When building a smaller mining farm with 2 dedicated mining rigs or more, you can expect some common obstacles like hitting the fuse limit or disposing of the heat and cooling the rigs. In this blog, we will direct you in the right direction on how to deal with these obstacles.

We will look into four main areas:

1. Electricity
2. Heat
3. Network
4. Management

Keep in mind, that every mining setup is different. Each room has a different window layout, different electricity setup, etc. You will need to use your own imagination and ingenuity for your own farm and tips in this article are there for general guidance only!

Electricity

If you are not a professional, we strongly encourage you to hire a professional electrician as it is not worth saving a few bucks and have your house burn down because of bad wiring!

There are a few basic things to understand about electricity and that are related to mining.

1. The amount of electricity that rig consumes is pretty much all converted into heat. If the rig consumes 1000 W, there will be approximately 1000 W of heat output by the rig.
2. The basic formula for calculating current/ampere (A) is to divide power (W) by voltage (V). Example: for 800 W rig in EU (220V): A = W / V = 800 / 220 = 3,63. This is very important as if you overload the fuse, it will trip and cause unnecessary rig downtime. Never load the fuse on 100%. Always leave around 5% or 10% as a reserve.
3. If possible use a fuse only for mining rigs. Do not use the same fuse for your freezer or refrigerator and a couple of rigs. Freezers and refrigerators only use power periodically when needed. This could overload your fuse and trip it. This will, again, cause unnecessary rig downtime.
4. When planning ahead, always leave an extra fuse and cable. This will make things easier and faster in case you would want to expand your mining farm in the future.

Heat

As mentioned before, the amount of power that the rig consumes will be the same as the amount of heat output. Keep in mind that a 1 kW rig will produce approximately the same amount of heat as a 1 kW heater.

How should I cool down the room?

This depends on your room. Our suggestion is to not use the AC as it will use a lot of extra electricity. Of course, in some cases where the room has no windows or loud fans would bother neighbours, then AC could be a reasonable choice. The cheapest way to cool down the room is to open a window and put a mosquito window net on it. This is an energy-efficient way to provide fresh air to your rigs.  Again, this option is only sufficient until there is enough natural airflow. Also, it might not be the safest one. Leaving a window open for potential burglars is not the smartest choice.

We recommend you set up a cold zone and a hot zone. This means physically separating one side of the rigs and the other. Fresh air comes into the room to the cold zone, then gets pushed through the rigs on the other side of the wall, where the hotter air escapes the room. This prevents the hot air from mixing with the cold air again.

How much airflow for 1 kW of rigs?

It is worth saying that it is more important to remove the hot air away from the rigs and out of the room rather than trying to cool it down. This is why using AC is not recommended. For 1 kW of rigs, you need approximately 300 m3/h of airflow to keep the room at 30°C when the outside temperature is 20°C. You can use this data, to get an approximate airflow needed for your farm. If you would build a 5 kW mining farm, then you would need approximately 1500 m3/h of airflow.

Network

Mining itself consumes very small amounts of network bandwidth. A 6 GPU mining rig consumes around 50 MB to 70 MB daily. Note that most of the mining software requires updates, which may use more bandwidth.

We recommend not using 4G Internet via SIM cards. While theoretically, it should work fine, there are certain limitations. 4G Internet is also not that stable, or it might disconnect frequently.

We also recommend using cable connections over the WiFi. It might be more work with wiring, but it eliminates troubleshooting issues related to WiFi and random disconnects (especially USB WiFi dongles).

Management

Another very important aspect of a mining farm is stability and the ability to optimize the rigs. You want your rigs to be stable, not crashing and causing unnecessary downtime while being able to overclock GPUs and monitor each device separately from a remote location. The best option for that is NHOS. NHOS is NiceHash Operational System based on Linux Tiny Core. It offers an easy and fast setup, while it is very stable, it has been proven that NHOS is one of the most profitable ways to mine.

Click here to learn more about NHOS. NHOS comes with an online managing tool called Rig Manager. With Rig Manager, you can control your rigs and monitor temperature, fan speed, profitability, and much more. With the Rig Manager, you can group your rigs in groups. For example, you can physically put rigs 1, 2, and 3 on rack 1, and group these rigs in one group. Or you could group all the rigs on the same electricity fuse.

Click here to start mining with NiceHash. Feel free to contact our community on Reddit or Discord, where our staff and other miners will be happy to assist you with further questions.