powering your bitcoin miners how not to die in the process what voltage to use and some specifics to look up before you make the choice to host your own machines my name is nicholas johnson and this is the space warehouse look at these sweet new animated effects i paid good money for these if you're planning to run some bitcoin miners in your home or at your business there are a few important things to look for before you choose just how many s19 jpros you're gonna buy at the top of that list and it's at the top right now because past me 2021 me didn't look at the fine print on his electric bill but look up your rates i had looked up r-rates and saw that in orlando electricity has a base charge of 6.498 cents per kilowatt hour for the first 1000 kilowatt hours which six s19j pros blows through in like two days and then 8.998 cents per kilowatt hour after the first 1000 kilowatt hours those were the numbers i used to make my calculations on how much these things would cost to run rookie move we also have a roof full of solar so even though i've been running gpus for months our electric bill was usually zero but after a full month of six s19j pros three l3 pluses and five rtx 3080s humming along i looked at my bill and i owed two thousand five hundred dollars in electricity by my calculations it should have been like fifteen or sixteen hundred dollars a month how could i be off by so much was my neighbor stealing electricity no my electric company has a sneak score of like 90 and decided to separate two more charges on the bill a fuel charge and an asset securitization charge adding 4.7 cents and .25 cents to the nine cents that i thought i was paying which really means i'm paying like 14 cents per kilowatt hour and that's really high and that makes those remote hosting options look way more appealing a month from now i'll be mentioning my trusted and good looking hardware supplier musk miners as an option for that when their operation comes online and is ready to accept clients this next thing adds a level of confusion but it's worth mentioning if you have a commercial space that half of my machines are at the space warehouse which is using commercial power with a slightly lower rate per kilowatt hour but with 262 dollars of taxes added on there exists a different rate that you can ask for from your power company if you're on commercial power called a demand rate where you pay a pretty high base amount like 800 but then your electricity is like 2 cents per kilowatt hour after that so if you use enough power it ends up being worth it so if you have access to commercial power you might want to do the math on that but surely that's all different depending on the state or the municipality where you have things plugged in okay so that covers the money part that makes it scarier to run machines the next preflight check before buying some s19js is to take a look at how much total power you have available at your spot in the first place this is my electrical panel on the back of my house stop right here by opening this panel and especially by taking this guard thing out to access the inside of the panel if you don't have experience with this or an experienced person with you just stop call an electrician beyond the threshold of the outside of this box there are more places inside that you can touch that will hurt or kill you than there are places that you can touch that won't you really have to know which places you can't touch or just flick this switch at the top that says 200 then you can touch anything below it but nothing above it do not touch the bus bars safety meeting over these two super thick wires coming into the main breaker of the panel will carry in and all electricity being used at the property each of these lines will measure around 120 volts and when used together will give you about 240 volts looks like i've got a few bonus volts and that's totally fine in either direction however that will affect your total load capabilities if the voltage is lower your machines are going to pull more amps if your voltage is higher your machines are going to pull slightly less amps s19 js can accept anywhere from 200 to 250 volts and run just fine this tool is super handy to figure out how much power is being used for a particular thing this one is a klein cl220 i'll leave a link in the description to buy one if you want one they're like 60 bucks and can be described as an amp clamp or a clamp meter so looking at my house if i put my amp clamp on each leg of the power coming in you can see i'm pulling 49 amps on one leg and 47 amps on the other leg the reason these measurements are different is because anything running off of a regular outlet in your house the fridge tvs your computers lamps your toaster the internet your coffee machine also the lights in your house all of those things use 120 volts to run so they'll be running off of only one or the other of these big thickies in the top of the panel but anything that draws significant power your water heater your stove your dryer and most importantly your bitcoin miners those things will all pull from both of these fat fat wires and run on 240 volts my panel has a 200 amp main breaker and that means i can't pull more than 200 amps on either of these wires the math gets a little funny because 120 volt things will pull double the amount of amps as 240 volt things to use the same amount of power we don't need to get into