How to Mine Bitcoin at Home (2026)

A plain, step-by-step guide to mining Bitcoin at home in 2026: the three kinds of home hardware, what each needs in power, wiring, noise and heat, how to get it online and paid to an address you control, and how pooled and solo mining differ. Every cost and odds figure is dated to late October 2026, and at typical household electricity prices the running cost is higher than the bitcoin a home machine is expected to earn.

Category: Mining and the Network · Published 2026-10-28

Editorial review complete · technical review pending · sources under review · time-sensitive: revisit periodically

What home mining is in 2026

Bitcoin mining is a guessing game played at enormous speed. A miner takes a candidate block header, runs it through SHA-256 and checks whether the result falls below a target the whole network agrees on. Almost every guess fails, so the machine changes a number and tries again, trillions of times a second. The Bitcoin whitepaper calls this proof-of-work.¹ The miner that finds a passing result adds the next block, and the block's first transaction pays that miner newly created coins plus the fees of the transactions inside.¹

The reward today is the block subsidy, 3.125 BTC since the April 2024 halving, plus those fees; a recent block paid about 3.13 BTC in total (as of 27 October 2026). To keep blocks arriving about every ten minutes, the network recalculates the difficulty every 2,016 blocks against an ideal of two weeks, raising it when blocks came too fast and lowering it when they came too slowly.² On 27 October 2026 the difficulty stood at 140.58 T. Using the standard relationship, hashrate ≈ difficulty × 2³² ÷ 600 seconds, that is roughly 1,000 exahashes a second across the whole network (worked out by us).

A home machine is a speck against that. A Bitaxe Gamma, a popular hobby board, does about 1.2 terahashes a second,³ roughly one part in 840 million of the network at that difficulty (worked out by us). So home mining comes down to one choice. You can join a pooled (shared-reward) pool that pays a small, steady trickle for your work, or mine solo and hold what is really a lottery ticket for a whole block. Bitcoin's developer guide describes the same trade: large payments with higher variance, or small payments with lower variance.⁴

Every machine in this guide uses ASIC chips, which do SHA-256 hashing and nothing else.⁴ One honest point before the steps: at typical household electricity prices, most home miners cost more to run than the bitcoin they are expected to produce. People run them anyway, to learn how Bitcoin works from the inside, to warm a room they would heat regardless, or for a small chance at a block. Those are reasonable reasons. Income is not one of them.

The three kinds of home hardware

Home machines fall into three groups, and the right one depends less on ambition than on your wiring and how much noise your household will accept. Ratings below are the makers' own. Earnings are SoloLuck's model-page figures at the 27 October 2026 difficulty and a bitcoin price of about US$80,400, before electricity; each model has a page in the hardware catalog with today's numbers.

Hobby boards. The Bitaxe is an open-source miner whose designs are published on GitHub. The Gamma carries one BM1370 chip, the same chip Bitmain uses in its Antminer S21 Pro, and its designers rate it at about 1.2 TH/s.³ It runs on 5 volts DC only, from a supply that can deliver more than 4 amps (about 20 watts), and mines over your Wi-Fi.³ The NerdQAxe++, another open-source board, does about 4.8 TH/s for about 76 W. They draw little power and earn very little: about $0.17 a day for a NerdQAxe++ before electricity, roughly 4 cents for a Bitaxe Gamma (worked out by us). They are popular all the same. At its reading of 27 October 2026, 15:07 UTC, the Solo Mining Census counted 17,206 Bitaxes on one public solo pool, Public Pool, averaging 1.06 TH/s each.

Compact home units. These are factory-built ASICs designed for living spaces. Canaan's Avalon Nano 3S delivers 6 TH/s at a maximum of 140 watts, runs at 30 to 40 dB and doubles as a small desktop heater.⁵ The Avalon Mini 3 is as slim as a baseboard heater and pairs 37.5 TH/s with 800 watts of heating output.⁵ The Avalon Q is the big one: up to 90 TH/s, power adjustable from about 800 W and rated at 1,674 W at full power, a 110 to 240 volt input and a noise range of 45 to 65 dB.⁶ Before electricity, an Avalon Q is expected to earn about $3.24 a day and a Mini 3 about $1.35.

Industrial ASICs, used or new. Antminers are built for mining farms, and their spec sheets show it. Bitmain rates the Antminer S21 at 200 TH/s for 3,500 W, on a 220 to 277 volt supply through a single 20-amp input.⁷ It is expected to earn about $7.21 a day before electricity, and the newer Antminer S23 (305 TH/s, 3,355 W) about $11.00. Older models turn up secondhand, so check the numbers first: an Antminer S19 (95 TH/s, 3,250 W) earns about $3.42 a day before power and an S9 (13.5 TH/s, 1,350 W) about $0.49, turning a lot of electricity into very little work.

