I've been keeping an eye on the air quality at one of our mining sites for about 6 weeks now, using a pretty straightforward Nova Fitness SDS 011 Sensor.
Honestly, I didn’t think I’d run into so much trouble finding info on what the acceptable limits are for air quality when it comes to crypto mining equipment.
We’ve got Antminer S9 and Whatsminer M20S machines running there, but I can't find any solid data on what the safe levels of particulate matter should be. The miners I mentioned are just examples. What I really want to know is what levels of particulate matter are usually seen as excellent, good, or critical for devices like these miners.
So far, all I've found relates to human health, but I'm not sure how that info applies to how long mining hardware lasts.
As for the monitoring results, the sensor can pick up PM2.5 and PM10 concentrations. Over the last 6 weeks, the average for PM2.5 was 2.60µg/m³, while PM10 averaged at 4.24µg/m³.
You can check out a graph and table with all the data here: https://ibb.co/FJTyrR5
I’d really appreciate any expert opinions or links to helpful resources!
A miner converts electricity into heat via powering electronic circuits.
The air particles will be what came into the building from outside.
Since they cycle a lot of air, then if the outside air quality, where you are is bad, so will the inside air quality.
Most often farms use filter walls to keep out the bugs & dirt while still having enough airflow - you want to keep the air velocity through the filters (and ducting if any is used) as low as possible to reduce frictional losses so that means you need huge filter surface area. In hot areas they very often use wet-filter walls where the filters are kept wet by sprayers or drip feeds. That of course makes them act as swamp coolers and substantially lowers the air temp coming through them.
Yes of course is air quality inside is strongly related to outside air quality. Installing a filter system is definitely something we are planing for the future (when more high end miners are deployed). As for the moment we have to make it work without one. But even when we have a filter system I would like to be able to evaluate how good or bad it is working. Thats why I am monitoring air quality.
From my research data centers typically aim for particulate matter concentrations of less than 1µg/m³. I suppose similar thresholds should be applied for mining farms as well. This information can be found at section 3.1 in Table 2 in the following document: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.362.2554&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Contradicting to this Oliver from the WhatsMiner Support on Telegram (https://t.me/whatsminercommunity) has told me that WhatsMiner devices should be deployed in environments with particulate matter concentrations of < 0.5mg/m³, which would mean < 5000µg/m³.
A limit of 5000µg/m³ seems very high to me. But then again I am not an expert on the topic.