Bitcoin Forum

It's freezing outside but I'm roasting in here with the rigs burning away. These are the standard r9 280x gpu rigs not asics.

What's the opinon on heating your home like this? healthy or not?

With regard specifically to the air you'd be inhaling? rather than the electro magnetic concerns? I measured those and they seem to have only a very short reach and for the most part I'm way out of range.

How about the air quality?

Say for instance 25 rigs with 3 gpus? each  in a 4 bedroom house. Although most are just in two rooms.

The only thing i could imagine is the heat transfer goop that stick the heat sinks on - does that give of any toxic fumes even in very small doses?

I live in alaska and i have thought about getting an old miner just to heat my room. lol

I think worrying about toxic fumes from computers is being a bit too much like a hypochondriac.  What about all the other electronic devices that a household typically has?  If there was a legit concern about such a thing there would be warning labels everywhere.  The only time I would be concerned is if the rigs aren't properly cooled and overheat/melt, then smoke/fumes would be an issue.

I don't think it would be much of an issues from fumes, as these are designed to be put in PCs that are in homes already. Granted, you might end up running them a bit hotter than usual, but still should be no concerns there.

I believe the biggest issue would be that of a fire hazard. Are you using extension cords at all? Are you overloading a circuit, should probably only put one rig per individual circuit, especially if the circuit is being shared with other appliances. If dedicated 20 Amp circuits, you could probably get a way with two rigs each.

Then how about the immediate surroundings? Are you setting these rigs up on or nearby anything flammable? Even a quick spark shooting out and landing on some clothing could set your house ablaze. This is especially a concern if you are running open air rigs, which it sounds like you may be with 3 GPUs each. With a regular computer, the case acts as a barrier between a short and any sparking and the surrounding environment, open air the spark could travel some distance. With rigs running hot 24/7, sometimes weak components can give out.

When I ran a lot of scrypt mining rigs, I had them on metal wire racks from Home Depot with each 4 GPU rig fed from a Tripp-lite surge suppressor (the metal cased ones) which in turn has as separate 12 amp breaker. These were plugged into (2) per 20 amp circuit. I had to have extra circuits installed to keep everything legit. The racks were on concrete in the unfinished part of my basement, with the backs about 2 feet away from a bare sheet-rocked wall (it had paint but nothing else, i.e. no posters, curtains,etc.). I also made sure to keep anything combustible, like cardboard, papers, clothes, etc. at least 6 feet away from the sides and fronts of the rack area. This way if a component failed and a few sparks shot out, they would not land on anything that would easily catch fire.

I bring all this up, as again during my scrypt mining days, I probably had 5-6 instances where components went bad and the few times I was actually in the room, a bunch of sparks shot out before the equipment could shut down. Fortunately it was usually just a video card voltage regulator going out, so I could send them in for RMA. One time a PSU went out when I was away. When I came home and noticed, because of the burnt smell in the air, the tripp-lite surge suppressor breaker had tripped. The connected PSU had brunt out and I could see a lot of charring around the vent holes, what looked like it may have put on quite a show when it went out.

So after experiencing some of these events first-hand, i can only imagine images of people placing a bunch of rigs in bedrooms, on carpeted floors, near beds, curtains, etc., and overloading outlets where if something would happen, it would likely cause a fire.

This is not meant to discourage you or anyone from mining, only to think about what they are actually doing and some of the risks they are introducing into their household. At minimum put a smoke detector in every room you have rigs going.

I also remember the tremendous heat this used to put out. I live in a colder climate, and even when the temperature was below 0 outside, we still had to have several windows cracked open at all times. In spring, even as it approached 20-30 degrees F outside, the house would need to be opened up like it was summer outside, with windows wide open as well as the doors. Once real warm weather arrived, I had to relocate some rigs to the garage and ended up shutting many of them down.

I heat my home with 2000 W of mining rigs. It is warm during high temperature days. But when it is very cold, the heat is not enough.

I used to heat my house of the rigs I run, plenty of machines running a group of HD6990s, later HD7990s produced some amazing heat!

You were all so lucky here in our country,we are located on tropical country,we cannot set up mining rigs because of the electricity cost,you need an aircoinditioned to run a mining rig inside your room,guess mining rigs are for those with a cold climate like alaska..

I think you are pretty safe to breath! The rigs are basically just thermal fan heaters. Also if you are using wired Ethernet and keep the rigs in server cases the EMC should be low.