The figure that ties all of this together is efficiency, in joules per terahash (J/TH): the energy a machine spends for each unit of work. Lower is better. The S23 runs at about 11 J/TH, the S21 at 17.5, the Avalon Q at 18.6,⁶ the S19 at about 34 and the S9 at about 100. At home, efficiency decides your running cost more than hashrate does.

Power, wiring and the electricity bill

The running cost is simple arithmetic. Watts × hours ÷ 1,000 gives kilowatt-hours, and kilowatt-hours × your price gives the bill. A Bitaxe Gamma at about 20 W uses roughly 0.5 kWh a day. An Avalon Q at full power uses about 40 kWh a day, and an Antminer S21 uses 84 kWh, every day, all year (worked out by us).

Then take your price. In the United States the average residential price was 18.16 cents per kWh in August 2026, from 12.72 cents in Nevada to 47.18 cents in Hawaii, in the Energy Information Administration's figures released on 23 October 2026.⁸ In Great Britain, Ofgem's price cap for 1 October to 31 December 2026 sets an average electricity unit rate of 26.32p per kWh for Direct Debit customers, plus a daily standing charge.⁹ German households paid an average of 37.97 euro cents per kWh in the first half of 2026, according to the federal statistics office.¹⁰ In Canada and Australia prices vary by province and state; use the unit rate on your bill.

Set that against what a machine earns. At 10 US cents per kWh, well under any of those averages, SoloLuck's model pages show an S21 losing about $1.19 a day, an S19 $4.38 and an Avalon Q $0.77, while an S21 Pro roughly breaks even and an S23 makes about $2.94 (27 October 2026). A rule of thumb worked out by us from the same figures: a machine covers its electricity only when your price in US dollars per kWh is below about 1.5 divided by its J/TH. That is about 8.6 cents for an S21 and 13.6 cents for an S23. At the US average of 18.16 cents, every machine named here costs more to run than it is expected to earn. Even at Nevada's 12.72 cents only an S23-class machine covers its power, and British and German prices are higher again.

In money: at the US average an S21 burns about $15.25 of electricity a day against about $7.21 of expected bitcoin, and in Great Britain at the October cap its electricity comes to about £22 a day (worked out by us). None of this counts the price of the machine, and when the difficulty rises the same machine earns less. The mining calculator runs these sums with current figures and your own tariff.

Wiring needs differ completely between the three groups.

• Hobby boards: use the 5-volt supply the board was designed for. The Bitaxe Gamma takes 5 V DC only, and anything else will damage it.³
• Compact home units: Canaan built the Avalon Q for household supplies from 110 to 240 volts,⁶ but at full power on a 110 to 120 volt outlet it draws roughly 14 to 15 amps (worked out by us). Treat it like a space heater. The US National Fire Protection Association advises one heat-producing appliance per outlet and says major appliances belong directly in a wall outlet, without extension cords or plug strips.¹¹ In the UK a plug socket can safely handle up to 13 amps, and extension leads are usually rated at 13 amps or 3,000 watts.¹² At 230 volts the Avalon Q draws about 7.3 amps (worked out by us), but it still wants a socket of its own.
• Industrial ASICs: an S21 needs 220 to 277 volts on a single 20-amp input,⁷ more current than a UK plug socket is built for¹² and more voltage than a 110 to 120 volt outlet provides. That means a dedicated circuit put in by a qualified electrician, who is the person the NFPA says should do all electrical work.¹¹

Know the warning signs the NFPA lists: breakers that trip often, wall outlets that feel warm or look discoloured, and a burning or rubbery smell.¹¹ Any of those means switching the machine off and calling an electrician.

Noise, heat and where the machine lives

Noise is the first thing a household notices. For scale, the US National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders puts normal conversation at 60 to 70 dBA and a movie theater at 74 to 104 dBA.¹³ Canaan rates the Avalon Nano 3S at 30 to 40 dB and the Mini 3 from 33 dB, with an ultra-quiet Night mode.⁵ The Avalon Q runs from 45 dB in its quietest setting, which Canaan likens to a quiet library, up to 65 dB.⁶ Bitmain publishes no noise figure for the S21,⁷ but rates its S21 Pro sibling at 76 dBA:¹⁴ louder than a conversation, day and night. That is a garage or outbuilding machine, not a living-room one.

