I did it . I immersion cooled an S19J Pro ASIC miner…
It did not go smoothly…
And I did not pick the right
components (cut to me saying “This is a truck radiator from a 2007 toyota Corolla)
But I learned a lot! And man, those temperatures!!!
Ok, this part is super important.. This project was a proof of concept for the
warehouse mining farm - and mostly I wanted to test out this Bitcool, Dielectric coolant,
To see if it can really deliver on the promise of super stable temperatures with
WAYYYYY less noise than the hurricane room. That said, we used the wrong pump,
the wrong tubing material and a radiator out of a 2007 Toyota Corolla as a heat exchanger! This
video is filled with really good information about immersion cooling but Do not do as I
have done here! :) My name is Nicholas
Johnson and this is the Space Warehouse. So I got a chance to go out and meet the guys, and
lady, at EngineeredFluids.com - where they make these dielectric coolants for use in Immersion
cooling all sorts of things, from computer servers to EV batteries to Bitcoin Miners!
He showed us around their new facility, showed us some of the older projects they had made,
and some future whole kit options they will be offering to us miners in the coming months..
He was happy to answer all the questions I could come up with and give us advice
on how to properly put together an immersion cooling rig for my ASIC miners;
advice I promptly went solidly against for the purpose of filming this video youre watching now!
You see, were starting a road trip tomorrow all the way up north, to meet in person with
and verify the identity of our new US based Mining Supplier where Im going to pick up a couple more
S19j’s! But that meant that I needed to get all of the equipment I needed to build this…
monstrosity.. in person, and in one day, to have it running and tested
before we take off on this long road trip. There are some stipulations when it comes to
bitcool dielectric coolant. They have a list of materials that are compatible with the chemical
makeup of this stuff, Ill put a link in the description of what you can and cannot use
with it. All of the proper components are very easy to order and wait for, and have arrive at
your house a few days later - but getting the right stuff in person, locally, is not.
SO - I got a pump that is WAY overpowered for the size of this tank and Im pretty sure it
has the wrong plastic on the inside that will either make it just stop working, or leak all
over the warehouse some time Im not there.. Were using clear vinyl tubing.. It looks really nice,
you can see everything happening - but it will soon become as hard as glass and crack and fail.
I couldn’t find anywhere that would sell me a dry cooler, a proper heat exchanger - so what
we have here is a car radiator zip tied to an old home depot shop fan,
which did a surprisingly good job of dumping heat before springing a leak on day 1 of its operation.
If youre going to do a home brew immersion cooling setup for your miners, DO NOT DO IT THIS WAY.
But as far as how immersion cooling works; these are the general components one needs in order
to build a system. Just… build it with materials that wont self destruct when brought into contact
with this magical anti-electricity liquid. You will need: some sort of tank. Many gallons
of Dielectric fluid, Im using Bitcool (more on the wonders of this heat sapping wonder juice
in a bit). A fluid pump to move the coolant out of said tank, ideally one made with all metal
construction. A heat pump to remove heat from the coolant that you’ve pumped out of that tank. Some
hoses to carry the now less hot bitcool back into the tank, and of course all of the accoutrements
that go with these things, like hose clamps, thread tape, CPVC glue, a willingness to be
covered in a warm oily substance when something unexpected happens. Oh and an ASIC machine!
You start by prepping the miner. First: these fans are way too powerful
to be spinning under the coolant - you dont need them, and you save a few dozen watts by running
the machine without them. Unfortunately, and also fortunately - the S19J Pro is smart enough
to realize when its fans aren’t operating and it shuts itself off to avoid self destruction.
The way you get around this safety feature is by using these little fan spoofers, or
fan simulators. I got these on amazon, Ill leave a link in the description if
you dont want to go searching for them. So get all four fans off; youre going to
have to pop the top off to get the fans unplugged and the spoofers plugged in.
Once EngineeredFluids.com starts selling their immersion kit - they’ve designed this handle
to make use of the fan screw holes, they’ve got some extra long cables for the guts of this thing
to make it so you can leave the control board up and out of the fluid so you can reset it,
mess with the ethernet and use an SD card easier and also this black riser to get the
miner off the bottom of the tank and direct the coolant through the case. Unfortunately,
this thing wasn’t designed for THIS tank, so Joey and I had to make some modifications in order to
get the flow going in the right direction. Now that the machine is prepped, the pump
was hard wired in and the radiator zit tied to its fan - it was just a matter of getting
the bitcool into the system and checking for leaks! This time this stuff came in a
bucket - pouring it was easier, except for how high up I have my tank for display purposes.
I have my tank propped up this way to give a little gravity assist going into the pump. Also,
in the event that you need to turn it off for any reason - the pump will stay primed.
The fluid went in without any obvious problems - a guy could say I was a bit surprised nothing
leaked considering there were about 20 possible joints where I could have glued the CPVC wrong,
or just slid hose over the end of a pipe and clamped it down, hoping for the best!
Chad tells me that this fluid has tiny molecules, so even more
than water - this stuff will find any leak no matter how small the opening.
