Bitcoin Forum

Let's collect, in this thread, anecdotes about mining accidents having caused physical damage such as: high temperatures destroying hardware, insulation melting on power cords, fires (gasp!), etc.

I'll start with one from a friend of mine (who shall remain anonymous): he lives in a place with old 120V electrical wiring. He put a rig of ~1.6kW (~13A), as measured by a kill-a-watt, on a 20A circuit for about half a day, until he started smelling smoke in his apartment, apparently coming from the wiring inside the walls. He completely stopped using this circuit, and now runs his rig on a dedicated 240V circuit. A 20A circuit is normally rated 16A for continuous loads by the National Electric Code, but that old wiring was likely defective and the insulation probably started melting.

Another from me: a fan failed on one of my HD 5970s. My monitoring data showed that the fan speed dropped to 0 percent for some reason, causing the temperature of one of the GPUs to quickly spike to 105 C for about half an hour, while the other GPU remained at a relatively safer 90 C. My miner then hung, causing the temperatures to drop back to normal idle levels. This has destroyed one of the GPUs on this card. Since then, any attempt to launch a GPGPU app quickly triggers an ASIC hang. The fan on this card still works, so perhaps it was a firmware bug controlling the fan that stopped it.

Im afraid of reading this thread and become paranoic

When installing new hardware in "modified" cases I have repeatedly cut myself on sharp metal edges. Oh, and quite a few times I've touched spinning fans, which causes some damage as well.

I broke a nail assembling my miner hardware. ;D

i've gotten a couple of fingertip owies from unshrouded fans, and a knuckle cut from the sharp edge of an internal drive cage.

i also lost a shirt cuff button when i inadvertently closed a case on it.  i liked that button, dammit.

I have my fingers in fans all day erry day, nothing happened until now though, but it's always a shock.

I lost a finger nail from a 5400 RMP Gentle Typhoon liquid cooling fan  :o
Also, I had a small fire start in one of the sockets that the miner was plugged into. Luckly, it was at night, so I was home and caught it in time.

This does not necessarily mean it's caused by mining directly, but more or less, indirectly. I overclocked too much to gain faster mhash/s and rendered the card useless under extreme load. It will shutdown if i were to try and bench it with a stressing program.
This is why i set -f on poclbm to a big higher so that it's not fully stressed.

Jesus. if I wasn't paranoid enough already.

Haha, good thread.

I was trying to figure out why one of my 5830's said fan speed was at 100%, but the temps were 90-95c and RPMs was just -.  I thought the sensor was broken for RPMs.  A little more investigation revealed that the card was being severely throttled (down from 800 to 600 or 300mhz).  I stuck my fingers into the fan, because it was too close to the bottom of the case to see if it was actually spinning or not, and to my dismay, nothing.  It was also almost impossible to turn.

Turns out, the PCIe extension cable I was using for my 3rd 5830 in the case was caught in the fan of the 2nd 5830 in the slot right above it.  I took a screwdriver to it while it was still plugged in and managed to bend it out of the way of the cards.  All cards are working well now.  ;)

Glad i'm not the only one that likes to stick his fingers in fans.

I was working on finding the optimal cooling solution for my miner and so I reached in to the case to unplug a case fan while the computer was running.  All of a sudden I see a huge spark and the comp shuts down.  Of course, I'm crapping my pants at this point but after unplugging the machine and plugging it back in everything came right back with no problem.  No idea what happened but thankfully no physical damage.  At that point I decided that my cooling was ok and no need to mess with it further.

Worst I've had so far is I stood on a plug facing this way up when building my new rig the other day.  >:( >:( :'( :'(
https://i.imgur.com/BNkUE.jpg

Just hoping my house electrics aren't going to catch fire now while I'm away  :-\

Fires! Yikes!  :o

Please install dedicated circuits for your miner rigs!

This is what u need:
12AGW insulated three-strand wire
20A circuit breaker
20A receptacle

Also keep in mind that most power bars are only rated for 15A (continuous load needs to be 20% less than max load!).

I had a decent Belkin power bar attached and it tripped after a few minutes with three mining rigs connected. The 20A circuit breaker did not trip, as it was well within spec drawing around 1800 watts @ 120 volts, or 15 amps.

With a properly installed 20A circuit, the continuous current draw can be 1900 watts @ 120 volts (or 1750 watts @ 110 volts).

A Kill-A-Watt meter is a very handy tool, it is so cheap there is no excuse not to have one!

exactly my experience :P

and once i hold finger on my fully working 5970 for too long

My mining rigs have kicked the breaker in my house once, but beyond that I don't have any scary mining stories.

Hardware stories though?
Once I was replacing the thermal paste on my CPU, I got some thermal paste on my hand and didn't wash it off. (That's a BIG mistake depending on what type of thermal paste...)

I now have a permanent chemical burn on my hand from CPU thermal paste...
Any skin I have that grows over the burn dies at a very accelerated rate, it looks like psoriasis.

did you go to the doctor for that?

