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Hello,
I have done quite a bit of research, but haven't found a proper answer yet.
I live in Canada and would like to build a little mining farm out in a shed made of thin steel.
Here it gets bellow -35 degrees Celsius, but miner temperatures go down to only 0 degrees.
What would happen if i had them running in this shed? Wouldn't they heat up the shed enough to keep it warm? Or would they just create moisture and shorten out?
This seems very dangerous...
What would you guys recommend?

You can run them in a shed no problem, the heat will warm up and dry up the place. Prepare a plan where you can heat up the place BEFORE starting up the miner, IE do not start the miner at -20 C

1 miner might not be enough to warm however. might need 4 hehe.

Okay thanks. I guess I could also just use a heater to heat up the place before starting them.
And the heat/cold mix won't create too much moisture?

It seems really dangerous even if you are able to warm up the place before you turn on them. What does happen if everything goes down for a while and then the devices restart? A disaster, trust me :)

Why not just run them in your house and re use the heat instead of wating  it in a shed.  I know they can be noisy but seeing as the by product is heat it seems a shame to waste it.  You would be killing 2 birds with 1 stone.

I would really love to run them at home. But our house is very small, and running 4 of those in the living room will make it extremely loud.

Did some one already had this kind of problem ? It's the first time I hear that miners need a minimum of heat (usually people want the coldest place for their miners so they can overclock/overvolt them).

I have tried running a few S5's in balcony through last winter. Surprisingly they all survived without any issues at around -20. Below this temp I didn't run them. To prevent dust I put them all under a sofa cover. Fans usually were under 3k rpm. Only time I had problem with it was the router failed to boot up. (yea i threw a wifi router on balcony as a repeater of my main indoor router.)

This winter I'll definitely be running some test. It will be very interesting to see just how cold and efficient I can run.

Did you not have any issue with them getting wet? I thought if you run them in extremely cold conditions the heat would cause condensation and then you would start getting water all over your miners which everntually would cause big problems. At -20 i thought maybe your fans could seize up as well unless you were running them without them due to it being cold enough already?

Well of course you need to ensure there would be no tons of snow around your miner. Some slush was fine for me. The sofa cover helped a lot because it was breathable but also kept some warm air inside it. This made the cover like an inflated balloon. inner temperature would be around 10 degC.

You will need to play with the cover a bit so ensure it allows air flow to enter from the bottom tip, while also allows over heated air to escape from the top by poking a few small holes (1~2 cm diameter).

I'll probably just run them in a wooden shed that we built not too long ago. And I might just throw in a cheap thermostat and heater to keep it above 10 degrees. The only thing I'd be scared with is running all that in a wooden shed... Might burn down -.-

Haha Awesome ! It seems like a nice setup. Do you have any pictures ?
Wouldn't it be better to store them in a cold place in your house, like a basement ? At least this way the heat would not be lost and you could save a few bucks in heating.

lol i wouldn't call it nice but definite did its job throughout the entire winter, and, CHEAP!
I didn't take any pictures of and the rigs were sold a few month ago.
I live in a one bedroom condo so indoor doesn't work for me at all. even you can mine in your basement, the heat can still be hard to manage, depending how good ventilation you have there, but in the winter, i guess it would work well.

Thats only if you have a basement. Luckily I don't! Cause everyone around here has flooded basements every summer.

Have you considered watercooling ? ;D
But why are basements flooded ? Is it because of a lack of isolation or simply because most houses are not very well build and water flows through cracks or something ?

You should provide a good ventilation in the place. Of course too much moisture will be created but a good ventilation will dry the place out. Miners have their ventilation by themselves but I'm talking about the room ventilation.

So a big server room fan cooler to keep the air moving, and a air exhaust flap on the side of the room should do the trick?

Im heating my garage and house here in Finland. Last winter there were -30C outside so two S5 kept place around +10 degree. There is no problem if miners are running and ambient temp goes down like to -20C for a while like when you opening garage door but you can't start cold miner. So you have to heat them first so basicly those are just like a cars :D And dont keep them too long in place where is minus degrees because the chips starting to get some ice and after that you get some problems.

I think yes, but you'll see it by yourself: if there is still a lot of moisture in the room - open the flap more or make it bigger, only make sure that the air outside doesn't have more moisture in it than the air inside.

you should live in hotel and let the 4 miners active at home because in that loud noise you can not sleep and you will force your wife will kick you out in chilled weather  :P with your miners  ;D

If you can make sure that there's no downtime and that the shed is well isolated, especially from humidity, then there shouldn't have any problem.

yeah, it would be really good actually, you have a win win situation, your home isn't 500 degrees and you got free cooling for your miners. It shouldn't be a problem unless your shed is badly isolated, which i mean by that is that snow/rain/water/condens can come in, then you're fucked..

 As the miners heat the shed up, it will DROP the relative humidity in the shed, moisture won't be an issue.
 Just make sure it doesn't leak, and that you have the ability to flow a little air through it even in the winter in case your miners are generating TOO MUCH heat.

If you have any opening near the bottom you could always keep a small trough of water to act as a passive heat exchange with half of it sticking out of the shed.  Geothermal hothouses use this cooling method.

You could keep running them in the shed to keep it warm, but you've to do a risk analysis before. If you can handle the risks, they'll run safe and your shed'll be pleasantly warm. However, you'll need more than one miner to do that.

 Backwards.
 Warm humid air flowing over COLD item causes condensation.
 The issue with electronics at extreme cold is that it can stop working, or just not work right - but if it's running before the outside temp gets that low, the internal heat generation can often keep an electronic device warm enough to KEEP working correctly.


 One possible trick to use, if the shed is close enough to the house ANd if it gets warm enough - run a duct from the hot part of the shed to the house heating ductwork, with a temp-controlled fan blowing the air from the shed to the house and a flapper valve set up to not let the air flow back the OTHER way.

 

The problem will be the humidity that could damage your hardware... It is water, so, how could not damage a chip that is working with electricity? Now, as I know, some places are amazing to mining in extreme low temperatures because these places have a arid or semi-arid weather who has almost zero of humidity. As I know (because I was there) some places in Mongolia, some regions in Chile and some in Australia has this characteristics. But I also think that some structures to prevent humidity are well developed and maybe could be used for this reason.