The Canaan Avalon Q needs electricity at 6.70p a kilowatt hour to break even. The cheapest half-hour on Octopus Agile in Eastern England today was 22.37p, and the cheapest in any of the fourteen Agile regions was 21.15p. Neither is close.
We derived that from live network data rather than a calculator. Difficulty at 07:02 UTC was 132,716,002,350,731, which implies 950.0 EH/s of network hashrate. The last 144 blocks paid 3.13801150 BTC each including fees, and bitcoin was £63,494. That is a hashprice of 2.99p per terahash per day after a 1 per cent pool fee.
At 90 TH/s the Avalon Q earns 4,238 satoshis a day, or £2.69. Flat out it draws 1,674W, which is 40.18 kWh a day. At the Ofgem cap rate for Eastern England — 26.61p, derived from Ofgem's own levelisation workbook and matching Octopus's live regional tariff to four decimal places — the power costs £10.69. Mining revenue covers a quarter of the bill.
The modes do not rescue it
Eco mode is the machine's best setting on paper: 53 TH/s at 850W, which is 16.0 J/TH against 18.6 in Super. Better efficiency raises the break-even price, so Eco tolerates 7.77p instead of 6.70p. It still loses £3.84 a day at the capped rate, and it gives up 41 per cent of the hashrate to get there.
Agile is worse than the cap for a machine that runs continuously. Forty-four of today's 48 half-hours had published when we fetched them. The mean was 32.52p, the median 29.63p, the dearest half-hour 51.71p between 17:30 and 18:00. A 24-hour load pays the mean, not the median, and the mean sits above the median because of that evening peak. The four missing half-hours are the cheap overnight ones, so that mean is a little high.
One point in the owner's favour: there is no VAT on domestic electricity from 1 October 2026 to 31 March 2027. Octopus returns identical inclusive and exclusive figures, and Ofgem's cap page says so in terms.
It does install in a British house
This is the Avalon Q's genuine advantage. At 1,674W on 230V it draws 7.28A, which is 56 per cent of an ordinary 13A socket. No commando outlet, no dedicated circuit, no 380–415V three-phase. An American buyer running the same unit at 110V draws 15.22A and needs a 20A circuit. Three-phase requirements have killed better machines than this one for home use.
The heat is the other half of that argument. 1,674W is 5,712 BTU/h of controllable warmth and 14,664 kWh a year — about 5.9 times an average British household's annual electricity, on Ofgem's 2,500 kWh benchmark. If you were going to run a 1.7kW heater anyway, the 4,238 satoshis a day is a rebate on heat you were buying regardless. That is the only framing in which the sums work, and it is how Canaan positions the rest of its Home series.
What we could not verify
Canaan's website returned 403 to us all morning, so every specification here is reseller-stated and should be read that way. We confirmed the machine itself from Canaan's FY2025 annual report, which calls the Avalon Q "our first low-noise home mining device that supports 110V, and is compatible with major global voltage standards" and places it in the Home series alongside the Nano 3 and Mini 3 — different machines, not to be blended with it. The filing gives no hashrate or wattage.
Noise is contested three ways, warranty two, and no UK retailer page would load. US distributor figures of $1,349 to $1,379 work out at £11.34 to £11.59 per terahash ex-VAT, or roughly £13.61 landed once 20 per cent import VAT is added; those bases must not be mixed. For context, Canaan's own 2025 industrial A16 series runs 12.8–13.8 J/TH, so the Avalon Q's 18.6 sits at the bad end of a two-year-old industrial part.
The verdict is not close. Difficulty is estimated to rise 5.13 per cent on 16 October, taking the same hardware to 95 per cent of today's output. Buy this as a heater that pays a small dividend. Do not buy it as a mining machine.
| Break-even electricity | 6.70p/kWh |
| Gross revenue | 4,238 sat, £2.69/day |
| Power at Eastern cap, 26.61p | £10.69/day |
| Net at the cap | −£8.00/day |
| Agile mean today, 32.52p | −£10.38/day |
| Cheapest Agile half-hour | 22.37p east, 21.15p best region |
| Current draw at 230V | 7.28A, 56% of a 13A plug |
| Annual consumption | 14,664 kWh, 5.9x a household |
| Efficiency, Super / Eco | 18.6 / 16.0 J/TH, derived |
| Price per terahash | £11.34/TH ex-VAT, US seller |
| Next difficulty change | +5.13% est., 16 October |
Sources, all retrieved 12 October 2026: mempool.space for difficulty, network hashrate and the 144-block reward including fees; CoinGecko for the bitcoin price in sterling; the Octopus Energy API for Agile Eastern England, 44 of 48 half-hours published when we fetched them; Ofgem's cap page and levelisation workbook for the period in force to 31 December 2026; Canaan's FY2025 Form 20-F for the machine. Profitability is derived here in Python, not taken from a calculator. Contested: Canaan's site returned 403, so every specification is reseller-stated — noise is quoted as 45–65, 39–47 and 75 dB, warranty as 360 days or twelve months. No UK retailer page loaded, so sterling prices are converted at 1.322 dated 9 October and the landed figure is our own estimate. Difficulty implies 950.0 EH/s against mempool's measured 1,007.2; we used the former. Prices are ex-VAT unless stated. Not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold anything, and mining receipts and disposals are taxable.