Topic: Using a Grow Tent for a mining rig cooling case? (Read 693 times)

It sounds like you should be ok, the good thing is you can always add another fan if needed.  Using a passive intake and the fan for exhaust definitely makes the most sense.

4 fans? Wow.  I'm only running 10 gpu, and 6 hard drives...maybe 1400w total.  The tent is in my garage.  So I'm hoping I can get away with a single 8" exhaust duct with a 450ish cfm fan that pumps it out through a vent in my attic to the outside.  Ideally I wouldn't need intake ducting at all (since i'm in the garage which isn't air tight), I'll just open up the flaps on the tent at the bottom.  Think that could work?

I ran my rigs in a tent last summer and pulling air from outside and venting kept the cards at a reasonable temp.  I would not recommend pulling air from your HVAC system, that will likely put a huge strain on your unit and could cause expensive damage.  Bring in 100F air from outside is not ideal, but I figure that it is probably similar in temp to what a GPU would be exposed to inside a gaming PC while playing a game.  I run 4 fans with 8" ducts, 2 intake and 2 exhaust.  The inside of the tent has an ambient temp of 90F to 100F, which sucks, but won't run my electric bill up and the cards still run around 65C. 

So I also live in Austin, TX, and am planning a setup using a grow tent.  @Saltyminer - in your experience, does simply pulling the air from outside and venting it to the outside keep the temps low enough?  How large is your intake and exhaust ducting?  I've been considering doing weird things like tapping into the air intake of my HVAC system to pull the cool air from, and then vent it either into the attic or to the outside.  Some tips from you guys would be very welcome before I ruin my house ha!

Yes, exhaust goes outside and intake from the outside as well, ducts are some 8 feet away from each other. I know TX is hot, we get some 115F here during the summer as well... but we get very cold winters, we had like 5F for some weeks last winter with snow and everything. I was running all my GPUs with just a few fans and a 2 feet window open, thats how cold it was.

Are you venting your hot air outside from the output of exhaust fan(s)?  Also, are you bringing in air from outside on the intake side?  That is what made a big difference for me.

I am jealous of your temps.  I live in Austin, TX and in the summertime it gets brutally hot here.

Before the tent I had metal lockers working the way you describe, which is similar to how rackable servers work - intake at front, exhaust to the back. This did the job over the winter but temperatures were different. On each of these I had 2 compartments of 13 GPUs each with 8x50cfm 120mm PC fans at 12V for intake at the front and 2x 200mc/h duct fans for exhaust at the back of the locker. It worked nice (all GPUs under 50C) until spring when temps started spiking over 70C in the locker contraptions so now I am playing with tents.

The tent I am trying now has the intake fans at the bottom and the exhaust at the top, I figure hot air should rise anyway because physics and I also have 6 duct fans inside blowing from bottom to top. I've tried every possible combination of all these fans on/off, switched positions and so on... I figure I'll just have to try some AC because right now the GPUs mine at some 65C during the day and 55-60C at night...I am not comfortable perma running them at ~60C, I'd rather have 50 or 55 max.

I had better success with setting my tent up with metal shelving that went from floor to ceiling and using a "hot/cold aisle" approach.  The intake is in front of the shelves and all the fans blowing towards the back of the tent.  The exhaust fans suck from the top of the tent directly outside.  I also used styrofoam insulation boards on the front of the shelves to block off unused space so it forces the airflow directly through the rigs.

4,500CFM is solid, are you bringing air from outside in and pushing it back out without restriction?  If you don't have airflow to/from outside then you will restrict air movement.  Bringing in air from outside and pushing hot air out made a significant difference.

If it's a small tent, don't use an active  inlet.
I only use an active inlet if the size of the tent is bigger then 1.5 by 1.5 meters.
Growing has the same problem as mining, Heat.
Allways the inlet on the bottom and on the other side above you suck away the hot air.
The temp differences you have, 1 place hotter the the other, growers use a fan to mix the air
There are enough 420 shops online where you can get a nice, energy saving air pomp, but allways let the hot air out to the oustide or another room.
I place my miners outside my tents in the winter, so they heat the room when the temps are below 0 outside and the ladies are in their 12 12 fase

And for those thinking this are small tents, the bigger ones are 6 by 6 meters and have an anti hot air detection from above ( Gorrila tents )

How does ducting diameter matter? I thought only fan capacity matters, cfm. You can have a fan pull, say, 1000 cfm through a 8" duct and you can have another more powerful fan pull 1000 cfm through a 6" duct.

On a side note, I see nobody mentions which area of the box or tent get ventilated more and which less based on fan placement... in my case I measured temperature in various corners of the tent to find differences of up to 8C even, so some spots in the tent did not get ventilated enough despite having 2 x 500 cfm fans on the exhaust.

I'll leave the maths to the clever people, but having done several similar tests, I can tell you that 6in ducting is not wide enough. 8in can be but it's a struggle - you'll need an epic inline fan that'll eat serious wattage (and cost hundreds for a specialised industrial fan unit).

You basically want the biggest extractor fan diameter you can fit - bigger fan, lower RPM = quieter, cheaper to run.

Either I'm not doing it right or this tent thing kind of sucks...I have 20 1070's in a 70 f^3 / 2 m^3 tent I am sucking air out of with 2 fans rated at 450 cfm (700m^c / h), and 2 more fans at 150 cfm each on the intake pumping in cold-ish air from my garage at about 70F/20C. Can't seem to get the GPUs under 150F/65C. Won't even try AC because the lowest temp I can get out of a portable 12K BTU is about 16C.