Heat is the other side of the same bill. Almost all the electricity a miner draws ends up as heat in the room, as with any plug-in electric heater; Canaan sells the Mini 3 on exactly that basis, as 800 watts of heating output that also mines.⁵ A Bitaxe adds about 20 watts of warmth. An S21 turns 3,500 watts into heat around the clock,⁷ so in a small closed room in summer it needs cool air coming in and hot air going out.

The heat is the best argument for mining at home, but only against the right comparison. If you would otherwise warm the same room with plug-in electric heaters, a miner gives the same heat for the same electricity, plus a small chance at bitcoin. Against gas the sums change. Under Ofgem's October to December 2026 cap, electricity costs 26.32p per kWh and gas 7.97p,⁹ so a kWh of heat from a miner costs about three times as much as a kWh of gas. A heat pump is harder still to beat: the Energy Saving Trust says heat pumps are more than three times more efficient than a gas or oil boiler.¹⁵

Pick the spot before you buy. It needs a socket that can carry the load, room for air to carry the heat away, open vents, and nothing that burns close by. The NFPA points out that fires can start when heat builds up near things that burn, such as cloth or paper, or where a cord runs under a carpet.¹¹

Getting it online

The Bitaxe Gamma mines over Wi-Fi,³ and the Avalon Q is controlled through Canaan's Avalon Family app.⁵ Antminers are wired machines with no Wi-Fi, so an S21 needs an Ethernet cable to your router or a switch. Bandwidth is not a worry. Pools commonly use the Stratum protocol, which gives a miner only the minimal information it needs to build block headers.⁴ What matters is that the connection stays up, because a machine that cannot reach its pool cannot submit its work.

Setup is much the same on every machine: power it on, connect it to your network and open its settings in a web browser or the maker's app. You will find three fields: the pool's address, which each pool publishes together with a port number; a username; and a password. On many solo pools the username is simply your Bitcoin address, sometimes with a short worker name added after a dot so you can tell machines apart. Pooled services usually have you register an account and use that name instead. Copy the pool's own instructions exactly. A worker name is only a label: it changes nothing about your odds or your earnings per hash.

If the machine's web panel has a default password, change it. And update firmware only from the maker's own website or the project's official repository, never from a link a stranger sends you.

A wallet address you control

Whichever pool you choose, your bitcoin ends up at an address, and that address should belong to a wallet whose keys you hold. The bitcoin.org guide to securing a wallet puts it plainly: when a third party controls your keys, you rely entirely on its security and honesty, and exchanges and online wallets can be hacked, fail or freeze access to funds.¹⁶

• Choose a wallet. A well-established mobile or desktop wallet is fine to begin with; bitcoin.org calls hardware wallets the best balance between very high security and ease of use.¹⁶
• Back up the recovery phrase, offline. Most modern wallets can restore every past and future address from one backup of the recovery phrase.¹⁶ Write it on paper, keep it somewhere safe, and never type it into a website, a miner's settings page or a chat. Anyone who gets hold of it can restore your wallet and spend from it.
• Create a receiving address and copy it exactly. Paste it, then check the first and last few characters against the wallet before you save the pool settings.

On a solo pool your address usually goes in the username field, and the pool builds each block's coinbase transaction, the one that pays the reward, to that address.⁴ If your machine finds a block, the reward goes straight to you. It follows that nobody legitimate will ever ask for your recovery phrase to "activate" a miner or "verify" a payout; that request is a scam. There is more in getting a Bitcoin address for mining, seed phrase safety and how to avoid crypto scams.

Pooled or solo

A pooled service sets its own target a few orders of magnitude easier than the network's. Each hash that beats the pool's target is a share, proof that your machine did a share of the work, and when the pool finds a block it pays out the reward according to shares.⁴ Pools differ in how they pay:¹⁷

• PPS (pay per share) pays a fixed amount for every share, whether or not the pool finds a block. The pool carries the risk, so it charges more for it.¹⁷
• FPPS (full pay per share) works like PPS but also shares out part of the transaction fees.¹⁷
• PPLNS (pay per last N shares) divides each block the pool actually finds among the most recent shares, so your income follows the pool's luck.¹⁷

Before you pick a pooled service, check its minimum payout against what your machine earns. A Bitaxe Gamma's share works out to about 54 satoshis a day before fees at the 27 October 2026 difficulty and price (worked out by us), so a high minimum can take a very long time to reach.

