Buy Mining Equipment – Accessories from Germany's mining experts

When mining, the devices generate large amounts of heat. An efficient cooling system prevents overheating and ensures that miners can operate at optimal performance. This not only increases the lifetime of the hardware, but also reduces the risk of failures.

A UPS protects mining equipment from sudden power outages or voltage drops. In the event of a power outage, it ensures that miners can be shut down safely, preventing hardware damage and minimizing data loss.

Ventilation systems are essential to effectively dissipate the heat generated by mining equipment. Good ventilation prevents heat accumulation, keeps temperatures stable and contributes to the longevity of miners.

Modern ASIC miners are designed for a voltage of around 200 to 240 volts and draw, depending on the model, about 3 to 3.5 kW (air-cooled) or 5 to 11 kW (hydro) continuously. A single device runs on a suitably fused circuit; as soon as several miners come together, there is no way around the three-phase connection (400 V), because the load is then distributed evenly across three line conductors.

What is decisive is that the entire installation draws power at full load around the clock. Supply line, fuse protection and distribution must be permanently sized for this load, not just for peaks. As a rough ballpark, 1 MW of mining power corresponds to a good 300 air-cooled industrial ASICs. The binding sizing of connection and fuse protection always belongs in the hands of a qualified electrician who knows the local regulations (in Germany VDE).

The required wire cross-section depends on current strength, installation method and cable length. As a practical guideline for permanently installed copper cables: up to approx. 16 A, 1.5 mm² is sufficient; up to approx. 20 A, 2.5 mm² is used; up to approx. 32 A, 4 to 6 mm² is common; up to approx. 63 A, you are at 10 to 16 mm²; and larger feeds from 100 A require 25 mm² and up. A single 3.5 kW miner draws around 15 to 16 A single-phase; several devices are sensibly bundled three-phase.

It is important that mining is a continuous load: cables must not be operated at the upper load limit, as the insulation would otherwise heat up over months. Long cable runs often require the next larger cross-section due to the voltage drop. These values are only a rough guideline and do not replace the specific sizing according to the applicable standards - when in doubt, always consult a qualified electrician.

Every circuit needs a miniature circuit breaker (fuse) that matches the wire cross-section of the cable and protects against overload and short circuit. Since ASIC miners generate continuous load, you deliberately do not plan the utilization of a circuit to the limit, but with a reserve, so that the fuse does not operate in the borderline range during normal operation. With larger installations, the individual device circuits are bundled via a sub-distribution board and protected jointly from there.

In addition to the line protection, a residual current device (RCD) is common, and especially with valuable hardware, surge protection is worthwhile, because voltage peaks are among the most frequent causes of power supply failures. The sizing of fuse type, characteristic and selectivity is a matter for a qualified electrician.

Single-phase alternating current (230 V) is sufficient for a single air-cooled device or a small home setup. As soon as several miners run, three-phase power (400 V) is the standard, because the total load is distributed evenly across three line conductors. This avoids an unbalanced load on the grid, allows more power at the same cross-section and corresponds to the way power distribution units (PDU) and containers are also built internally.

Important: hydro miners absolutely require three-phase power (a three-phase connection) and cannot be operated on a normal Schuko socket - they are designed for the three-phase connection from the outset. Three air-cooled ASICs, by contrast, can be neatly placed one on each of the three line conductors, so that the phases are balanced. Anyone planning more than one or two devices or wanting to use hydro hardware should prepare the site for three-phase power from the start, rather than rebuilding later.

On the device side, air-cooled ASIC miners usually have a C13/C14 connector or, at higher power, a C19/C20 IEC connector, through which the power supply is connected to the power distribution. In professional setups, the miners therefore plug directly into a PDU with matching C13 or C19 outputs, rather than into household sockets.

On the feed side, different industrial connectors are used depending on country and power - in Europe these are the blue (single-phase) and red (three-phase) CEE connectors in current ratings such as 16 A, 32 A or 63 A. Household sockets (Schuko) are unsuitable for the continuous operation of several miners, as they are not thermally designed for it. The exact connector choice depends on the device, the PDU and the house connection.