specifically why that is for this to be useful but for instance a typical hairdryer will pull about 15 amps from only one of these stocky chunky power cables and it runs on about 1850 watts a typical stock s19j pro 104 will also pull about 15 amps but it'll take 15 amps from each of these hefty midi cables and run on about 3 200 watts you can't let either of these beefy wires get up to 200 amps and if you're observing the commonly accepted safety range of 80 of your box you can't let either of them get to 160 amps so whichever cable measures higher is the one you need to look at the loser is nothing only the princess matters here's how to get this amp clamp to measure how much total power your house is using therefore how many miners you can run at home without having to pay your electric company to come out and give you a bigger box first turn literally everything on turn on your stove your dishwasher your washer and dryer make sure your fridge is running make your ac run cook something in the microwave turn on a hair dryer all the lights all the tvs turn on the hot water until you hear your water heater kick on run everything while all this is happening run outside and slap your amp clamp onto each one of these profuse abundant cables at the top of your panel and see what the meter says as long as the higher number is at least 15 amps less than 80 percent of the number on your main breaker then you're clear to buy at least one s19j pro or three s9s or three l3 pluses powering your bitcoin miners in the case of an s19 or an s19jpro on the back of the unit you'll see two of these c14 plugs to your eyes this may seem like a common plug for something like a printer or a power brick or the plug that goes into the back of a speaker or your television all of those things run on 120 volts so without instruction you might just assume that you can plug these two plugs into a regular wall outlet you can't this machine requires 240 volts of power and therefore both of the c13 females that you plug into these c14 males need to be wired at 240 volts or 208 volts if you have three phase power in a commercial setting a common solution to this is to have an electrician come and install l620 receptacles in your wall those are 240 volt plugs that can handle 20 amps each and then some people will buy a pdu power distribution unit that accepts a c19 plug end and has an array of c14 to c13 receptacles pretty much like a beefy power strip i am so sorry for all the numbers and letters but it will help with your googling to know what everything's called using a pdu is great for gpu mining or smaller asics like an s9 or l3 plus because you can plug a bunch of those things into one pdu before you get up to 20 amps but the s19s pull so much power that you'll have to get a different pdu for every one of these machines unless you spend a bunch of money on like a 50 amp pdu so an alternative to using a pdu is to find a big cord that goes from an l620 to two l620s or from an l620 to two c13 female lens i actually hand made a couple of those during testing only to land on my final power plan which is to just wire two eight gauge cords straight into their own breaker on the panel and from the breaker split off to two c13s i'll put links to all the different types of plugs and cords in the description of the video your individual breakers for the miners should also follow this 80 rule so even though an s19j pro at 240 volts should only pull like 14 amps you'll still want at least a 20 amp breaker for each machine or a 40 amp breaker if you're gonna put two machines on one breaker and if you are gonna put two machines on one plug know that you're gonna send like 6400 watts through those wires so you're gonna need to choose a heavy gauge wire to pull 30 amps you'll want a minimum of 10 gauge wire at 240 volts but maybe take a look at eight gauge just in case you want to overclock in the future if you're planning to dip your toes into the wonderful world of overclocking well then you need to reassess the size of everything if your plan is to ask 104 terahash s19j pro to run at 120 terahash well then instead of 3200 watts you're gonna pull something closer to 3600 or 3800 watts per machine which will bump you up to about 16 amps per miner you can use your handy clamp meter to test an individual machine or an individual circuit as well but in order to do that you need to be able to clamp these jaws around a single hot wire cords like this have all three wires wrapped into one so you can't just go around this cord you'll get a measurement of zero the easiest way to take a measurement on an individual machine if you are running power cords instead of individual lines is back over at the breaker panel again 240 volt breakers have two hot wires coming out of the side of them just put these clamps around one of those wires and you'll get a reading of how much power is coming out of that circuit side note s9s and l3 pluses will run on either 120 volts or 240 volts they don't care they'll use the same number of watts either way the same total amount of power but at 240 volts they'll pull half the number of amps so you can get more out of your panel running at 240.
so run at 240. also don't forget to think about your ventilation or your pumps and dry coolers and how much power they're going to draw for cooling big fans are a relatively low draw compared to the miners but they're not nothing that was a lot.
