Avalon 851 w/ Alternate PSUs?

[murphinator]

I've recently found myself on an inventory of Avalon 851s, some used some brand new, but it seems like it has come from an entity that was mining on them using after market PSUs:

Antminer PSUs, rated for 180-280v, 12.5v DC out - about 90% of inventory
Flypower Switching PSU (FLY1800-1800W) 170-264v 50/60Hz, 12v DC out - about 10% of inventory

Our energy source for these will be a turbine that produces 480/277 @ 60Hz, and we can wire phase to neutral off our distribution, so I am not concerned about delivering the voltage requirements. What I am wondering about is any unusual or unexpected behavior, longevity implications, hash implications, etc. as the result of using these PSUs. Is it a relatively normal and safe thing to do to swap PSUs as long as the output voltage meets requirements for the Avalons? Another possible concern is underclocking, which we will likely be doing due to total Power availability--would it be better to cull the inventory of miners and have them run at full Hash? Or rack and stack the entire inventory but underclock all of them to sink the available power.

Thanks all. Apologies if these are newbie questions, my background in mining is minimal, but I am supposed to be orchestrating the setup of these miners and I'd like to prepare as best I can.

Side note: anyone know of a good literature base for reading about the HVAC side of things? MERV Sizing, CFM dynamics, effect of turbulence, etc.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

277v is an iffy area. The vast majority of PSU's have a max input rating of 250vac so surprised you got some rated higher. The Bitmain supplies should be good, the others NO.

Avalons are pretty forgiving regarding temps and even at full speed will be happy with ambient temps up to 95F. As for cooling, their fans move 250CFM, heat load is of course exactly what power they are drawing. I'd use a baseline heat load of 1,500w each.

Do a search for the A841's here in the Hardware area - the 851 is same miner with a few more chips in it. The tweaks you will find for the 841 apply to the 851 as well.

As long as the PSU can deliver the power, makes no difference who made it. Regarding power available, I'd throttle them down a bit using
 --avalon8-voltage-level -2
in the More Options box. That should drop power usage to around 1,250-1,300w each.

[DaveF]

If the the Flypower is similar to the ones that I have they actually only rated for 200V - 240V
The 170V - 264V numbers are really the ABSOLUTE MINIMUM and MAXIMUM before *bad things happen*
Been there, done that. But, they were dirt cheap.

I have never seen any Bitmain made  PSUs that have input up to 280, but that is just me. I don't usually use them.

-Dave

[HagssFIN]

It seems to be hard to find 277V input psus.

Two pcs. of these (one for left side PMU board and one for right side PMU board) will work.

• HP 1200W Common Slot 277VAC Hot Plug Power Supply Kit (717359-B21)
• A breakout board with 6-pin PCIE power cables.

I found an old thread about the subject,
I take no responsibility about the suggested psu models: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1206101.0

You can also find some in eBay.com with search "277 psu".
Again, I take no responsibility about the products that come up with these search words.

[murphinator]

I made a mistake on my original post, the PSUs we are running are Alphaminer, not Antminer PSUs. On the website it seems like they are industrially oriented. Going to have to do some searching on their performance in real world applications.

Thanks for your comments btw guys, really appreciated.

@NotFuzzy: I didn't see a more options menu when we had our interface open. Had 4 or 5 chained together on test bench and it was not obvious how to break out the individual miner performance, seemed to default to aggregating the output of the entire chain. Maybe I will take a second look.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

Go to Status > CGMiner configuration. The More options box is at the bottom of the page.

Yes the controller aggregates and reports individual miner stats into a cluster. All settings are applied to all miners in the cluster(s).

The GUI lets you look at what each one is doing per-string. AwesomeMiner lets you break out and see that same information if you enable the option for it but AFAIK AM then treats each miner as a separate one and that eats up a license seat so is best to keep them as a cluster.