A PDU (Power Distribution Unit) distributes the three-phase power of a single feed to many individual device outputs. Instead of wiring each miner individually, you plug the devices into a PDU, which in turn hangs on the distribution board via an industrial connector. This creates order, distributes the load cleanly across the three phases and makes the cabling maintainable.

In mining, robust PDUs designed for continuous load are used; depending on the model, with metering and switching functions per output, so that consumption can be read off and individual devices switched on and off remotely. The PDU is thus the link between the house connection/distribution board and the individual machine - in containers and hydro racks it is already integrated.

In hydro mining, a water-glycol mixture flows through cooling plates that sit directly on the hot chips of the hashboards and absorbs their heat. This heated fluid runs in a closed primary circuit to a heat exchanger or dry cooler, releases the heat there and returns cooled to the devices. Pumps keep the flow constant, and a control system monitors temperature and pressure.

The advantage: fluid transports heat many times better than air, which is why hydro miners run at higher performance and are quiet at the same time. In practice, you often separate a closed inner circuit (at the device) from an outer circuit (to the dry cooler) via a plate heat exchanger, so that contamination and frost do not reach the sensitive device circuit. A beginner-friendly building block is a hydro rack such as the Bitmain Antrack V1 Hydro-Cooling Mining Rack (24 kW), which bundles several hydro miners and their water routing in one unit.

The cooling unit must be able to dissipate the entire heat load of the installation - it is therefore sized according to the electrical power, since a miner converts nearly all of its power consumption into heat. A 100 kW hydro installation thus needs a dry cooling capacity for around 100 kW of heat. In practice, three designs occur: the dry cooler, which releases the heat to the outside air via fans; the plate heat exchanger, which transfers the heat to a second circuit; and hybrid or evaporative coolers for hot climate zones.

Via a plate heat exchanger, the waste heat can not only be dissipated but also usefully reused: heat recovery can be connected to the second circuit, for example to heat buildings, halls or domestic hot water. The dry cooler is the most common solution because it works without water consumption; its capacity, however, depends on the outside temperature and must be sized for the hottest expected day. For smaller setups, there are compact units such as the LianLi Cooling Radiator (12 kW Hydro Cooling Unit). The correct sizing of cooling capacity, flow and pumps we are happy to discuss to match your installation size.

The required flow depends on the heat output to be dissipated and the temperature spread between supply and return. The greater the permitted spread (i.e. the temperature difference between the warm return from the device and the cool supply), the less volume has to be circulated per unit of time. As a rough guideline, about one liter per minute per kilowatt of heat load applies - but this value depends directly on the temperature spread and shifts accordingly.

It is important that pump output, line cross-sections and heat exchanger match: too low a flow lets the device temperature rise and costs performance, while an unnecessarily high one drives up the pump's power consumption. Decisive is always the specification of the respective device and system manufacturer; the sizing is done on an installation-specific basis.

ASIC miners come with three cooling types: air cooling, hydro and immersion. They all mine in the same way but differ significantly in noise, efficiency and the infrastructure required.

Air-cooled devices dissipate their waste heat via built-in fans and are the common standard for smaller setups. Hydro miners route the heat through a closed loop; they are quieter and can dissipate more power at the same size, but require suitable cooling infrastructure.

With immersion, the devices are fully submerged in a non-conductive fluid that absorbs the heat particularly evenly - this is suited above all to larger, professional installations. Hydro and immersion are typical for data centers, while air cooling is the standard at home and in smaller setups.

In immersion mining, the miners are fully submerged in a non-conductive fluid that absorbs the heat directly from all components. Since the fluid does not conduct electricity (it is dielectric), the devices are not damaged. The heated fluid is cooled down again via a heat exchanger and circulated in the tank - similar to the hydro principle, except that here the entire device lies in the bath instead of just cooling plates on the chip.

