I think the asset list makes it pretty clear why the farm went belly up. Looking at the electrical components alone, there's almost 30MVA in indoor transformers, coupled with all the additional goodies (25MVA in disconnects, loads of panels, etc). From the looks of it, everything seems as if it was bought brand spanking new so that's quite a pretty penny. The infrastructure costs sunk this ship; great opportunity for someone to buy in at a deep discount (I wouldn't be surprised if a legally separate yet somewhat related entity scoops it all up and resumes ops with a much nicer debt structure/payment schedule).

Spot on IMHO.... the hot air coming out of the equipment will dry up any place in no time. I personally see two distinct downsides to humidity 1) high RH% means less cooling efficiency, which doesn't really help in an already hot environment, and 2) if you lose power and the miners are exposed to humidity it'll be a PITA to turn them on. As they cool down they'll generate condensation and shorts.... yep, electrical shorts... I've tried all sorts of things and ultimately settled on using HPS bulbs to dry out specific racks and then use those to dry up the rest of the farm. Also, 30C ambient is fine, just be prepared to have about a ~10-15% variation in hash rate between hot and cold periods of the day and plan accordingly.

I actually followed a retweet by "Braiins_Systems" of a post by "MinerUpdate" of the following article:

https://minerupdate.com/news/miner-insights/how-will-the-bitcoin-asic-manufacturer-market-evolve-in-2020

So I recently came across a market analysis of ASIC miner manufacturers and was shocked at the fact that Ebang is number 4 on the list with high single digits market share. Why was I shocked? Because I barely hear a thing about their miners. I barely come across posts regarding custom firmware, etc. This particularly stood out to me as I own a few of their miners and have always struggled to find good information regarding them or even custom firmware, etc.

I know that S9s pretty much take up most of the limelight but if we go by the numbers, there is one Ebang miner for every 7-10 Antminers. However, there is probably one Ebang post for every 70-100 Antminer posts. I'm just curious, as pretty much a newb, is this simply because Ebang miners are considered cheap/shitty/not worth the try or is it because it's mostly large farms buying their miners in bulk and pretty much running their own show in the shadows (relative to us)?

Back of the envelope math means there have to be hundreds of thousands of these deployed and that somewhat doesn't jive with the level of attention they get publicly. I just wanted to hear what you guys think about this and any explanations.

Thanks!
M

I'm not an electrician nor an electrical engineer but have had to learn way more than necessary about this in order to solve tons of electrical issues with miners and 3 phase input.

My original farm ran on single phase 240v and problems were pretty much minimal. Once we grew into a larger facility, three phase was the name of the game and boy does it bring with it a whole host of issues. From your information, it seems that you're running some sort of "split-phase" electrical system despite having three hot wires coming in (can't really figure out how you get 220v on a line to line basis unless your utility is providing you with really high 120v (electrical experts please chime in!).

Shutting down the freezer might sound like a good idea but if it's powered by the same system as the miners you're going to get a ton of noise in the lines when you power it back up. Not sure if this would defeat Verizon's impact on your farm. We've tried to isolate power to the miners as much as possible and when necessary, we only run fixed speed/drive fans, etc on the miners' lines. We've found this to reduce most "in-house" noise. Putting an additional transformer between the freezer and the miners may help (it did in our case for ventilation/switches/etc) but I can't really vouch for this as, as previously mentioned, I'm not an expert on these matters.

We do have an "expert" that recommended we do this. He also ran a scope meter on our lines and a logger for 24hrs and pretty much told us that 1) we had a ton of outside noise and 2) his solutions were prohibitively expensive (UPS system for miners, yeah right; active noise filters; surge protectors; etc.). Out of all of the recommendations we definitely took a few home such as cleaning up the electrical wiring and installing certain affordable forms of surge protection but, as our "expert" put it, you can't really fix your power quality issues completely (100% clean power is only possible in mathematics equations). Garbage in = Garbage out. PM me if you want more details of certain things we did to improve our situation. I completely understand your concern. We have public water pumps sharing our lines and when those turn on we really see their impact.

Hi there,

I'm currently dealing with similar issues. I'm holding most of my hopes up for Braiins OS's upcoming version (if it supports E9+s) as a way to finally fix my problematic miners.

One thing I found that helped quite a bit was to use the latest version of the miners' management tool (version 1.0.2.82). Ebang's website shows two different miner management tools; one of them being specific to the E9+s. The newer tool has options that you simply cannot program into the E9+. However, factory resets using the newer version of the software seem to take hold on certain miners that were pretty much unresponsive to any type of reset. This hasn't entirely solved my problems but I was able to factory reset some stubborn miners with this version vs the E9+ specific version of the management tool and, therefore, restore them to hashing (not necessarily at proper rates).

It's definitely a band-aid fix but after going through the same steps as you and trying left and right to switch hash/control boards, cables, network settings, etc. This method surprisingly helped out a bit. So I would say, give it a try. Factory reset using the latest version of their general Ebite Miner Mini (1.0.2.82) and then restore your pool info, etc.

Best of luck!

I know this is an old thread but just wanted to add that I've also come across blinking PSUs before and in my case it was due to improper data wiring. I accidentally connected two miners directly. Once I separated them the PSUs worked properly. Just wanted to let people know so that they can look into this as it's a pretty easy troubleshooting process and fix (if this is your actual problem).

