This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
This is quite an undertaking for a solo venture. I'm assuming that you've got some other folks on the side working with you but it sounds like you're doing most of the heavy lifting yourself. I wish you good luck on your travels this upcoming weekend.
I don't think I follow the schematic of your cooling system entirely. So it's hard to follow your calculations if I don't quite get the whole picture, even if the equations by themselves make sense. Maybe drawing a P&ID would assist the audience? I know, asking a lot from an internet stranger.
A couple of thoughts that came to me as I was reading through your post - wondering if there is any benefit in sizing down the cooling system to better deploy the capital elsewhere? Obviously it is important to have engineering margin, and it sounds like you're building the cooling system to accommodate the hottest of days. The other option would be to size it down slightly, and decrease the number of miners you run on the hottest days of the year. In other words, instead of 99.9% uptime for the cooling system, might it be worth evaluating what 99% uptime can get you? You can always upsize the cooling system on the next build. Or you could add provisions in the piping so that you can connect additional cooling in the future, in case the design doesn't perform the way you expected.
Will be glad to talk about electrical when you get there.
Thank you for being (upfront!) willing to help! It is basically entirely a solo venture. I will have outside startup capital, but no help in making things happen. I do plan on hiring someone to babysit the miners; I don't want to live there, so the plan is to have someone local who can show up and do needed maintenance without me having to fly back each time. And thank you for the luck; my flight may be delayed another week (we'll see) due to last-minute contract wrangling with the investors. I think that's the most frustrating part for me.
It's not asking a lot at all; asking a lot is asking an internet stranger to look over my calculations! Here's my sketched-out P&ID; forgive me if it's not to scale and if I don't have a ruler with me. I hope it gets the idea across. If you have strong feelings about having a proper one, suggest a program to do so and I can make one up. This seems to me to be a useful skill to gain, anyways; my preparation consists of a sketch similar to the one I just made, along with a series of numerical calculations and markings.
Well, I'm not averse to downsizing the cooling. It's just such a small part of the overall cost that it seems to me to be okay to overbuild, especially since there is a potentially-unknown amount of extra heat being added. More specifically, the cooling system as is will cost about 3% of the overall startup cost (the miners are by far the most expensive part). That number includes generous margin of error; my actual predicted cost is 2348.75 (plus shipping), which is rather under 3% and anyways rounds up on some small parts. When I say that there could be additional heat being added... Well, I'd love to overclock the miners. Exactly how much I can do that by will be directly proportional to my ability to cool them. And cooling itself is generally going to be very easy; I mean, no worrying about chillers or anything, just dumping the heat outside.
With that said, adding provisions to connect additional piping in the future is a good idea. And, again, I'm not against downsizing the cooling... I just think that doing so would save me relatively little (0.5% of the project cost? limited upside) and have uncertain downside (potential lack of cooling).
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