Basics Of Wattage And Electricity

How Important Is Electricity And Wattage Planning

When you’re looking into building a small-scale mining farm or mining from home, electricity planning should never be overlooked. Electricity can be very dangerous and harmful to everyone around the mining operation, it can lead to overheating cables, electricity shorts, and worst of all your house burning down. This tutorial will go over the basics of electricity and wattage for Crypto Mining, please make sure to conduct your own research as well regarding your environment, and consult an expert for help.

Understanding Your Fuse Box

1. The best place to start is to decide where to place your Mining Rig(s)
2. Open your fuse box and locate which breakers are connected to the outlets that you will be using.
3. Read the fuse box labels carefully, then plug a lamp or anything lightweight to test the outlets.
4. Turn off the breaker and check if the light turns on, do it to all of the outlets that you will be using, and write down your wattage limits.

Doing The Calculations

With the method above, you will be able to figure out how many watts can a plug handle. Now that you hopefully labeled which breaker is related to what plug then you’re ready to perform the calculation, here is an example that you can follow:

• If the breaker says 15 Amps, then it means you can do: 120v * 15 amps = 1800 Watts.

Voltage is usually 120v for residential in U.S. and Canada but please double check and contact your electricity supplier and ask them.

Putting the limitations

For example in our mini-mining farm, we are running 3 Rigs from 5 different outlets, those rigs have a total of 5 power supplies, hence it is 5 outlets. We got 2 EVGA 1200 Watts Platinum, 2 Thermaltake 750 Watts Gold RGB, and 1 Corsair HX1200 Watts Platinum. The 2 EVGA 1200 Watts are running on a 20 Amps outlet, which yields 2400 Watts total, and the others are running on 1800 Watts outlets.

Please make sure to never go beyond 80% usage of the power outlet, it can make the breakers go off and shut down the rigs if they get too hot. If you have 1800 watts to use, do NOT go beyond 1500 watts of usage, and to track how much you're using use this Power Draw Tracker.

Powersupply Ratings And Power Output

Powersupply ratings can play a big part in your electricity bill, the more PSUs you use the higher the rating you want to save as many watts as possible now let us explain how.

The Ratings refer to the efficiency of the power supply, Titanium being the most efficient meaning that less power will be lost when it is being moved around the wiring to your GPUs, and other parts. Using an 80-plus White PSU will only be 80% efficient therefore 20% of power will be lost. With the Titanium it will be 90% used and only 10% lost with also the ability of it being more stable and reliable in the long-term.

Conclusion

Now that you finished the article we hope you got some critical tips on the basics of electricity and wattage and also learned how to mine safely. Here is your checklist before you start mining…

1. Figure out where you’re placing your Mining Rig(s).
2. Check how much Watts you have in the outlets that will be used for Mining.
3. Make a plan with your rigs and see how many watts you will be using from each outlet, make sure to never pass the 80% threshold.
4. Get high-efficiency Power supplies to avoid wasting power and to have a more reliable way to power your rigs.
5. Under-volt your cards by following our ‘Basics Of Overclocking‘ Tutorial to reduce your power usage by a noticeable amount
6. Finalize and then we recommend making an excel sheet of all your rigs, your costs, and your expected profits so you can have it planned out.