I work mostly with Antminer S9s and Ebit E9+s. As you can probably imagine, information on the E9s is nearly impossible to find, which really sucks because their bulk management software gives you tons of valuable information (actually ridiculously good miner management software given the fact that pretty much everything else out of the company is usually "ehh").

Anyways, I just wanted to lay out there that the Antminer S9s (at least original and S9i) and Ebit E9+ are so similar in design that I've pretty much solved a ton of issues by trying Antminer solutions. There are some minor differences but the point I really want to get at is that despite this post being heavily biased towards Antminers, I think we could easily help out a lot of people if we could either make a list of "similar" or "close enough to give it a shot" hardware and their Bitmain or Avalon counterparts.

For example, I can vouch for the fact that despite some minor differences in the models (mostly heat sinks and SD card slot), the S9s/S9i/E9+ are extremely similar. The software side is obviously a lot less similar but my point is that most of the trouble shooting steps and solutions for the Antminers seem to work pretty well on the E9+ as well (mostly hardware problems; e.g. resetting, testing proper grounding, testing hash boards, what steps to take if "X", etc.).

If we can compile a list, then despite most of the troubleshooting posts being "Antminer centric", we could point people in the right direction. Had I never touched an S9 before in my life, I would have never thought of using Antminer troubleshooting tips for my E9+. I hope there are others out there that can chime in on other hardware that's similar to whatever we already have troubleshooting guides for. This way, we can at least expand the guides' usefulness a bit to others without much work involved and, hopefully, they can post on what worked for them.

Either way, thank you for this sticky!

Congrats on the DIY build.

Out of curiosity, do you have a dedicated substation/transformer? If so, are you getting 217v from a tap adjusted traditional 208v 3phase transformer (or bank of single phase)?

I have no clue if your utility provider would allow for it but if you're constantly getting 217v from undervoltage it may make sense to ask them if they can adjust your tranfsormer tap(s) and bring up the secondary voltage.

I've ran several Bitmain PSUs (not the S17/T17) and they're workhorses next to some of the other stuff I've dealt with. Currently running a dying breed batch of APW3++ at 277v without a hiccup (please do not attempt this; I just had a few left overs with little resale value so I'm using them under very strict conditions/supervision).

All this being said, I've always had issues with Bitmain (and other) PSUs when they drop into that 140-200VAC limbo. I would certainly hope that your utility gets its stuff together as I'd hate to see such expensive equipment suffer.

Just food for thought.

Best of luck mining!

I have experience with this and completely agree with several of the aforementioned points. Specifically:

-Cryptocurrency is a relatively new thing in this part of the world, which can really be a pain in an already highly bureaucratic business environment. Moreover, depending on the country, you can receive unsolicited requests from the usual suspects if they find out you produce "X" amount at a facility. The funny thing is that for some reason people tend to assume that facilities are way more profitable than they really are. This can lead to unreasonable requests that can literally kill the business.

-Infrastructure can be a hassle. Where I operate, the power company expects you to cover everything. This includes heavier gauge cables all the way to the nearest substation if necessary. 5,000 feet of transmission cable won't bankrupt the operation but 50,000 just might. I've seen fellow miners install everything just to find out that they can't pull that draw. This poses a business risk that's hard to determine until you power up in stages and measure things. In addition, you may be faced (as I have) with rare input voltages from your primary lines. This can seriously increase your infrastructure costs as you're forced to source items that are typically sold outside the country. That means import taxes, the risk of having your equipment held for weeks at a time in customs and, finally, getting faulty equipment as you can't test it prior to clearing all the previous hurdles. There are some reputable third-party firms that provide test results but more than a few times these are faked.

-You have to seriously invest in your power delivery infrastructure as power tends to be finicky not to mention that you have to budget for downtime whenever it goes out. I mean, there isn't a generator in the world that would be profitable at powering miners on a large scale so when the lights go out... just pray they come back ASAP.

-Security.... I can't stress this one enough. Anything that remotely resembles a warehouse or data center is a magnet for criminals. Moreover, you have to be careful as to how you assemble your build crew given that they'll either know what you're doing or eventually come across a crypto article with a picture of, you guessed it, very very similar equipment and setups. Add to that all the sensational headlines of BTC going to $200k and you can imagine how someone might develop a nefarious idea.

-Cooling. Working in a hot climate year round poses a host of unique problems. We've been successful by carefully selecting large building with good cross ventilation and adequate intakes/outtakes. If you keep feeding the equipment fresh air it will tend to operate fine. I envy guys up north that can simply open the windows and have the miners running much faster/cooler but, hey, what can I do about it.

-Last but not least, dealing with the local "IRS". Where I'm at, these guys usually don't know how to deal with crypto (because they simply never contemplated it in their fiscal framework), which results in a lot of trips to their offices. I would highly recommend a good tax counsel if operating in these countries as it can seriously make a huge impact with regards to net profits. Expect audits eventually, retain good counsel, and keep all records and you should he fine. However, at least where I'm building out, there is always the chance that a regulator or politician will suddenly flip on you and derail everything. In other words, do everything by the book and retain good counsel as, unlike in other situations, they'll prove their worth.

That's all I can think off the top of my head. I guess issues with bringing the units in are kinda on the list but yeah, it can be a bigger pain if the country has yet to determine the applicable import rate.

PS. Almost forgot, you can kiss your equipments' warranty goodbye. Even if you run into a faulty unit, unless the manufacturer covers all of the shipping expenses, it'll likely be cheaper to just take whatever hashboards/control units are still OK and just use them for future repairs.