Pleb Goldshell Miner Immersion [how-to+ sourcing guide]
First, a little bit about myself: I’m a hardcore PoW degen idealist invested in low mcap projects with my strat set on holding and 100x upside minimum cashout thresholds. Mining, to me, served as my initial point of market entry, exposing me to the strong, growing communities I’m fully involved and invested in today (❤ $KDA fam). I’m also an author, and one of the ways I believe I can best add value to our ecosystem is by writing posts like this.
I started mining in December 2021, and almost exclusively altcoin mining via goldshell ASICs. The hardest part about getting into mining, in my opinion, are its initial bottlenecks: sourcing hardware & power infrastructure. Well, I broke through the initial barriers and got mining, but pretty quickly butted up against a new bottleneck: heat dispersion. I was producing too much heat, and despite framing-in the portion of my garage I now call my “mining studio” and adding a 20amp A/C unit and powerful exhaust fans to circulate air, I still couldn’t keep up with the heat production.
This led me to discover immersion, and geez, even though I jumped in fully aware of the complexities involved, and with plumbing experience besides… dunking Goldshell miners is not for the foolhardy* (that’s me) or the faint of heart.
For those of you looking to immerse miners, I highly recommend joining this Immersion Telegram group.
Okay, enough chitchat… let’s dive in.
Immersing Goldshell miners voids your warranty, or it’s supposed to. Because Goldshell miners are relatively new and have limited production runs with total stock that pales in comparison to, say, Bitmain Antminer, there is functionally zero information on the specific process and challenges for immersing these miners. Everything is trial and error, with general consensus about immersion-specific challenges serving as guideposts on the rocky road to building a functioning system.
For the purpose of this guide, we are building a mid-tier pleb immersion system from scratch, although you can buy plug-and-play systems in the TG group, or get quoted by DCX (*DNR) or EF (Engineered Fluids $$$). Every underscore represents a sourcing link.
Let’s dive in~
First, what are we immersing?
Goldshell CK5 (3)
Goldshell HS5 (1)
Goldshell X5 (1)
Antminer L3++ (1)
Dialectic fluid is the base layer for every immersion system, although I have known people to run straight mineral oil with no issues. Dialectic fluid is a non-conductive crude oil byproduct designed specifically for immersing computer components. Considering the cost of the miners themselves, splurging 2x for engineered fluid seems like the prudent choice.
Dialectic Fluid: ThermaCoin 1900 via Ryan Hawkins on TG, complete with data sheets etc. ~$2100 for 55 gallons, includes lift gate delivery to a residential address.
Fluid runs about ~1/3 of total build cost for a pleb immersion build, and although it’s possible to run food grade mineral oil, I decided on going for this fully poly-carbonate dialectic fluid. Essentially a repurposed engine cleaner. I personally would recommend this over Engineered Fluid’s Bitcool~ bitcool is a blend (=cheapskates+scalpers) and 130% the cost of ThermaCoin. Plus, they quoted me $50,000 for a build this size, so I actively dislike them.
Tank (exterior wall): Aluminum tool box from Lowes, ~300$
Tank (interior wall): Chemcast acrylic from TAP Plastics, 3/8" thick custom-cut sheets, two unsecured partitions for oil convection ~$400
Sump Pumps: 3x sump pumps for redundancy and overrated flow rate of 3100 GPH/51 GPM ~130$
For the purposes of shaving costs, it’d be possible to custom order acrylic cuts from TAP Plastics and assemble a single-walled tank, but don’t forget to add a partition to more effectively pump out the hottest oil via the principles of convection.
Now, I made sure to test the tank and confirm it held water prior to adding dialectic fluid, but I STILL ended up chasing a pinhole leak for days, my bare arms submerged up the the elbow in oil for hours at a time, which, by the way, DNR. I highly recommend buying some gloves and wearing them religiously when working with this stuff, unless you enjoy rashes and mental anguish? To avoid this grim fate… use the proper sealant from the get-go.
In addition to the acrylic bonding agent from Tap Plastics, go over all your tank welds with the proper sealant. Most sealants are NOT rated for underwater applications, high temperatures, or else won’t handle more pressure than is produced by 32 gallons of fluid. JB MARINE WELD.
Now that we have a fully sealed tank, let’s move onto the meat of the system: HXs: heat exchangers. In this case we’re using water-air HXs, basically a fancy way of saying radiator. With four 5 series Goldshell ASICs and two mid-size antminers at ~6000 watts, from a thermal rejection standpoint I could have skated by with one HX… but I overrate literally everything for safety margins and to future-proof the build. I also plan to add a water-oil HX so I can heat my as-of-yet nonexistent hot tub, because… hot tub!
20x20 Heat Exchanger: 3x water-air heat exchangers in parallel, coupled with a simple picnic table from local hardware store.