Good lord! Cut it off man, before it spreads!  ;D

www.bitcoinminingaccidents.com (http://www.bitcoinminingaccidents.com)

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access / on this server.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Not a 100% mining related accident, but I found out the hard way that my whole flat has a 16A fuse (which is BEFORE my circuit breaker... and of course irreplaceable without redoing the whole wiring in the flat and probably house).

At least now I know about it and will be more careful when planning to boil water for tea while having the washing machine switched on.

Nah, I didn't go to a doctor, I went over the affected area with a razor blade as soon as I realized it was burning, to get out the skin and chemicals.
I washed off what I could, and I tried to cut the chemicals out of my skin, but I didn't get all of it.
I don't have prints there anymore.
It's on the right side of my right hand's index finger.

I would, but you'd have to pay me for it.  :P

Dang, I had no idea thermal paste could do that!

that sounds very painful. That will probably remind me to wear gloves when handling ANY chemical.

really?  interesting.

what brand of thermal paste, and what was the formulation:  silver?  zinc?  how long did it stay on your skin?  how long have the prints been gone?  much pain?

I just realized, this could be valuable information.  ;D

took you eight minutes longer than me.  8)

Tell me what thermal paste you were using, I want to put smiley faces into my fingerprints!

I'm guessing it was silver compound, when I was in chem class we were told to be very careful with it or we'll get a chemical burn that will stain the skin for a very long time when we were handling solutions with silver in it. Just a guess, lemme know if I'm right plox!

and remember to wash beforehand in the bathroom.

It was either Arctic Silver 5 or it was an OEM brand. Those are the only types I've worked with.
I don't remember exactly which it was.

Strange.  He must be really unlucky.  I've had every imaginable type of heatsinking compound all over my fingers before and never had any side effects from it.

Typical stuff, cut fingers while working with cheap cases and fingers hurt by fans.

Did you actually measure the current with the Kill-a-watt? Most my computer have a power factor of about 0.67. That means that for every 100W (833mA resistive), the actual current draw is closer to 1.24 amps. or in your example, 19.9 amps. My kill-a-watt is only rated to measure up to 15Amps, IIRC.

Yep, he did measure. I am pretty sure his PSU had active PFC, so pf = 1.0.

That is makes me worry.  I am putting a lot of load on my old house wiring.  The electrics were redone sometime after grounded plugs became standard, but it is still very old.  Yay for 100+ year old houses...

Yeah, that story actually made me purchase a kill-a-watt.

Just almost set my entire mining rig room on fire... (http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=13951.0) With shitty PSUs apparantly.

I hooked up 2*850W raidmax gold PSUs to 6 video cards and it started smoking like crazy.

I can hook up 6 * video cards to a 1200 watt gold psu with no problems whatsoever.

WTF raidmax?!? You made me inhale some kind of weird assed fumes!

Thank you EU for our 230 V power.

Hey US, enjoy your doubled current drain at your wall socket  ;D

Enjoy your half-assed amperage in yours.    8)

One of the power MOSFET's shot a sizable flame out the back of my 5770 no more than 3 minutes after getting my very first rig together (talk about a bad omen eh?).  Luckily there I was still able to figure out the part number by looking at other transistors and pics on the internet and soldered a new one in place with what was probably my single worse soldering job in my life.

*shrug*

6 one way, a half dozen the other.

Gigabyte's 5870s have very sharp fan blades that barely have a housing.  It is a good deterrent to sticking one's hand in a running machine.  Ouch!

nobody has posted this yet?

https://i.imgur.com/ieNK0.png

So far just a pretty serious papercut from a 5830 box...seriously, it was very deep, like a knife cut.

Damn dude, I'm gonna have to feature you on my site again!

Broke my wrist last month in datacenter after hitting concrete wall; Multiple machines in the farm kept going offline due to ethernet failures or GPU freezes. The thing is, this was happening continuously at 2-5 AM for many days and I kept waking up on automatic text message alarm.

There is no personnel at night besides guard at the lobby and access is purely on keycard basis, so I have to drive 6 kilometers every time.

I'm usually very professional but that broke the camels back (yes, I realize it does not solve anything and is primitive. I was tired). Fortunately the problems went away after installing dedicated ethernet cards as suggested by sysadmin the following day.

I've covered that at this link. (http://www.bitcoinminingaccidents.com/?p=196) I would like to get in touch with that poster for an interview, if they can step forward.

I think I have a problem in the making.  My circuit breaker would occasionally start buzzing, but it never actually tripped.  I have been counting on the assumption that the circuit breaker will trip if I have too much plugged in so I thought it wasn't dangerous.  But just adding up the wattages on everything that's plugged in gets me to like 2kW when it's all on a 15A breaker, so I'm sure I'm overloading it at least a little. 

The buzzing isn't constant or anything, and I will eventually move some of the equipment once everything has been built, but should I be worried at the moment?

Yes.  You should never load a circuit with more than 80% continuous load.  The wiring isn't built to carry that much load, and could be overheating and on the way to starting a fire.

