Topic: Safe to heat house with ALT coin mining rigs.?? - page 2. (Read 2552 times)

You were all so lucky here in our country,we are located on tropical country,we cannot set up mining rigs because of the electricity cost,you need an aircoinditioned to run a mining rig inside your room,guess mining rigs are for those with a cold climate like alaska..

I used to heat my house of the rigs I run, plenty of machines running a group of HD6990s, later HD7990s produced some amazing heat!

I heat my home with 2000 W of mining rigs. It is warm during high temperature days. But when it is very cold, the heat is not enough.

I don't think it would be much of an issues from fumes, as these are designed to be put in PCs that are in homes already. Granted, you might end up running them a bit hotter than usual, but still should be no concerns there.

I believe the biggest issue would be that of a fire hazard. Are you using extension cords at all? Are you overloading a circuit, should probably only put one rig per individual circuit, especially if the circuit is being shared with other appliances. If dedicated 20 Amp circuits, you could probably get a way with two rigs each.

Then how about the immediate surroundings? Are you setting these rigs up on or nearby anything flammable? Even a quick spark shooting out and landing on some clothing could set your house ablaze. This is especially a concern if you are running open air rigs, which it sounds like you may be with 3 GPUs each. With a regular computer, the case acts as a barrier between a short and any sparking and the surrounding environment, open air the spark could travel some distance. With rigs running hot 24/7, sometimes weak components can give out.

When I ran a lot of scrypt mining rigs, I had them on metal wire racks from Home Depot with each 4 GPU rig fed from a Tripp-lite surge suppressor (the metal cased ones) which in turn has as separate 12 amp breaker. These were plugged into (2) per 20 amp circuit. I had to have extra circuits installed to keep everything legit. The racks were on concrete in the unfinished part of my basement, with the backs about 2 feet away from a bare sheet-rocked wall (it had paint but nothing else, i.e. no posters, curtains,etc.). I also made sure to keep anything combustible, like cardboard, papers, clothes, etc. at least 6 feet away from the sides and fronts of the rack area. This way if a component failed and a few sparks shot out, they would not land on anything that would easily catch fire.

I bring all this up, as again during my scrypt mining days, I probably had 5-6 instances where components went bad and the few times I was actually in the room, a bunch of sparks shot out before the equipment could shut down. Fortunately it was usually just a video card voltage regulator going out, so I could send them in for RMA. One time a PSU went out when I was away. When I came home and noticed, because of the burnt smell in the air, the tripp-lite surge suppressor breaker had tripped. The connected PSU had brunt out and I could see a lot of charring around the vent holes, what looked like it may have put on quite a show when it went out.

So after experiencing some of these events first-hand, i can only imagine images of people placing a bunch of rigs in bedrooms, on carpeted floors, near beds, curtains, etc., and overloading outlets where if something would happen, it would likely cause a fire.

This is not meant to discourage you or anyone from mining, only to think about what they are actually doing and some of the risks they are introducing into their household. At minimum put a smoke detector in every room you have rigs going.

I also remember the tremendous heat this used to put out. I live in a colder climate, and even when the temperature was below 0 outside, we still had to have several windows cracked open at all times. In spring, even as it approached 20-30 degrees F outside, the house would need to be opened up like it was summer outside, with windows wide open as well as the doors. Once real warm weather arrived, I had to relocate some rigs to the garage and ended up shutting many of them down.

I think worrying about toxic fumes from computers is being a bit too much like a hypochondriac.  What about all the other electronic devices that a household typically has?  If there was a legit concern about such a thing there would be warning labels everywhere.  The only time I would be concerned is if the rigs aren't properly cooled and overheat/melt, then smoke/fumes would be an issue.

I live in alaska and i have thought about getting an old miner just to heat my room. lol

It's freezing outside but I'm roasting in here with the rigs burning away. These are the standard r9 280x gpu rigs not asics.

What's the opinon on heating your home like this? healthy or not?

With regard specifically to the air you'd be inhaling? rather than the electro magnetic concerns? I measured those and they seem to have only a very short reach and for the most part I'm way out of range.

How about the air quality?

Say for instance 25 rigs with 3 gpus? each  in a 4 bedroom house. Although most are just in two rooms.

The only thing i could imagine is the heat transfer goop that stick the heat sinks on - does that give of any toxic fumes even in very small doses?