Topic: Why so few immersion cooled custom builds/Mods? - page 2. (Read 5393 times)

Love it and makes for a great post # 2,000 for me

As with all the other applications, since the business is paying for power anyway to make the needed heat it would be to their advantage to offset the energy cost by mining. Say use the miners to supply around 75-80% of the heat needed and use a conventional heat source to provide the rest. That way miners stay running 24x7 and temp control is done by the conventional heater & temp controls.

bitjerky.. has a great ring to it. people would probably buy for the novelty of tasting some petahash infused beef.

I've often thought it'd be handy to pipe my exhaust heat into a greenhouse or something so I could have fresh corn in January. Though realistically my shop leaks so much, it was all I could do to keep the place warm with miner heat and didn't have any to spare for vegetables.

Ah. That aspect has been extensively covered and recovered and recovered in other threads... Ya the heat could be reused in many areas needing a constant moderately to very warm temp. Quick re-cap:
Hydronic heating
Baking (proving rooms)
Food preservation (beef jerky)
Pools/spas

I like what machine zero is saying about heating his pool  . I don't have one myself to heat, but certainly the idea of transferring the asic heat to a fluid makes it more transportable and re-usable in other applications. By not blowing dusty air around too maybe this could transfer heat into cleaner environments, (food prep areas like bakers proving room/cupboard etc) I dunno, like I said earlier I was just trying to encourage some discussion on the topic of why not and not so much how.

That ^^ looks rather nice and good to see they are not using Novec
Tried to dl the FAQ on their thermal xfr fluid but must be one helluva big PDF -- over minute and still not loaded. That's a 'FAQ'?
Too bad and rather stupid that they won't talk to 'small' users...

What are the options for purchasing a finished system for immersion cooling?

I've only been able to find this product, and the company didn't want to talk to me about a small residential installation...

http://www.grcooling.com/carnotjet/

You have to design a board to work with immersion cooling specifically, as a general rule, for it to work properly and reliably - and the up-front investment in the hardware AND the cooling setup isn't exactly low cost.

It can work well once it's set up, though - but it's more "large pro farms" that use it, or something like that BitFury "shipping container" setup.

Ya on the emphasis I added.
In our laser systems the total piping run for the cooling oil side is only a few feet just for that reason. Way cheaper (less thermal fluid) to xfr from the oil to water using a heat exchanger located in the systems.

My fav heat exchangers are the plate type, damn near 100% xfr efficiency. I use this one https://www.mcmaster.com/#35115k62/=1797t5f to keep 10kw of laser heat load a constant 72-75F using 60F water flowing 5GPM, water solenoid spends about 50% time on & off so could push even more heat in if wanted.

Given the miners like running MUCH hotter - remember, 70C = 158F - - gives us a very large delta-T to work with so cooling the water side just using air even on a hot day should still let you pull a helluva lot of heat out of the system.

EDIT: Hopefully it should go without saying but I must anyway: If you are going to be using liquid cooling and running miners at over about 100F (37.78C) then DO NOT use a plastic tank! Plastic of any type begins to soften/deform at surprisingly low temperatures... Fiberglass good (hmm, a stand alone laundry sink? Already has a nice hole in the bottom for incoming oil returning from the oil/water exchanger...), metal tank is best.

Need a parts list and some pictures.

I'm thinking something like

that encases 2 S9s,  feeds into a pool pump and with a flick of the switch exchanges heat into the house.

If you just had a dunk tank with a circulator inside it, you could put whatever miner you wanted in there. Pump your fluid out to a radiator in your basement or another exchanger in the pool. If that's too much pricey fluid, use a heat exchanger in the tank and pump water or something through it and out to the radiator. That's gonna raise the overall temperature a bit because you'll have two heat transfers instead of just one, so you'd have to pay a bit more attention when designing and operating to make sure it'd handle full power.

I would love to heat my pool using some kind of heat transfer between may-sep, then switch to heating my basement on other months.
It'd be nice if it was one system and interchangeable with the latest miner.

Wishful thinking...

I hacked together a prototype tank for some testing a while back. This is just a simple open loop design (just runs and dumps cold water through the coil). Have some more ASICs coming so maybe ill modify this with a real closed loop design.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5-BaH8_SAk

Provided the output was compatible (or easy to transform), that'd be a better option.

Or, a flow sensor for the cooling loop would also work. They're quite cheap on ebay these days, but watch the seals.

Anything that'll make a 12V pulsetrain at about 135Hz on the tach line will tell the controller it's got a fan running at 4000RPM. A $1 555 circuit will do that.

This guy seemed to have good results:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo0g2dKPAcQ

He had interesting reasoning for why he hasn't done immersion cooling on an S9...


Seems like it would be easy enough to get around, but another interesting drawback to the auto-tune firmware Bitmain introduced.

Might as well resurect these old Novec Data Tank vid eh? https://vimeo.com/95819646 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iykkSo75yDo
240kw in a very small volume tank in that last one... Woof.

2 things drives it: Max kw in smallest size package and moving that heat load somewhere else to be gotten rid of. For us that is a plant cooling water supply running up to 110F, preferably under 95F. Well, that and lack of fans/filters to replace.

Ok that makes 3.
Maybe 4.
What is this? The Spanish Inquisition??!

A typical 30kv supply good for 20kw is about 2ft-square-sided cube and that is mainly due to spacing needed due to the high voltage.

Ok, so there's a few more forum topics than I thought on this (I searched the forum for immersion cooling, and there was nothing recent. I didn't look for submersion   )

But I don't really want to get hung up on the how to. That seems like a common theme, oil types etc. (Unless the reason people don't do this is complexity.) Just the why "why" interests me in particular. I do this as a hobby and am very prepared to modify things to suit my needs. I have my miners close to where I sleep due to living arrangements. This makes noise my biggest concern. No point me having an S7 if I never sleep again    This has limited me to s3 units and swapping the fans for quieter one's. For me that works great.

But I trying to test the room for if people are happy the way things are with air cooling. How about when bitmain had the C1? It's not quite as drastic as immersion/submersion cooling but tackles the noise problem. Not sure it helps the power regulating components much though.

Does anyone think that as these things are sounding more and more like a jet engine with people posting videos on youtube using blenders as noise comparisons, we're using air as a cooling medium but that's on the edge of still being practical? A step in a different direction

I just feel the life of these units could be extended if this route was taken, (and done properly, but again not bothered with the how yet as in other threads).

***notfuzzywarm posted as I was writing this and it's great to see some expert insight. Can you say if the units you work with benefit from the immersion cooling due to high component count, or due to needing to transfer more heat than air allows, or other reasons?