Solo mining drops the sharing. You are paid only if your own machine finds a block, and then the whole reward is yours, the subsidy and the fees,⁴ less anything the pool's published terms keep. That makes it a lottery, not a job. The expected time to a block, in seconds, is the network difficulty × 2³² ÷ your hashrate. At the 27 October 2026 difficulty of 140.58 T that gives:

• Bitaxe Gamma (about 1.2 TH/s): about 16,000 years on average, a 1 in 5,800,000 chance on any given day
• NerdQAxe++ (about 4.8 TH/s): about 4,000 years, 1 in 1,500,000 a day
• Avalon Nano 3S (6 TH/s): about 3,200 years, 1 in 1,200,000 a day
• Avalon Q (90 TH/s): about 210 years, 1 in 78,000 a day
• Antminer S21 (200 TH/s): about 96 years, 1 in 35,000 a day
• Antminer S23 (305 TH/s): about 63 years, 1 in 23,000 a day

Those are averages, not countdowns. Every hash is a fresh draw with the same tiny chance, so a machine that has run for a year is no closer to a block than on its first morning, and a lucky one can win on day one. Nothing about the result is certain, and none of it is income. The pool you pick, its distance from you and your worker name do not change the odds per hash; only more hashrate does. Over the long run and before fees, pooled and solo mining pay the same expected amount for the same work; pooling changes how smoothly it arrives. The odds calculator works out any hashrate, and how solo mining probability works explains the maths.

Small machines do still win. SoloLuck's Solo Block Record lists more than 40 solo-mined Bitcoin blocks since 2022, found mostly by small and home miners and each verified on the chain (as of 28 October 2026). A single NerdQAxe++ found block 945,601 on 18 April 2026; a Bitaxe Gamma found block 957,382 on 10 July 2026. The reason is numbers, not skill. Between them, the 17,206 Bitaxes in the 27 October census reading would expect about one block every 383 days (worked out by us), and for any one owner of a similar machine, the chance that the next one is theirs is roughly 1 in 17,000.

What to expect in the first week

Day one. Within a few minutes of connecting, the pool's dashboard should show your machine and its shares. The pool estimates your hashrate from those shares, so for a small machine the figure jumps around; pool hashrate versus miner hashrate explains why. After an hour at full power, check the plug and the wall outlet, since warm or discoloured outlets are on the NFPA's list of warning signs,¹¹ and look at the machine's own temperature readings.

The meter. Over seven days a Bitaxe Gamma uses about 3.4 kWh, an Avalon Q at full power about 281 kWh and an Antminer S21 about 588 kWh. At the US average price of 18.16 cents,⁸ that is roughly $0.61, $51 and $107 for the week (worked out by us). Read your own meter at the start and end of the week, so the decision rests on your numbers.

On a pooled service, expect a balance that grows by a few satoshis a day, about 380 a week for a Bitaxe Gamma at 27 October 2026 figures (worked out by us).

On a solo pool, expect nothing, almost certainly. The chance of a block in the first week is about 1 in 830,000 for a Bitaxe Gamma, 1 in 11,000 for an Avalon Q and 1 in 5,000 for an S21 (worked out by us at the 27 October 2026 difficulty). The dashboard will show a "best share" or "best difficulty" that climbs quickly at first and then more and more slowly. That number is a record of your luckiest hash so far, not progress toward a block, and the next hash has the same chance whatever the record says.

If a block does land, the reward is written to your address in that block, but it cannot be spent until 100 more blocks have been added on top,² about 16 to 17 hours at the ten-minute average. What happens when you find a block covers the rest.

Records and tax. Log dates, payouts and electricity from the start. The IRS lists mining among the income reported on Schedule 1 of Form 1040,¹⁸ and HMRC taxes mining that is not a trade as miscellaneous income, at the coins' sterling value when received.¹⁹ Elsewhere, check your own tax authority.

At the end of the week, put your real electricity price and your machine into the calculator. If the electricity costs more than you want to spend on a hobby, switching off is a perfectly good result of the experiment.

Key takeaways

• Mining at home means running an ASIC machine and choosing between a pooled pool, which pays a small steady share, and solo mining, which is a long-odds lottery for a whole block.
• Electricity decides the economics: at the US average of 18.16 cents per kWh (August 2026), every machine in this guide costs more to run than it is expected to earn on 27 October 2026 figures.
• Bitaxe boards and Canaan's Avalon units are made for homes, while an Antminer S21 needs 220 to 277 volts on a 20-amp input, a cable to your router and somewhere the noise and heat do no harm.
• Mine to an address from a wallet whose keys you hold, and keep its recovery phrase offline and private.
• Solo odds are an average, not a countdown: a Bitaxe Gamma's mean wait is about 16,000 years at the 27 October 2026 difficulty, and nothing about a block is certain.
• In the first week expect shares, a turning electricity meter and, almost certainly, no block.

