Using wind generated by miner fans to power tiny wind turbine?

[Didley1JT]

I've seen a lot of creative ideas for harnessing some of the lost energy due to heat, but has anyone thought of harnessing some of the wind we're creating from the fans?

It would be small, I'm sure, but it might be enough to power a few lottery miners so that they're operating for free. You would have to be careful not to create an excessive amount of back pressure against the miner fan, thus reducing the effective cooling on the miner.

I did a brief search on here and other sites, but didn't see anything similar. This means that either no one else has thought of it, or (more likely) it's a stupid idea...

What do you think?

[HeRetiK]

It's a fun idea, but I'm afraid the problem comes from the back pressure against the miner fan: To reach the same amount of cooling you'd probably have to run the fans at higher speeds, which means the additional energy necessary to run the fans would be higher than the energy that could be regained by the wind turbine. Placing the wind turbines far enough from the fans so that the back pressure doesn't matter would probably lead to the problem that the wind turbine is exposed to too little energy as to actually move.

[philipma1957]

well  what is the smallest wind turbine you can find?

[Didley1JT]

It's a fun idea, but I'm afraid the problem comes from the back pressure against the miner fan: To reach the same amount of cooling you'd probably have to run the fans at higher speeds, which means the additional energy necessary to run the fans would be higher than the energy that could be regained by the wind turbine. Placing the wind turbines far enough from the fans so that the back pressure doesn't matter would probably lead to the problem that the wind turbine is exposed to too little energy as to actually move.

Ahh... yeah, that makes sense. Oh well. It was just a thought.


Another thought... Why don't I see anyone making water-cooled systems for any of the miners? It takes a lot of energy to heat water... that's got to be more efficient than blowing air over the chips, right?

[QuintLeo]

Bitmain used to make a water-cooled miner (C1 model I think) - but it apparently didn't sell well enough to continue making it.

 Main issue is the sheer number of chips involved, and the difficulty of getting the "plate" flat to ALL of them (this appears to be why Bitmain moved away from monolithic heat sinks after the S5).