A distinction is made between single-phase immersion (the fluid stays liquid and is pumped around, the common approach) and two-phase immersion (the fluid evaporates at the hot chips and condenses again at the top, technically more elaborate and more expensive). The advantage: extremely even cooling, very quiet operation and protection from dust. The effort lies in handling the fluid and maintaining the submerged devices.

Only a dielectric (non-conductive) fluid is used - never water, since water conducts electricity and would cause a short circuit. Common choices are synthetic hydrocarbon oils, specially treated mineral oils or technical specialty fluids designed for continuous operation in electronics. They are electrically insulating, thermally stable and do not attack the components.

With single-phase immersion, this fluid remains liquid throughout and is circulated; it hardly consumes itself in normal operation but should be kept clean. It is important that the devices are suitable or prepared for immersion operation: with air-cooled miners, the fans are removed before immersion and, in part, the thermal paste is replaced with a suitable material. The exact choice of fluid is specified by the tank or system manufacturer.

Small pods accommodate few devices and are suitable as an entry point, for tests or for spatially limited sites. They are cheaper to purchase, faster to fill and easier to handle, but scale poorly: many small pods mean many individual circuits and more maintenance points. Large tanks hold many miners in a shared bath and share pumps, filters and dry cooling, which makes operation per device more efficient.

The disadvantage of large tanks is the higher entry effort: more fluid volume, heavier handling when removing individual devices and a more elaborate initial installation. Rule of thumb: small pods for entry and niches, large tanks for scaled, professional operation. Which variant fits the planned quantity and the site, we are happy to clarify with you.

A mining container is a turnkey mining installation in a steel container that bundles power distribution, cooling and device accommodation for dozens to over a hundred miners in one unit. Instead of converting a hall, you place the prefabricated container on a concrete base, connect power and - with hydro variants - the cooling circuit, and you are ready to operate. Typical units range, depending on design and cooling, from several hundred kilowatts up to around 1 to 5 MW per container.

Containers are worthwhile when there is no suitable hall available, when you need to scale quickly or when a site with cheap electricity is being developed - so for larger commercial operators, not for one or two home devices. A professional hydro container solution is, for example, the Bitmain Antspace HW5. Anyone who does not want to operate their own site can also have the hardware hosted at Cryptohall24.

An air container houses air-cooled ASICs and dissipates their waste heat to the outside via large fans and ventilation openings. It is simpler and cheaper to build, but needs a lot of air volume, filters the intake air (dust) and is loud inside. The usable power density is limited, because air can only transport a certain amount of heat per volume.

A hydro container houses hydro miners and dissipates the heat via a fluid circuit to an external dry cooler. It achieves a considerably higher power density per container, is quieter and delivers usable waste heat, but requires the matching hydro hardware and the cooling infrastructure. The choice depends on which miners are operated and whether high density or heat utilization is required at the site.

A number of specialized manufacturers have established themselves for cooling, containers and accessories around mining hardware. In the area of hydro and cooling units, Lian Li (LianLi) is well known, among others, offering compact cooling radiators and cooling units. FogHash supplies container and hydro solutions as well as the associated cooling infrastructure, among other things. For hydro racks and immersion cooling, components from the major ASIC manufacturers themselves are also used, such as Bitmain's Antrack series.

For mining containers, pods and power distribution (PDU), there are additionally further providers that specialize in individual areas such as air or hydro containers, immersion tanks or distribution technology. Which brand fits in a given case depends on the cooling type, power density and site. We are happy to assess the available options neutrally for your project.

Yes. In addition to the large stationary containers, there are compact, mobile solutions that can be brought to a site with cheap electricity, connected there and relocated again as needed. This is attractive for tapping power sources where a permanent building is not worthwhile - for instance surplus energy at remote sites or local PV/wind surplus.

One such modular variant is MiniPods: smaller, prefabricated units that accommodate several miners along with power distribution and cooling and can be flexibly combined. One example is the 4-Unit Set Digital Shovel M300 MiniPods (1.2 MW). The advantage lies in speed and flexibility: faster in operation than a hall conversion and able to follow the cheapest electricity. For individual devices, this is oversized.