Sources

1. Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, the whitepaper: proof-of-work with SHA-256, and the first transaction in a block paying new coins plus transaction fees to the block's creator — bitcoin.org
2. Bitcoin developer guide, Block chain: difficulty is recalculated every 2,016 blocks against an ideal of two weeks, and a coinbase output cannot be spent for at least 100 blocks — Bitcoin Project (developer.bitcoin.org)
3. Bitaxe Gamma README: one BM1370 chip from the Antminer S21 Pro, about 1.2 TH/s, 5 V DC only from a supply of more than 4 A (20 W), mines over Wi-Fi, open-source hardware — bitaxeorg on GitHub
4. Bitcoin developer guide, Mining: solo mining (large payments, higher variance) versus pooled mining (small payments, lower variance), shares and the pool's easier target, ASIC hardware, the coinbase transaction and the Stratum protocol — Bitcoin Project (developer.bitcoin.org)
5. Canaan press release, 24 September 2026: Avalon Nano 3S (6 TH/s, 140 W maximum, 30 to 40 dB, desktop heater), Avalon Mini 3 (37.5 TH/s with 800 W of heating output, from 33 dB, Heater, Mining and Night modes) and Avalon Q (90 TH/s, from 45 dB, Avalon Family app) — Canaan Inc. via PR Newswire
6. Canaan press release, 27 March 2025: Avalon Q specification (90 TH/s, 18.6 J/TH, 1,674 W, 110 to 240 V AC input, adjustable 800 to 1,600 W, noise range 45 to 65 dB, prototype figures) — Canaan Inc. via PR Newswire
7. Antminer S21 model page: the maker's rating of 200 TH/s at 3,500 W, its 220 to 277 V single 20 A input, no noise figure published, and 3,500 W of heat around the clock — SoloLuck
8. Electric Power Monthly, Table 5.6.A (released 23 October 2026): average residential price 18.16 cents per kWh in August 2026 (preliminary), from 12.72 cents in Nevada to 47.18 cents in Hawaii — U.S. Energy Information Administration
9. Energy price cap, 1 October to 31 December 2026: average Direct Debit unit rates of 26.32p per kWh for electricity and 7.97p per kWh for gas (England, Scotland and Wales) — Ofgem
10. Press release no. 345 of 30 September 2026 (in German): households paid an average of 37.97 euro cents per kWh for electricity in the first half of 2026 — Federal Statistical Office of Germany (Destatis)
11. Electrical safety tip sheet: one heat-producing appliance per outlet, major appliances straight into a wall outlet without extension cords or plug strips, electrical work by a qualified electrician, warning signs such as tripping breakers and warm outlets, heat building up near things that burn — National Fire Protection Association (NFPA)
12. Sockets and extension cables: every plug socket can safely handle up to 13 amps, extension leads are usually rated 13 amps or 3,000 watts, one plug per socket for heaters — Lichfield District Council
13. Noise-induced hearing loss: average decibel ratings of familiar sounds, including normal conversation at 60 to 70 dBA and a movie theater at 74 to 104 dBA — National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIH)
14. Antminer S21 Pro model page: rated 76 dBA with the fans at full speed (Bitmain's figure) — SoloLuck
15. Air source heat pumps: heat pumps are more than three times more efficient than a gas or oil boiler — Energy Saving Trust
16. Secure your wallet: the risk of letting a third party hold your keys, backing up the recovery phrase, hardware wallets — bitcoin.org
17. Comparison of mining pools: definitions of the PPS, FPPS and PPLNS payout methods — Bitcoin Wiki
18. Digital assets: income from mining is reported on Form 1040, Schedule 1 — Internal Revenue Service
19. Cryptoassets Manual CRYPTO21150, mining transactions: where mining is not a trade, the sterling value of tokens at receipt is taxable as miscellaneous income, less appropriate expenses — HM Revenue and Customs

Some specific claims in this article are scheduled for further source review; citations may be expanded (see our editorial policy).

Related educational reading

• How Solo-Mining Probability Works
• How to Evaluate Bitcoin Mining Hardware
• What Happens When a Bitcoin Miner Finds a Block?
• How to Protect a Bitcoin Recovery Phrase
• How Mining Pool Hashrate Estimates Work