Bitcoin Forum

Hi Folks,

How is everyone small+big miners protecting the miners from Surge plus any kind of Fault, etc.?

Any blunder that definitely needs to be done and which blows or burns the machines all the time?

Any best practices that I should be using?

Please suggest. Thank you.

I've never had any such problem happen, just used a surge protector strip and no PDU or any fancy equipment people use nowadays. Just keep your miners away from carpeting or any possibly flammable material (PSUs too) so in the event of a catastrophic failure your miner doesn't burn the whole house down. Unless you barely know how to plug in anything or the miner you buy just happens to be unreliable like the S9 there shouldn't be issues.

We have have this guy on our 3-Phase 400amp panel:

   https://www.schneider-electric.us/en/product-range/61960-type-eba

It's a nice little budget modular system for our 125KVa setup.

How much is that?   Notice there is no price on the schneider electric site..... They want you to hit up sales support.  Also what would be wrong with using a PDU with surge/fuses per outlet?

I think it was around $2000. We had it installed when we had the new panel put in. It has replaceable modules and protects our entire panel. It's something your electrician needs to install. You can see it in this picture just to the right of the main panel between the panel and the door.

http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/animecorner/CommandBaseFarm42.jpg

We also have breakered and fused PDU's, and we have the entire rig earth grounded to the building steel, but the EBA provides an extra layer of protection for the entire rig.

Is that your farm Conner?  :o

Clap Clap Clap

Nice work...Looks very nicely done and it seems like you put in a lot of thoughts to secure yourself from surge and faults...

What kind of fused PDU's are you using?

Are they 30 amps or 20 amps?

Are you using 208 volt or 240 volt?

Line to Line or Line to neutral?

2 pole breakers or 3 pole breakers?

Thanks man! Putting this rig together was basically my life for about 4 months this earlier this year. Previously I had a couple racks of S9's and S7's, about 25 machines total, and before that about a dozen S5's and some GPU rigs. Now it's over 80 machines, mostly S9's but a few 741's. We're running just shy of 1.1Ph currently.

They are combination of HP and Dell PDU's we bought surplus. Can't remember the specific models off the top of my head. I have a few metered APC's also sprinkled in there.
30 amp circuits
208v
Line to Line
2 Pole

We have all the network gear on 120v with UPS's. The EBA on the main panel was a but expensive, but it's protecting about a lot of gear so I guess it's all relative.

Here is how the rig looks from the front:

http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/animecorner/CommandBaseFarm46.jpg

So we're running single phase line to line 30 amp circuits off the 3 phase power center. Matches the PDU's. We have 4 miners per circuit and we have the load balanced between the phases pretty good,  around 5% or less per leg. I wish we could run more gear, but the building transformer is 150KVa and we're running it about as hard as we can while still leaving a 20% safety margin. We're going to squeeze a few more units in soon, but it will be limited. We inquired about upgrading, but the distribution center for the entire building is only 800amps and the cost to change the transformer and the distribution center came in at around $60k and we decided if we really want to expand we need to find another building.

I'll tell you one thing, anyone who thinks mining is easy can get out of here. It's nothing but work!  ;)

Wow man...this looks really nice... Mining is not easy at all... I like how you have put in thought to secure your network gear using the UPS because that is one of the areas people miss when it comes to surge protection since the wires have copper in them.

So I was under the impression you should only use 80% of the AMP's on the breaker as well. So if you have 30 AMP on breaker you can only draw around 24 AMP max for prolonged use. Each Antminer takes around 1450 Watt at 208 i.e. 6.9 AMP per machine. So how are you running 4 on 30 AMP? Am I missing something here or are my calculations wrong? Thank you.

I also didn't see any hole in your walls and stuff nor a cold or hot aisle arrangement. How are you venting/exhausting and the bringing cold air to the miners?

I am just a small time home miner, so I installed a whole home surge protector on my main panel, on the first 2 spaces where the main feed comes into the house. The Miners I moved inside are using the furthest breaker spaces available down the line. I've never worried about it before until I put a few thousand dollars of equipment on the grid. So I figured it was worth the 150$ for the protector and the breaker.


I did notice those large fans blowing straight up, I assume he has exhaust fans in the ceiling. That would be my guess anyways

Even those fans would have a hard time getting rid of that heat the S9's generate.   

Your power supply is what should be protecting the miners. This is why you use repurposed server PSUs and not ATX psus that were never meant for high load 24/7 operation. If you have a quality power supply, the only surge protection you need is from your breakers.

Sorry. I didn't quite get it. And that's just because I don't know much about this stuff.

So per your experience, the Bitmain power supply protect you from surge? But I still need something for my breakers? I am confused

Per my experience, stay away from the Bitmain power supplies. They are poorly manufactured and fail all the time.

When you use a quality server PSU, they have many protections built in to protect the $30k server they were originally attached to. If there is a problem with the power they will shut themselves down to prevent damage and most certainly will not pass those issues along to the mining hardware. If something does burn up in the power supply the breaker should trip before any damage is done. Ive run tens of thousands of miners and never once used any kind of in line surge protector.

Examples of the PSUs I am talking about:

http://www.parallelminer.com/product-category/power-supply-kit/

I have already ordered my PSU's so I am not sure how to go about it now.

I also heard that the break out boards which were in your link need to be soldered to the PSU otherwise they blow or burn due to resistance if there is loose connection.

You have worked on tens and thousands of miners? Man you must be a pro then. Any other best practices? Do you run your machines on 208 or 240?

It really depends on how old the breakout board is. I know for a fact those parallel miner breakout boards are so stiff you really have to jam them on the PSU. As long as you arent disconnecting and reconnecting them so much the pins stretch, you should never have a problem with loose connections. If you buy an old, beat up PSU with an old breakout board that could be a concern.

I have been mining professionally for 3 years, which in this industry is a long time. If you look at PSU ratings 240 is the max recommended input voltage on most all of them so I wouldnt try and push them that high. All of mine are 208 with the transformer turned up a little bit to get as close to 220 at the PDU plugs as possible.