With air-cooled setups, the separation of cold air (intake) and warm air (exhaust) is the single most important point. If hot exhaust air is drawn in again (a short circuit in the airflow), the intake temperature rises, the devices throttle their performance (throttling) and the service life suffers. In practice, you therefore work with separate cold and hot aisle zones, adequately sized intake and exhaust openings and, in part, exhaust fans.

As a rough guideline, the ventilation must be able to dissipate the entire heat volume: per kilowatt of miner power, a considerable air volume flow is needed, which is why ventilation openings and ducts are generously sized. Added to this is dust protection via filters, since settling dust on hashboards and fans behaves like thermal insulation. Hydro and immersion solutions avoid this problem by design.

Air-cooled industrial ASICs are loud: their fans run continuously and are therefore typically in the range of about 75 to 85 dB per device, with several devices adding up. An ordinary living space is unsuitable for this without measures. Effective approaches are spatial separation (a dedicated room, basement, container), sound-insulated enclosures or soundproofing boxes, dampers at the exhaust openings and decoupled placement against structure-borne noise.

Considerably quieter are hydro models, since the noise-intensive fans are omitted or smaller; immersion devices are practically silent. Anyone who wants to avoid the noise entirely has their hardware hosted in a data center, where the noise level does not matter. Sound insulation is usually cheaper to plan than to retrofit later.

Yes, a miner converts practically all of the electrical energy it consumes into heat - the same waste heat that has to be dissipated at great effort in large installations can in principle be used for heating. How well this works depends on the cooling type: with air cooling, the warm exhaust air is diffuse and only roughly usable via air ducts; with hydro and immersion cooling, the concentrated heat can be fed directly into a heating or hot water circuit via a heat exchanger.

The limit lies in the temperature level: miners typically deliver heat in the low to medium temperature range, which suits underfloor heating, preheating or process heat well, but only partially serves classic radiators with a high flow temperature. Heating becomes economically particularly attractive when the electricity is cheap anyway or comes from your own photovoltaics - how mining can be combined with surplus solar power is shown in our article Crypto Mining with Solar Power.

A UPS bridges short power outages and voltage fluctuations so that devices do not shut down abruptly. With servers, it serves an orderly shutdown. In mining, however, it has only limited use: ASIC miners draw several kilowatts, and a UPS that buffers an entire fleet for any length of time would be disproportionately large and expensive - and unlike a server, a miner does not need to „shut down cleanly“; it usually tolerates a hard power outage without problems and starts up again afterwards.

More important and more common instead are a properly fused connection and surge protection, because voltage dips and surges are among the most frequent causes of power supply failures. A small UPS can make sense for critical secondary components such as network equipment, control systems or the pumps of a hydro installation, so that these bridge a short outage - but for the miners themselves it is not standard.

Every miner needs a wired Ethernet connection - Wi-Fi is unsuitable for continuous operation because it becomes unstable with many devices and connection drops lead to lost yield. In practice, one or more switches with enough ports, structured network cabling (patch cables and, if needed, patch panels) and a stable internet connection are sufficient. The bandwidth requirement is low: mining generates only little data traffic; what matters is stability and low latency, not speed.

The data network carries the entire monitoring and remote control of the installation. If it fails, the devices keep running but can no longer be controlled or monitored - and an unnoticed defect costs yield. That is why a reliable router, availability monitoring and ideally a notification on failures are part of a clean setup.

The most common wear parts are fans, power supplies and cables - all components that are mechanically or thermally stressed in continuous operation. With air-cooled miners, the fans are by far the most frequent failure part, because they spin around the clock under load; a blocked fan quickly leads to throttling or an emergency shutdown. The power supply is the second most frequent weak point after the fans.

Load cables and plug contacts also age under continuous current - scorched or loose contacts are a real hazard and should be replaced, not patched. With hydro installations, pumps, seals and the coolant are added as recurring maintenance points; with immersion, the filtration and care of the fluid. At Cryptohall24, we stock suitable wear and infrastructure parts for the common models and carry out repairs on request.

