BTC mining on GPUs uses a ton of power, like quadruple-the-monthly-power-bill-in-your-apartment kind of power. If you're willing to pay the energy company and bring more harm to the environment for something, I don't feel like you're really thinking about the true cost. I'd rather just pay up-front on simple terms.
The monthly power bill in my apartment is consistently $7 / month. If it went up by a factor of 5, I'd never notice; a while ago I got fed up and paid several months in advance because it seemed so ridiculous to have a $7 bill every month.
What's a typical power bill like, and what's going on with mine?
(my power uses - lights, fridge, and one to two old computers in a 400 sq. ft. apartment in downtown SF)
I live in a 4 bedroom house in Hawaii. My power bill is usually around $200. We don't have A/C or anything other than your typical household appliances. Hot water heater gets a solar credit applied to it. Then again our price/kWh is $0.35 which is significantly higher than the rest of the country.
Sometimes if the meter is not accessible by an electricity company they'll just use an 'estimated' reading from past bills. Could be your lucky enough to be stuck with some very low past estimated reading.
I do not have A/C, heat, a microwave, or a dryer (I'm not even allowed to install a washing machine...). I get hot water, but I imagine there's a central source of that for the whole building.
An hour of GPU is not much. I think a single GPU can do a few Megahashes per second. To hit one BTC/day you would need about 20 Gigahashes per second all day.
I think they'd make a bunch more by showing you the ads.
But 1btc/day is >$100/day. They don't make that much on a single client showing ads. More like $0.10 at most, or 0.001btc (which takes much less mining power).
I don't know how popular their client is but I have a HD7970 which is not bad at all (enough to run any currently released game on full settings) and when I don't game I let it mine which gives me about $0.5 - $0.75 a day.
An HD7970 can peak at around 200W consumption, so the entire PC is probably consuming around 300W, or about 7kwh per day. I pay $.11 per kWH, so I would be losing money on the deal.
