's hourly swing. Antminer S21 Pro: 234 TH/s, 3,510 W, 15 J/TH and ≈$2,089, price observed at asicmarketplace.com in July 2026 — check the current price before buying, this market moves fast.

Put another way: the exact same electricity, at home, costs 2.4 to 3.4 times more than at GoMining's data centre. It isn't that GoMining has a magic rate: it's a large-volume industrial contract, in some cases with curtailment — powering down at grid demand peaks in exchange for lower transmission tariffs — as explained with real numbers from a 25 MW building in Texas. Nobody negotiates that for one miner in a living room.

With that bill, the same miner loses money at home

With current network data, here's what an Antminer S21 Pro (234 TH/s, 15 W/TH) earns or loses per day depending on where it's plugged in:

Same miner in all three scenarios: 234 TH/s, 15 W/TH. "At home" uses the US residential average (≈$0.17/kWh) and pays no GoMining service fee, since there isn't one when you mine on your own — but it also gets no maintenance discounts, since those are GoMining's. "GoMining" applies the service fee ($0.0089/TH/day) on top of the data-centre rate.

The result isn't a smaller margin: it's that the home scenario can come out negative while the exact same hardware on GoMining stays positive, with the same network and the same bitcoin price. The service fee you were going to "save" by mining at home is tiny next to the electricity-rate gap you take on in exchange.

And electricity isn't the only thing you pay for at home

Electricity is the part that can be calculated precisely, which is why it's the centre of this article. The rest of the differences are just as real even without an exact figure attached:

• Entry capital isn't fractional. On GoMining you buy however many TH you want, starting at 1. At home you buy one whole $2,089 machine, or nothing.
• The noise is real and constant. The Antminer S21 Pro is rated at 75 dB, roughly a vacuum cleaner running non-stop, 24 hours a day. Most homes have nowhere to put that without it becoming a problem for someone.
• The heat has to go somewhere. 3,510 W is, in practice, a large space heater running all year, including in the middle of summer.
• Reselling a used ASIC isn't like reselling an NFT. A GoMining miner sells on a marketplace with a transaction history; a second-hand ASIC sells in person or by courier, with no warranty and a buyer who has no way to verify real wear.
• There's no redundancy. A power cut, a hardware fault, or a network outage at home stops your miner. In a professional data centre, that's exactly what the infrastructure is built to prevent.

What if you only mine during cheap hours?

It's the obvious objection, especially in Spain: the PVPC tariff swings enormously across the day, from about €0.03/kWh at its cheapest hour to over €0.36 at its most expensive. If you could only mine during the cheap hours, the rate would get closer to GoMining's.

The problem is the arithmetic, not the idea. The machine costs $2,089 whether you run it 24 hours or 4. If you only run it during cheap hours, you're still paying 100% of the hardware cost for a fraction of the productive hours, so the effective cost per TH-hour gets worse, not better — unless you reliably automate switching it on and off, 365 days a year, which adds another piece of hardware and another thing that can fail. It isn't a free fix: it's trading one problem for a harder one to automate at home.

Summing up

• Electricity, not the service fee, is what decides this comparison. A home pays 2.4 to 3.4 times more per kWh than GoMining's data centre, for the same machine.
• With that gap, the same hardware can lose money at home and make money on GoMining, with the same network and the same bitcoin price.
• The noise (75 dB, constant) and the heat (3,510 W) are real costs even without a price tag on them.
• "Only mine during cheap hours" doesn't solve the problem: it spreads the same hardware cost over fewer productive hours.
• This maths uses one specific ASIC and specific rates from July 2026: hardware and electricity prices change, check your own before deciding.

Plug your own electricity rate into the calculator to see what would happen with your setup, or compare GoMining against other cloud mining models in this article.