I think people who got this to work live in colder areas or made it during the winter, over here I will probably get 40C during the summer.

So you might want to reconsider if you are planning on spending $800 on a tent, vents, tubing and so on.

I think it was Einstein who once said if you truly know the subject you can explain the most complicated thing to a child. I dont troll people, I just get down on their level so they can understand me.

If we have intelligent comments than we can have an intelligent conversation.



I only have 4,500 CFM?

Each antminer puts out aprx 200 CFM of air.


I dont have issues cooling or exhausting heat so I am a little confused why you keep bringing that up.

Also I dont think we are on the same wavelength my friend. Lets talk math.

How big is the room,
How much wattage and amps is being drawn,
What is the BTU being produced,
WHAT IS THE THERMAL EXPANSION OF THAT BTU IN SUCH IN THAT AREA,
How much CFM are you exhausting,
How much CFM of fresh air are you inputting,


When you write all this out, all the variables will be X.

Math does not lie, people do.

Yes in an average sized bedroom at 20c Ambiant with a fair sized window opened and another window as intake, you can have a gpu rig heating the room and then the asic dumping their hot air outside directly. For 1 kW (my rig TDP size) the intake for the ASICs won't even be 1C higher. You just need a good metal fan as exhaust. In a room with 150 GPUs, then yes, it does matter. I think you said you had 12 runnings at the time...?

Finally do you only have 3 * 1500 CFM inline as exhaust TOTAL? That is not much, especially since they fight against pressure, so in reality it's much less as well hard to say, you do not talk about size of intake for outside air. You also seem more inclined to resort to trolling than intelligent remarks, hrmm..

Well I have a bunch of antminers and gpu mining rigs so I did a full build out on my garage to accompany this. I made a very well insulated room that is:

16ft X 8FT by 8FT


I am currently exhausting out the ports of my garage windows so right now I have no issue running everything open but I wanted to try to remove that extra 10,000 BTU of heat coming from that 1 mining rig alone. My main issue is that I wanted to turn that 16X8X8 room into a server room but the only way to do that is to cool at least 80,000 BTU.

I am in the process of having a dedicated AC company that specializes in server rooms come out and see what they can do to scale this up properly.

The issue with the tent is if you are running a serious multi rig gpu that the space is so small and the thermal expansion is so great that is just very inefficient, the only way to do it would be to do a 12,000 btu stand alone ac unit inside of the tent.

I love it mining in grow tent, lmao.  Im surprised that with 3 12' fans exhausting you can open the door to get into that place! Is there a lot of air coming in from somewhere, passively?  Have you tried having an inline fan bringing fresh air into the tent?  Id think that with air in and out, the air would exchange so fast it wouldn't heat up the tent?  

Now this is more of a logical conversation. Yes, I agree completely, open air is the only way to go. The reason I made that video is I saw a bunch of videos on youtube claiming they are getting temps of 50 inside of these grow tents, we all know thats not possible unless he was running 20 degree air force injected inside of them. So this video was to proof that what I was seeing was not real. I never saw any temps when the unit was running.

Okay so that was for you to understand and hopefully you will get this;

Thermal expansion is the tendency of matter to change in shape, area, and volume in response to a change in temperature.


Directly from Wikipedia:

"Temperature is a monotonic function of the average molecular kinetic energy of a substance. When a substance is heated, the kinetic energy of its molecules increases. Thus, the molecules begin vibrating/moving more and usually maintain a greater average separation. "


What I am trying to tell you is that because these units are producing so much heat so much fast(BTU) the actual molecules are expanding at such a rate that I dont care if you have 2 inline highest powered fans there are hooked directly inside with no DUCTING, you still will not cool that tent... sorry
I geuss MATH55A comes in handy sometimes, I knew all that studying in college would pay off some day   

most grow tents aren't very big, talking average one that can fit a normal metal shelf inside is like 4 ft wide by 2ft deep and at least 6 and a half inches tall, that's not much CF going on there, but regardless he would still have to have a very high powered inline fan the expel the heat FROM the tent, mine are simple open air rigs like everyone else's, I'm not a hater I'm just really honest if I think your stupid, well not much ya can do about that, I mean come on. everyone knows gpus produce a lot of heat and what's gunna happen when you put gpus in a box while running them full bore, especially if there isnt adequate cooling, kinda common sense there

You guys talk allot about venting. Did you ask what the what the CF is inside of the grow tent? Or wait did you even ask how much BTU my rigg puts out.

Yea because each card puts out the same amount of heat because it draws the same exact amount of power as well. ROFL


First off get your calculations, numbers dont lie, people do.

And Virosa were you high when you wrote that? IT DOESNT MATTER IF YOU ASIC DRAWS IN HOT AIR?!?   OMG, the knowledge right now is outstanding.

and PS. all the miners and GPU is vented out (3) 12 inch inline 1500 CFM duct fans directly outside.


I CLEARLY STATED IN THE VIDEO THIS WAS A TEST TO SEE HOW THE RIG HANDLED THE QUICK SETUP I PUT TOGETHER, AND THAT I WOULD MODIFY IT.

Cryptowatcher your just a hater  Lets see your rigs and designs. And guess what I wont say they suck because I am not that type of person.

guess no one told him about how to vent heat roflamo, which is funny cause usually with a grow tent you've got inline fans to move air. must be a noob grower that doesn't know squat