The recent influx of new users into cryptocurrency has brought some older-generation miners back into the profitable range for many. The S9 is one such miner, Ever since its release it has been seen as one of the best miners that Bitmain has released. It does not fail easily is much cooler and they are much more compact compared to the newer models, however, these factors do not matter if they are not bringing in extra BCH for you to spend.
First off we need to weigh up the risks of ASIC mining. ASICs are purpose-built for a reason and that reason is to make money for their owners however it is not just as simple as plugging in the miner and leaving it for the foreseeable future. We have to look at its power consumption along with how we will dissipate the heat it creates, for the sake of simplicity I will be talking primarily about the S9 14TH/s version with stock firmware but I will be adding extra calculations at the end along with links to places where you will be able to improve the efficiency of the miner with custom firmware.
Heat
The heat it creates can be a problem for most residential miners as they do not normally have industrial level fans just laying around, to be able to mine in a residential setting we should be looking for a place far away from where many people will gather or where you sleep as it can create lots of noise, one way we can get around the heat and noise is by mining outside in a customs shed or if that is not an option maybe a garage which has a way of circulating the air.
Power Consumption
the S9 uses 1372W of power which is not a lot compared to many of the newer miners which can easily use over 2000W of power however the issue here is that while most households within the United States can supply this power for just one of them the issue comes when you want to scale up your operation as you will have to have adequate 240V power for the miner to operate and to not cause electrical issues.
Co-Locations
If we take the average US household electric rate of 0.12$ per kWh most S9 miners will not currently be profitable, however, if we use a Co-location which is normally a warehouse either in another state or country we can use the cheaper electric rate and the management of the heat to our advantage as good co-location will have the power infrastructure and the head dissipation systems to manage large sets of miners are once, one such co-location is Compute North which has an electric rate as low as 0.07$ per KWh which is well within profitability in the current market making you some bitcoin cash to be able to spend on things you want without even having to manage it yourself.
Main variants of the S9
Bitmain Antminer S9 Hydro (18Th)
Custom S9 firmware
Mining pools
Profitability calculators