However - back in the day when I was mining scrypt with GPU rigs, I took the dogs for a walk and when I came back one of my rigs was on fire. Proper flames coming out of a newish PSU - it would have spread if I had come back much later. Needless to say I had plenty of smoke detectors and a couple of fire extinguishers to hand after this!

funny you guys should mention the fire hazard... i've had 3 gigabyte 7950 kind of go pop and black smoke and sparks come out of the back. I proceeded to move them far away from the curtains and took the cat out of the room then added another extra smoke detector in there.

those stopped working but were just out of warranty -damn.


this all happened with in a few weeks time.

the MSi R9 280X are good but a lot of the fans are slow or sticking.

Still i've turned off all the heating and the house is so nice and warm. actually it has revealed to me how poor the insulation is on the house because as i was taking out the garbage the other morning i glanced back at my home and it looked like the snow had hit a force field and although the other houses in my row were covered in snow mine was completely snow free.

I knew a guy with GPU rigs who had this - we had some snow in March 2013 and we laughed about his roof. A week later he got raided at 5:30 in the morning by the police looking for a cannabis farm. They told him that their helicopter dude was almost blinded by his roof. They paid for his door but his Missus wasn't happy. The next year he was mining POT Coin just for the irony.

Wou,

You have been put lot of money of those if you can warm up your apartment for it?  :o

Yeah for me it was a lot...but they paid me back now.

Now heating my entire house and no tumble drying required my entire laundry dry in moments + coins rolling in. Lovely.

I have had 3 rigs in my bedroom for over 2 years running almost constant. I have not had any issues besides the noise that I know of. I do not think it has any detrimental effects on my health or....wait a second, what was I talking about?

i use a single antminer s2 to head my girlfriend sons room it keeps his room at about 72 F

we live in a basement and hes on a wall that has windows so its getting cool air from the wall

my house is 70 F upstairs and about 67 F downstairs so i use the miner to heat his room and our hall way

What is the total power consumption of the 3 rigs? It seems they are not very noisy if you can withstand it for two years.

I have my furnace blower fan running on a low speed all the time for air circulation / filtering so it was an easy adaptation to make use of miner heat.  My easy solution to distribute the heat from miners to the rest of the house was simply to change the vent ducting in the room from delivery to return.  ~ 1 hour work and $10 in ducting.  Now the hot air gets sucked out, filtered and delivered evenly throughout the house.

I keep the windows open until minus 15 degrees C. In the summer I have an industrial wall fan that I modified to fit in my window. It moves enough air to change the room's air every 2 minutes. During hot summers I shut the rigs down for about 2 to 6 weeks, seal the house and turn on the air conditioning. Sometimes it's just nice to be comfortable.

This is one of the advantage of living the cold weathered country,you can mine any coins you want and set up your own mining rigs,here in a tropical country the advantage is we can set up a solar powered mining rigs which will saves us electricity

In the Northern countries, you can also set up the solar panel. The only problem is that you have less electricity during winter.

wow just washed my big goose feather jacket.... normally takes forever to dry out.

Checked in 1 hour the entire thing is bone dry...

I do imagine I could be getting a sore throat but then again perhaps all in my mind.

Normally Im wandering around i a thick dressing robe in the house to cut on the fuel bills but still it's not pleasant in the mornings. Now I'm  loving it...even getting out of the shower isn't scary it's so warm.

Never buy ASROCK boards. All of mine have issues whilst the msi boards have not had one problem at all.

Agree.  Both the ASROCK boards I have used (Extreme4 or something) almost instantly fried when used for mining even with external powered risers.  No issues with MSI or Gigabyte, some of them are over 3 years of mining on them.

I have been heating my home most of the time for the last 5 years with a group of computers (did litecoin mining on them for a year or so, 'till ASIC took over, then turned them back to my RC5/GIMPS efforts).

 This past winter, I've had to keep 2 windows (with thermostatically-controlled fans in them) OPEN all winter, due to the addition of some A2 Terminators and my several-month-long S5/SP20 mining farm (sold the last of THOSE units off today).


 You just need something reliable, miners work fine as "electric space heaters" if you buy reliable ones (and power supplies) or design and set up mining computers for reliablility (overclocking is a BAD IDEA anyway for mining, it's very inefficient).


 Also, on motherboards, if you're going to mine on them get versions that put heat sinks on the power circuitry. It's a MAJOR plus for reliability on any motherboard that's going to be running 24/7

I use the Asrock H61 ProBTC motherboard. These boards are designed for bitcoin mining. It is very reliable.

Those are the ordinary motherboards. I think the MSI G55d is the best of the mother boards. It is relative cheap but powerful.

I run 8 GPUs on the Asrock H61 ProBTC motherboard, without any problem. They are 2X7990+4X7970.

mine were the asrock extreme4 and extreme6 both totally junk.

msi boards all running perfect years later.

I do not have experience with the Asrock motherboards other than the H61 ProBTC. It is very good motherboard.