18" Industrial Fan (3): Global Industrial™ 18" Industrial Workstation Fan, 3 Speed, 5650 CFM, 160W, 1/3 HP
You’re also going to need some high CFM fans and seal them to said HXs. I went with these 5650 CFM fans from Global Industrial ~200$ each. They are outdoor rated, with 10' long cords, pull 160W constant at their highest setting (hint: always run at highest setting), and have awesome reviews detailing being ran in horrible conditions for long periods of time without equipment failure.
Plumbing system: ~$1,000~ copper pipe/tube in 1–1/2" & 1" copper, 1–1/2" Ts, 1–1/2"-> 1" reducers, 90s, 45s (wherever possible replace 90s with 45s for flow rate retention). You can probably get away with running to Home Depot if you go CPVC, but a local plumbing supply will for sure have what you need for either a copper or CPVC build — like Ferguson.
You can’t see from this angle, but I cut 20x20 squares into the picnic table and set the HXs in each hole, the used extra-wide black duct tape to seal everything up. Each exhaust fan is wrapped with 1" rubber pipe insulation sourced from my local hardware store, then taped down to ensure a proper seal.
Copper is rigid, unforgiving, and expensive… plus, your first test run is likely to involve leaks, especially with a system that’s highly pressurized. And since the dialectic fluid comes in at roughly 1/3 of total build cost, every lost drop is burning money. Coming from a plumber though, don’t stress too much about leaks — if you can avoid them, great, but it’s all part of the process, unfortunately. DNR copper, source CPVC. Gluing is much easier than soldering imo.
But, but Ren — why didn’t you spoof your main fans? Wouldn’t that be a heckofalot easier than snipping each fan blade and hanging the resulting monstrosities outside the tank? Yes, yes it would. Based off a reddit post of someone who dipped some KD5s, I sourced the above fan spoofers with a naive belief they would function flawlessly. Results were as follow:
If you’re immersing Antminers, these fan spoofers work fine and dandy (my L3++ hashing strong), but using fan spoofers on Goldshell miners results in huge dropoffs in hashrate, followed by a climb back up to average hashrate, and endless dumps. DNR.
Custom Flexible Busbars: 4 AWG (Gauge) Silicon Wire + 4 AWG stud eyelet ~ also, 1/2" heat shrink and heat gun from local supply store.
Custom flexible busbars are cool asf and you don’t have to worry about the potential for PSU failure if you go this route.
Originally, I immersed all four of my big miners and their PSUs completely unaltered. It’s a common practice to immerse antminer PSUs in their entirety… well, these PSUs caused an error report in the temp settings, and the miner wouldn’t hash. I know for a fact a community member was able to spoof Goldshell PSU fans with 47ohm 1/4 & 1/2w resistors, but my immediate solution was to remove the fans themselves from immersion… to some positive effect — everything hashed, for a few days at least.
While this worked as a stopgap measure, if you are insistent on immersing your PSUs, I highly advise you go the resistor route and run a sacrificial PSU immersed for a few days to confirm your power supplies aren’t likely to fail under immersion conditions. I blew up one of my PSUs via bridging a connection with my fingies, and another by inserting a 6-pin while the device was powered on, but I am 99% sure 2 of the stock Goldshell PSUs failed due to immersion conditions.
Big oof. This ~$800 lesson combined with 2 weeks of downtime, and maybe sprinkle of psu ptsd convinced me to avoid immersing my newly sourced AP280 PSUs entirely, and I did that via these purpose-built flexible busbars made from silicon wire ~100$ all in.
I kept putting off writing this post. Another crisis inevitably captured my attention, but this is the current state of affairs here in my mining studio. I am down one control board on a CK5, with a replacement on the way. In two days I lost 10 gallons of dialectic fluid to some spontaneous leaks… so as you can see my fluid level in the tank is a bit low. I tried running all my miners with the hashboards standing upright, but the temparature sensors are at the topmost portion of the boards, so they didn’t hash.
While I wait on an extra 5 gallons of fluid, I’m running one CK5 diagonally submersed in fluid, overclocked to 999mhz and .51 V~ netting me the same average hashrate stock settings should due to hardware issues. Two of the four boards were running high HW errors when I started it back up, because where would I be without more problems?
These errors seem to be deriving from a clock/voltage issue in relevant chips… I’m gonna be honest, pretty sure I can pinpoint why this issue cropped up. I hit the boards with a rubber mallet to free them from the casing after my PSU failure incident, which I also do not advise doing… but there was so much glue!!!
I’ve kinda lost the plot after getting this deep into things, and am wondering whether anyone is going to be interested enough in this topic to follow such a long-winded post on my pleb immersion build. Let’s put a pin in this story here, and I will return with another post detailing my progress and pitfalls if people find this topic of relative interest.
Warmly,
~Ren
*Post brought to you by Babena
P.S. how deep in am I? By rough estimate, with PSU failure, ~7–8k USD. Build cost comes in around 5–6,000 if done right from the start.
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