Topic: Solution to deal with heat from mining rigs (Read 2556 times)

Yes as you can tell we are not reinventing the rack.  Our products are extremely high quality and user friendly compared to our competition as it directly affects the price.  In the mining industry everyone is trying to cut corners to save every penny, which is understandable.  We provide a quality product with the ability to make any custom modifications or requests that the customer might want (for example we designed a 106U rack for a miner last week), where most of the competition will not (We can make virtually any size you want).  We also manufacture and design our own custom and standard power strips, which gives our customers different options.  We have many different fan panel configurations and we could put something aesthetically pleasing to accommodate the racks like the photo posted above. Side note..you can check out our blue racks in this data center knowledge article posted today to check out our custom powdercoating abilities http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2014/05/28/5-reasons-modern-data-centers-use-environmental-sensors/

I used to keep my rigs cool enough with ambient temps up to 105oF... Now, I realize that's a bit extreme as I know some components (like PSUs) aren't supposed to be in ambient over 95oF (hence all expensive gold-cert PSUs)...  but it wasn't too hard to keep all the graphics cards under 75oC.  Just had to have a floor fan assigned to each computer... and a huge industrial fan blowing air in from the window & venting out the top..

The door was sealed off with some foam type stuff.  I'm sure some of that hot air still got to other parts of the house, but it probably didn't increase the AC bill all that much... maybe 10% or so.

YES THERE IS!!!

Just go back to before you turned them on. :-) And loop the process...
(joke joke)

What am I missing here?

Am I reading this correctly or missing something? Basically you are selling something already commercially available and calling it a BitRack.
I surely do not meant to rain on your parade (please do not be offended) however there is no reason to use those type of racks when
you can simply cool the rigs with ambient (correctly done) air flow and/or simply add the APC rack coolers to the racks you are already using.
You should design a rack that can do what I'm showing below in a more elegant manner... for example high velocity fans mounted on the server rack door
to push air through without people having to mount fans on the front side... I know those are commercially available as well, I guess with server
racks its hard to have a unique idea these days.  What MIGHT make a difference however is if your rack is super cheap compared to the competition.
Is it?  With that, I think you might have something viable.

http://www.apc.com/products/family/?id=107#

You can plainly see this is a VERY common datacenter type rack these days.

Here is 15600Watts in each rack...
Front:


Back:

aircondioner or extra fans but it not help much ...

any way to turn the heat into ac?

This is a good solution:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-61P08KKxs

Because AC is costly and don't forget about the energy consumption. It could add a lot of cost just by matching the heat and the BTU from AC..

Not economically at the scales we are talking about. The heat differential would have to be much higher to drive turbines. In other words the miners would have to run hotter and be happy doing so.

Isnt there a way to turn the heat back into electricity?

I saw a 12K and 19K coolers that reauire a 40A total circuitry (so about 7kW if following load and safe use guidelines). 32K BTU is capable of only ~10kW of heat being cooled though, correct (for efficient A/C 1w of heat removed = 3-4 BTU)?

The design does not strike me as ideally as using a regular rack packed full of hardware, which a lot of DC's seem able to handle up to 20kW from a rack

Sounds really cool, its cooling abilities are really good as well it appears.

Racks look good, but the title is a bit misleading. You still don't have a solution to the heat, as you have to get rid of it somehow (as people already said). The rack is just a tidy way of organizing things, but it won't help with the heat much more than a typical wooden shelf.

It depends largely on the quality of air external to your building. If you exhaust hot air to the outside you will still need to replace it with other air from outside. If the outside air is 70 degrees and 50% humidity all the time, then you've got a winning scenario. Unfortunately that won't always be the case. So you have to decide whether it is better to dehumidify, cool, and possibly filter outside air that is coming in to replace the exhausted hot air, or use a form of air conditioning to pipe that heat outside.

Instead of spending big bucks on massive AC units (HVAC) and the never-ending electricity bills associated with AC, why not just exhaust the heat out of the cabinet and push it outside?

WHY SPEND MONEY TO COOL SUPER HOT AIR? WHY,WHY WHY?? JUST GET RID OF IT!

...the intake air flow could be simply plain ole' outside uncooled air ducted in to the cabinet.

Yes, you'll need an exhaust air handler constantly running but that gotta be cheaper than cooling the air ala AC? You want the effect of blowing on a bowl of hot soup or blowing on a spoon of hot soup, to cool things off.

I would use the air mover/handler to suck outside cooler air and push it into the bottom of that hot air cabinet. Positive air pressure would then exit the top hot air out thru the ductwork that leads to the outside. But if the cabinet is leaky air-wise, maybe just have the air handler directly sucking out the hot air to the outside, but I'd think that the now very hot air handler equipment will have a shorter operational life. Also perhaps experiment with taking the covers off the mining rigs.

I live in Hawaii so the temp is usually around 85°F (30°C) which is way cooler than say, 80°C you may be wanting to keep your mining rig's temp under. So you "blow" room temperature air on your mining rig "hot soup" to cool things off.

Why not buy a AC? And placing your rigs in a ventilated room and there should be no problem, or just wreck a radiator of a old car and mod it so you can WC all your cards in serial!

If you hardware is producing less energy and heat than the terraminers, then you will be able to stack more in the rack to utilize the amount of cooiling being produced.  You also might be able to get away with one sidemount AC unit opposed to two depending on your heat load, which would significantly cut your costs down on the BitRack unit.  We can also adjust the PDUs accordingly.

so scrypt asics and x11 miners use less energy and heat


what are the results and utility of this solution going forward?

Our racks are made with the utmost quality and design.  We pride ourselves on being able to cater to specific needs of the customer, where most larger racks companies will not take these custom requests.  If you are looking for the highest quality rack for your mining setup, I'd say this is the way to go.

The BitRack 3 pumps out 32 KW BTU, which allows the mining rigs to run at optimal temperature and therefore mine more coins.  To my knowledge there really isn't anything else on the market that cools that much power, unless you want to go with the heat exchanger route, which we offer as well.  For most mining conditions this is the best fit.