That said, you should verify the ACTUAL power draw of each of your rigs before coming to conclusions.  For instance, a GTX295 "requires" a 680w PSU minimum, but the actual draw from the wall of a full-fledged system under load running a GTX295 is only 487w, according to tomshardware.com.

Damn.  I very nearly went Raidmax for a dual PSU setup.  I may have been saved from calamity by misleading advertising - I exchanged them upon noticing that it wasn't really a modular cable system. 

Oh, and I voice my support for Kill-O-Watts.  Cheap and incredibly useful in helping me obey the golden rule of 1 rig per circuit.

So this week I've added two mining rigs to my setup for a total of 8 6950's and a 5870x2 (roughly 3ghash/s) They have been mining for about 24hrs straight when my wife called me over by the couch in the living room. "Honey, this plug is warm... Is that from the heat in the other room" Yes honey, its from the heat... no, its just a wall fire waiting to happen! So until an electrician can get out here tomorrow, I'll be shutting down at least one of my rigs ;D

Those kill-a-watts beep when you get em close to their max amps! :o

I just happened to stick my beard into a fan while leaning over a caseless setup. No big damage, lost a few strands, but still...

Mechanical failure of a PSU fan blade, on a Corsair AX1200, after barely 700h of operation. Aah, the joy of running a mining cluster large enough to make improbable failures actually occur once in a while... After the blade broke, the imbalanced fan was making the whole computer chassis vibrate quite hard.

https://i.imgur.com/N28O9.jpg

I used a damaged dremel wheel to attempt to modify my x1 extender, it shattered as soon as I revved it up and a piece hit my face causing a small cut.

I was out of wheels so I grabbed my super sharp knife and started to shave away... slipped and cut my thumb open.

Neither cut was deep enough to warrant stitches, but there is a nice little pool of blood on my workbench now.

The good news is that I got the little fucker whittled down enough to make it work, and was able to add another 300MHash/sec to my secondary rig.

 

Worth it then. ;)

Nah, no pics, wiped it up shortly after it happened.  What remains can't really be identified as blood, more like a discoloration.

As far as the cuts, the thumb one was the worst but it's been 2 days and it's hard to see much of anything in a picture.  The face one was basically like when you cut yourself shaving, just a little nick.

I can offer up a picture of another injury that occurred while working on an old motherboard I was trying to get in mining shape.  I was going to desolder a bad cap and replace it... This injury is about 2 weeks old.. it was MUCH worse than it looks.

https://i.imgur.com/5bbhv.jpg

I am quite accident prone around computers.. I dropped a 850W PSU on my big toe last year.. The nail just recently grew back properly.  I could probably write a book of stupid computer related injuries.  I think the most frightening was when I touched something I shouldn't have inside a CRT with a screwdriver... Let's just say I don't fuck with CRT monitors anymore.

Edit: Holy hell that image was larger than I thought.. Linked it instead of embedding.

Edit2: Almost had a complete OH SHIT moment just now.  I am sure glad imgur strips exif data.. I looked at the original, plugged in the lat/long recorded, and google maps showed me a picture of my house... scary.

tito, sounds like a decent track record compared to some  :) (http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=18539)

  I think the most frightening was when I touched something I shouldn't have inside a CRT with a screwdriver... Let's just say I don't fuck with CRT monitors anymore.

[/quote]

Output of the flyback transformer...very high voltage.

"I plugged the HDD and DVD drive into the 12V PCI-E power ports rather than the 5V ones"

I call bullshit.  I hate to do it, but I call it.  Unless there is a picture of the aftermath, I'm not going to believe it.  Even if you assume he wired up his own connector, somehow ignored the fact that the red wire was connected to a yellow one, and got it to spin up:  You have to remember that a HDD is encased in metal.  The platters are NOT going to blow through it.

This story is less believable than the heat stroke one.  They are funny anecdotes, but don't have a shred of truth in them.


No explosions or being blown back 20+ feet as you would imagine.  Just a very large, and very bright spark and the screwdriver ended up flying out of my hand (still not sure if I threw it instinctively or if it was forcibly ejected)

Haha, a techie friend of mine, who also happens to be 400lbs or so, said he was thrown back across the room after touching the wrong part of a monitor.  Incredible power stored up in those things...

That's when you just break one off on the other side and call it good.   8)

No explosions or being blown back 20+ feet as you would imagine.  Just a very large, and very bright spark and the screwdriver ended up flying out of my hand (still not sure if I threw it instinctively or if it was forcibly ejected)
[/quote]
Haha, a techie friend of mine, who also happens to be 400lbs or so, said he was thrown back across the room after touching the wrong part of a monitor.  Incredible power stored up in those things...

[/quote]

I'm pretty sure the caps on the output of that flyback transformer (the thing that makes the high pitched whine that only some people seem to be able to hear) are over 10kV. 

Impossible. There is an odd number of blades.

Break them all off  ;D

... and build your own!