For air-cooled installations, regular cleaning comes first: dust on hashboards and fans acts like thermal insulation and drives up temperatures. This also includes checking and replacing defective fans, inspecting the plug contacts for signs of heat and keeping an eye on temperature and load values via monitoring. Filters at the air intake openings are cleaned or replaced depending on dust accumulation.

With hydro installations, checking pressure, flow and coolant level, inspecting for leaks and the condition of the pumps are added; the coolant is checked according to the manufacturer's specification and renewed if necessary. With immersion, the cleanliness and quality of the fluid is the central maintenance point. Anyone who does not want to handle this ongoing effort themselves is usually better served with professional hosting.

Beyond the miners themselves, stable operation needs suitable infrastructure. On the power side, that means an adequately sized supply line, the three-phase connection, a sub-distribution board with fuse protection and a PDU per device group along with suitable load cables. At larger sites, a transformer and medium-voltage connection are added. On the data side, you need switches, structured network cabling and a stable internet connection for control and monitoring.

On the cooling side, the equipment depends on the cooling type: with air, a well-thought-out air supply and exhaust with cold/warm air separation and dust protection; with hydro, pumps, lines and a dry cooler; with immersion, tanks, fluid and filtration. Added to this are an orderly setup (racks or containers), sound insulation, surge protection and monitoring that makes failures immediately visible. Only this interplay ensures reliable operation at full performance.

Your own site is worthwhile if cheap electricity, sufficient connected load, suitable premises and the technical know-how for setup and operation are available. The effort is considerable: grid connection and transformer, distribution and cabling, cooling, sound insulation and ongoing maintenance must be planned, built and looked after - this only pays off from a certain quantity onwards and with reliably cheap electricity.

With hosting, you buy the hardware and have it operated in a specialized data center that already maintains this infrastructure - cheap electricity, suitable cooling, a stable connection and no noise issues. You remain the owner, and the yields are yours. What to look for when choosing a hosting provider is summarized in our Mining Hosting and Mining Hoster Guide. Cryptohall24 offers both - the equipment for self-operation and hosting in the data center.

Planning starts with the number and type of miners: their power consumption determines the total electrical load - and because a miner converts nearly all of its consumption into heat, it also determines the total cooling load at the same time. Both values are practically equal. On this basis, you size the connected load, fuse protection, distribution and cooling unit, each with a reserve, since the installation runs continuously at full load and must still work on the hottest expected day.

A typical mistake is sizing the cooling too tightly: if it is insufficient on hot days, the devices throttle and the yield drops precisely when there is already a lot of load. It makes sense to plan in some reserve and scalability from the start, rather than rebuilding later. Cryptohall24 supports you with the sizing of power, cabling and cooling to match your planned quantity and your site.

Small setups hang on the existing house connection. As soon as an installation reaches the range of several hundred kilowatts or megawatts, the normal low-voltage connection is no longer sufficient - then it is connected to the medium-voltage grid via a transformer. The transformer steps the medium voltage (e.g. 10 or 20 kV) down to the 400 V low voltage with which the distribution and the miners work.

Such connections require coordination with the local grid operator, who must confirm the available connected load at the site - the grid capacity is in practice often the limiting factor, not the money for the hardware. The transformer station, medium-voltage switchgear and protective equipment are designed by specialist planners. For anyone who cannot develop their own site with sufficient connected load, hosting in an existing data center is usually the faster route.

Yes, with a mining calculator you can estimate in advance what a particular device can earn and how much electricity it draws. You enter the hashrate of the miner, its power consumption and your electricity price, and based on the current price and the network difficulty, the calculator determines the approximate daily or monthly yield - a useful basis for projecting the power demand and cooling load of a planned installation.

A good starting point is AsicMinerValue, which shows power consumption and up-to-date profitability for the common ASIC models. Since price and difficulty change continuously, this is always a snapshot - it is best to recalculate your scenario shortly before investing.