Post
Topic
Board Mining
Merits 4 from 1 user
Re: keep a small mining farm cool with only air conditioners.
by
Powell
on 04/07/2023, 16:03:36 UTC
⭐ Merited by mikeywith (4)
Years upon years ago when I had our farm (2014) and we were using about 140-150A @ 208v I had a calculation that took all of that formula and then even converted it to how many TONs of a/c I would need. I will say as a few others have posted outdoor units can/will be loud.

Fast forward to today at my personal home.
I have a ~50ft x 60ft x 20ft (roughly 3000 sq ft) shop/garage that was built around 4 years ago. It has vapor barriers under with the concrete, every bit of insulation that can be done (minus bay doors, which I may do soon but they are automatic rollups so always been hesitant), 2x 5 TON A/C units that are mounted from the ceiling to cool it down. I live southeast of Houston so I am closer to the Gulf of Mexico which means humidity is something I always have to fight. One thing as a user or two posted is depending on time of day where the sun is hitting the building there will be hot spots in different places and that can take a wicked hit to things.

Another thing though is humidity, and this is where I've had friends that own HVAC companies, and this did come up with my mothers companies small data center (we are a reseller for IBM/DELL/Pure Storage/etc. etc. so we have a large amount of equipment to demo) that you still have to battle humidity. Last summer I did not take that into account in my personal shop, I was just using the AC's to help pull humidity out. I was mining Etherium in Minerdude/Octominer chassis with 3090s and I started to notice the heatsinks/fans/etc showing signs of dew on them and oxidizing things. I was in no way overpowering my AC's considering the heat produced from that was no issue for the amount of BTU's available from the AC. After Eth mining was done I was getting annoyed because leaving cardboard, etc became a problem. I ended up recently adding 20,000 CFM in fans (just 2x wall mounted 10,000 CFM fans to cycle the air) and it has helped a lot when the AC is running where as before even with everything sealed humidity was still not manageable. Though in the evening when things cool down and the AC isn't taking as much load. I am having to add a large de-humidifier (shows up Thursday) to hopefully be the final peace of the puzzle.

Maybe someone else can chime in on there being a problem with humidity because lets say you in theory could keep close to ambient, there is still large risk of failure to equipment at that point from humid air taking its tole on equipment fast.