That said - we had the system filled up, turned it on.. and very quickly found that leak!
In my head, this pump was basically dumping the coolant up and into the radiator and it
would fall through the radiator and come back down to the tank, hence the radiator being up
so high.. Well I didnt account for the fact that I bought a pump that was about 5 times
stronger than I needed for what I’ve built here - and it IMMEDIATELY pressurized the system,
found a leak in the front of the radiator and shot a bunch more out the top;
this thing didnt come with a radiator cap. So a quick trip back to the O’Reilys auto
parts - a new capped radiator zip tied into the system and we were back off to the races!
This time, we started it up and everything was humming along perfectly!
Only one thing remained to do - stand on a chair, covered in oil and awkwardly hoist
one of my $11,000 dollar machines up and into the bath. You can just dunk the whole thing in,
wiring and all - its quite an unnatural thing to do, especially knowing this thing runs on over
3000 watts of electricity - but doing unnatural things is becoming increasingly more common for
me in on this youtube channel so here we are. And now the moment I had been waiting for
since having medium success with my GPU immersion experiment..
SUCCESS! No leaks! no errors,
the machine turned on, found its network, joined the pool and started hashing away! Green circles
were normal normal normal, and it even started hashing at 107TH, this is a 104 machine. Initial
running temperatures in the 40’s and 50’s C! Of course this was just because none of the coolant
had a chance to find its equilibrium just yet. We decided to let the thing run while we went
out and got some BarBQ with Sarah. The only hurdle left was to see if this little radiator could keep
up with the heat produced by the S19J Pro. Afer a few hours the temperature stabilized
with inlet temps in the 50’s and outlet in the 60’s! This is amazing! My air cooled machines
Are in the 60’s and 70’s - and all is “normal.” I took a little 4 second video of the disgusting
mess I had put together and sent it over to the boys at EngineeredFluids.com just
to tell them I had the thing going. Much to my surprise, only a few minutes later - and this
was after business hours on a friday - my phone rings and it is the CEO, VP of operation and the
lead engineer on a conference call, telling me to immediately shut down the system,
that I have put my equipment in imminent danger! All these bubbles you can see flowing through the
system are bad. They will cause problems with the pump, they will cause problems inside the
miner as theyre making their way up through there - they can get stuck and cause ruin the
heat transfer - this is not even to mention the fact that I used all the wrong materials
basically throughout the entire system. AND Car radiators, who knew, are designed
for water and automotive coolant. And upon close inspection - I was already getting some ‘sweating’
in various places around that thing as well. This system was a BEAUTIFUL proof of concept!
And it was doomed. So as quickly as I put it together, we went back to the warehouse
and decommissioned my immersion cooled S19J Pro. I cant wait to build an immersion system
with the proper equipment and specs! So.. Why would someone want to do
this? Why immersion cool at all when air cooling seems to work just fine.
For me, I see two MAIN reasons to do this. 1: You can make these hoses basically however
long you want to - and in reality, you should probably use a hard line, like CPVC chlorinated
PVC, rather than flexible hoses, for longevity. But and not only are they about 1/10th as loud
to begin with, but you can have your pump and head exchanger running outside for example,
which would leave you with your miners running inside perfectly quiet, and with almost no heat!
the second reason to do this is for longevity. Two of the main factors that lead to these
machines eventually failing are heat fluctuations and vibration. When there are heat fluctuations
throughout the day, with air cooling because of whatever changes in the environment, day
time vs night time and all that - the different materials that are in contact with each other,
aluminum, copper, silicone from the chips and so on,
contract and expand at different rates from each other, and over time, can cause
tiny tiny cracks. That gets compounded when you have 4 extremely powerful fans vibrating away
24 hours a day, speeding up and slowing down as they need to with the temperature fluctuation.
When your machines are bathing in a tank of coolant, that tank will be very close to the
same temperature all the time. And any changes in temperature will take place very gradually.
Also, the fans are removed, so there is no vibration (unless you buy a giant pump and
use it with a tiny tank and BLAST bubbles up and through the machine, dont build one like mine).
Thirdly, SOMEONE will come out with a way to overclock these bad boys and soon! And
when they do, heat mitigation will become your number one focus in running them faster than
they were designed, but in a stable way. And with a proper sized heat exchanger,
you can keep these things however cool you want, basically however hot they try to get!
EngineeredFluids.com is working on a kit, right now, that they will have ready to ship - we’ll
say in Q1 of next year, Chad was a little unsure of the exact date they’ll be ready for
the masses.. And that kit will come with literally everything you need; the tank, a proper size pump,
a dry cooler - heat exchanger, and all the fittings and wiring. You’ll be able to just put it
down and plug it in! Goodbye hurricane rooms. And now we’re off to Minnesota,
I will be editing this video in the back of a truck on a 1500 mile journey to a frozen
land to meet two strangers in a parking lot and exchange twenty thousand dollars for 80
pounds of computer equipment - im digging the cyberpunk nature of this timeline were living in.