Bitcoin Forum

Hey everyone, I'm very new to this and trying to put together my first at home farm,

I'm curious about how everyone is measuring and recording their power usage? Metered/Switched PDUs seem to be the answer I find online, but I can't find a consensus on which PDUs are the best for this use case. Is there a solution that I can look at a history graph of usage per plug? and remotely reset individual plugs? Should I also be running a surge protector before the PDU?

I've got access to cheap power and looking to build a decent small farm

There are probably more IT people in the world arguing about which reporting software is better then there are people fighting over religion.
Since most GOOD PDUs will let you pull data with just about any SNMP software I like RRDTOOL [ https://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/ ] & Cacti [ https://www.cacti.net/ ]

There is an implementation of cacti called ez-cacti which I think is no longer supported but should still work but was a preconfigured setup so to make life easy.

No doubt others will chime in with their favorites.

-Dave

Why not use Awesomeminer to monitor the power consumption of each miner? Any PDUs should work you just need to use PDUs that support higher wattage.

And take note you dont need to use power surge protector you must plug your PDUs directly to the wall to get the best power.

This software aggregates data from the PDUs?
Is there a term I'm looking for when I purchase PDUs (has SNMP?)
Is there a vendor that most people go with for PDUs?
Just googling it looks like raptor power is one of the only vendors that is crypto focused. Their PDU can handle a 20a load per plug but how do I remotely monitor the load on those plugs?
How do hosts monitor power draw to bill customers?


This looks like good software, why would you suggest this over minerstat or hiveos?
Do miners report power usage? I don't see anything reporting power in my miners dashboard.
Would the miners reported power usage differ from actual usage from the wall?

Awesomeminer has more features and tools compared to minerstat and hiveos and I never tested minerstat except for hiveos which is also a good software that you can able to monitor miners under their website. However, Awesomeminer have more feature to monitor miners that includes daily or monthly earnings and also support antminer APIs.

About report power usage I suggest you read this "Power consumption and profitability" (https://support.awesomeminer.com/support/solutions/articles/35000104685-power-consumption-and-profitability)

About the actual usage from the wall, I believe there is a slight difference because they only get the report directly from the miner dashboard through API.

If you want an accurate reasonably priced solution, this is the best I've found so far.

https://www.ekmmetering.com/collections/basic-meters/products/universal-single-phase-kwh-meter

The basic model just keeps the running kwh, and has a pulse output that external hardware can monitor. You can manually record the kwh and keep a log, or DIY a solution to read the pulse output (i use a raspberry pi zero). They also have more expensive options that log data to the cloud.

https://www.ekmmetering.com/collections/smart-meters/products/ekm-omnimeter-ii-ul-v3

I have the basic one. It works well.

+1 for EKM.  I know my accountant recommended EKM for tax purposes to be able to accurately keep a recording.  It's a popular choice with landlords who own duplexes and such with only one meter base and want to be able to "split" the utility bill.

Awesome Miner is the best monitoring software out there in my opinion as well.

The power reading is pretty accurate, it's not 100% accurate compared to the reading on the wire itself, but it's pretty close when I checked it, unless you have perform precise measurements whereby a -+1 to 5% can send you to jail, you can really count on the software readings.

The meter wndsnb posted looks pretty decent, if you want to measure more amps you can always buy some external current transformers they are pretty cheap.