I have been mining for years now. Like many, this started as a hobby. I’m an IT guy that owns a small consulting company and a HVAC company (long story) and do pretty decent for myself. I’m not loaded, but I live nicely (My wife has a spectacular job as well is why LOL) Anyway about 3 years ago during a stretch of hard time in the crypto industry where machines were making 2-3$ day, I spoke to my wife and decided to risk it and bet long on crypto. The reason in my mind was price. I could get equipment at a reasonable price not like last year when everything went nuts. I went from 1 machine to test to 20 quickly, then after the talk flew to china to meet with mfg’s and see about getting hundreds. Great city Shenzhen is by the way visit if you ever get the chance. Mfg as we all know now and i did not know back then, is that most Chinese companies are total scum bag greedy bastards. They will sell you out for the same amount of dollars if the other party is Chinese. They take care of their own first, admirable i guess, and if there is any scraps left then you can have those, normally at a higher price than what you agreed upon. Met with a few, lost some money on one or two and finally got one that worked well.
In May of 2017 I entered into an agreement with a hosting company up north for 250kw of power. Great bunch of guys I am proud to call friends now. I had full use of facility and was their biggest client taking 1/3 of their power. This July 2018 I finally completed and moved out into my facility.
At the end of 2017 and along with my wife’s support, since she is the only breadwinner (hold the crypto possible!) at this point because I went all in on crypto, I began the search for a building that I could put in a crap ton of power. It’s not as easy as one would think by the way! It took months of talking to electric delivery and cities because of regulations, taxes, incentives and all that fun stuff. I purchased a building and began my quest to build a mining facility that I can have for myself and rent out space once complete. My major focus was having something I can call mine, but do it in a way that I can automate it so I don’t have to be at the location 24/7 to manage it. Mid July 2018, my 4 megawatt 43,000 square foot facility was pretty much ready. There were many road blocks and turns to get to this point but it was all worth it. I use about 1 megawatt for me. I’m mainly a GPU guy but have 50-60 asics. I have 20 security cameras on the outside and a bunch on the inside. I am in the process of adding magnetic locks for keypad entry. I fully gutted the offices and made them in my image. I went ahead and purchased warehouse racks and took advantage of the height in here. Being an HVAC guy I know that cooling at this magnitude is just cost prohibitive so I went with major ventilation. Every 2 mw hot isle has 3 - 70,000 cfm up-blast exhaust fans running. 1 and a half can do the job but just in case I have a catastrophic fan failure I have a spare. I have all metered and switched CDU so that I can remotely reboot any machine I want. I am fed from two substations with switches on either side of my building just in case there is a fault at the power company the switch will kill that feed so I can continue on the other. I have the ok from the power company and the city to go to 12 mw if I ever wanted too. I have the space and I might do that some day =)
I did not cheap out on anything other than the obvious, cooling. I made this right because I made it for me. Even if I don’t rent out a single kw, i’ll be happy because I know in my heart this was done the way I wanted it and what most people would dream about. I’m like the hair club for men guy, I’m not just the president, I’m also a member!
Looking at the pictures below really don’t do justice to the enormity of this thing and the cost. Everything is expensive at this level of electricity. Cable is triple what I thought it would be for example.
Location obviously not disclosed. It is in Midwest USA
Anyway, enough of my ranting here are some pictures and ask questions i’ll be more than happy to answer. Please be patient though as this facility is still taking most of my time.
Few pics!
My washer was ready but drier was not so i put my clothes on racks behind units to dry =)
Big Ass Steaks first day units came online!
Pipes Being Laid (8 x 4 inch per 2MW)
Pads & Containment Ready! (6K per Pad Cost)
Poles Set!
Transformer Set!
On with first 2MW!
300Kva PDU x 6 for fist 2 MW
First 18 Machines on OMGz!
Few more machines up. About 600 or so.
Ventilation for massive fans (need more btw)
Giant Ass Fans 6ft x 6ft
HOT ISLES IN!
ALUMINUM FILTERS IN!
All Electrical: https://imgur.com/a/WgQeGYm
All Fans & Ventilation: https://imgur.com/a/ug5kmyw
All Digging https://imgur.com/a/dxp3Y0I
All Pads: https://imgur.com/a/AIFit4w
All Poles: https://imgur.com/a/oOfs92s
All Racks: https://imgur.com/a/4K3ZJUO
All Building: https://imgur.com/a/O8CdxeF