Bitcoin Forum

Hello,

I'm running a small ASIC operation where I live, and unfortunately we have consistent power outage daily that last for a few hours. And sometimes the voltage drop to 180V for a part of the day instead of the standard 220V.

My question is, will this affect the ASICs long term? I have had them running for a month now, and nothing major happened, except couple of fans failure (which I believe because of their quality).

The miners themselves, will have a shorter lif the power supplies will have a very short life.

Either get some decent battery backups to hold over the power fluctuations or accept the fact that as power goes up and down you are sending the wrong voltage through a lot of the components and that will shorten their lifespan.

-Dave

I wish I can get some sort of backup, unfortunately I can't. My only solution is to figure another location with better voltage. How "short" of life span would you give the PSU or the Miners?

What exactly is the unit model of your ASIC machine?

There are ASIC miners that only mine at 200v to 240v less or more than that could damage any components in your miner mostly PSU due to overheating.
I suggest you try to use software to auto-shutdown the miner like awesomeminer to reduce the risk or to avoid burnt PSU or hashboard.

You might want to look into voltage monitoring relays, like this: https://www.littelfuse.com/products/protection-relays-and-controls/protection-relays/voltage-monitoring-relays.aspx

They are used to shut off power when the voltage is out of range, either too high or too low.

S9 and L3+, PSU are APW3++ on the s9 and APW7 on the L3+.
I have the S9 running on Hiveos and underclocked to about 960W and the L3+ on AsicFW.io underclocked to 670W. I also have the auto-shutdown enabled on both of them. I hope this will at least reduce the risks some.

I have honestly, but due to my operation being small and budgetary reasons, its not an option at the moment unfortunately. Thanks for the link though, those look like great suggestions.

The stuff you linked are controllers, they will need a contactor alongside in order to handle anything the size of a miner ( I am pretty sure you are aware of this, but OP might not know).

OP, APW3, and APW7 can operate at as low as 120v, however, the output power "wattage" will be reduced and the coils in the miners will be doing more work on 180v than on 220v to sustain the same hashrate, but I don't think anything serious will happen since the voltage is still within range, just make sure you keep them underclocked.

With that said, I would be more worried about what happens after the power outage, I used to live in a place where the voltage was low (this usually indicates a poor infrastructure) and when the power comes back the voltage will be too high or too low, the problem resides on the substation's side and it isn't something you can avoid, in that case, you will need some sort of protection like the one wndsnb mentioned.

Another option would be a voltage stabilizer, for an operation of your size, 5kw will be enough, you can probably find it for under $300 and it will keep the voltage at 220v, I think you should really consider this, check their prices locally and then decide if the price is worth it.

The stability of the voltage is very important to the power supply. If the voltage is often unstable, it will damage the power supply. I suggest you find a way to solve this problem, or change the venue.

It's not just with ASICs, any high-computational device that is subject to fluctuating voltages is going to have some of its moving parts fail quite quickly. My experience tells me that this happens after a few dozen occurrences.

You should at least fit your most vulnerable ASICs with a voltage stabilizer, since your newer ones can hold out a bit longer than the rest, so that should buy you time for purchasing ASICs for the rest of your farm.

Where do you live? They can fix that if they want to.  Getting them hosted could a viable option. Dunno what your situation it