Small home miners – what the Avalon Mini 3 and Avalon Q can and cannot do

A commercial miner needs its own electrical circuit and a room where noise does not bother anyone. Home miners need neither. In return, they are built for something else.

The two units

Avalon Mini 3

• 37.5 TH/s at 800 W
• 33 to 55 dB, depending on the operating mode
• built as a heater, with the operating modes heating, mining and night; in heating mode either 500 or 800 W
• 110 to 240 V

Avalon Q

• three levels at 800 W, 1,300 W and 1,674 W; 90 TH/s at the highest
• 45 to 65 dB
• LAN and Wi-Fi
• 110 to 240 V

At 230 V, both stay below 10 A even at the highest level and may therefore run continuously on a normal socket.

What they are good for

Hobby and learning

With a home miner you learn everything that also applies to large installations: setting up a pool, reading hashrate and temperatures, tracking payouts. The cost of learning stays small because the unit and its power consumption are small.

Heating

800 W is a small fan heater, 1,674 W a medium-sized one. In winter the unit replaces an electric heater in the study or the workshop and pays back part of the electricity through the mining revenue. In summer you switch it off or put it in a room that can take the heat.

Lottery mining

Instead of earning a small, regular share in a pool, you can mine alone for an entire block. If your unit finds it, the whole block reward is yours. If it finds none, you get nothing.

The odds can be calculated:

Expected blocks per day = 144 × your hashrate ÷ network hashrate

A worked example with an assumed network hashrate of 1,000 EH/s (at the end of September 2026 the 30-day average was 948 EH/s according to Hashrate Index): an Avalon Q with 90 TH/s finds a block every 211 years on average, an Avalon Mini 3 every 507 years. This is an average, not a waiting time. The block can come tomorrow or never.

Lottery mining is therefore exactly what the name says: a ticket that is drawn anew every day. The stake is the electricity. If you mine this way, you should need the unit as a heater anyway.

What they cannot do

• Turn a profit on household electricity. At normal household tariffs the electricity usually costs more than the unit earns. What you get in return is the heat.
• Keep up with large units. They are at 18 to 21 J/TH. Current commercial units need considerably less per terahash.
• Heat a house. It is enough for one room; for a building you need a hydro unit on the heating circuit.

Who they suit

Anyone who wants to understand mining before getting in on a larger scale, rooms that are heated electrically anyway, and the daily ticket. If you are looking for revenue, you need cheap electricity and a commercial unit.

Sources

• Canaan: operating modes of the Avalon Mini 3
• Hashrate Index: Avalon Mini 3, specifications
• Canaan: press release on the Avalon Q with specifications
• Hashrate Index: weekly report of 28 September 2026, network hashrate

As of October 2026. The worked example is not a promise of revenue.