Our 450W PSU is gone. We need another one. Trying not to overshoot our budget, I went to GumTree checking if we could be lucky. There were numerous offers, but all sort of similar to what we already had. When clicking to filter per QLD availability only, I’ve suddenly I’ve seen this:
An user “Jo” from some place near Rainbow beach is selling Bitcoin-mining-grade-beast 2000W PSU fo $80! Look at its parameters:
This device is 5 times more powerful then our original model (see 120A on 12+V branch). This monster is designed to feed 6 powerful GPUs at once. I am sure it will serve us well. 😉 Order went well and it should arrive in next 10 days.
However, this time we need to be sure that it is not going to go Bang! again. I’ve discussed this with Andrew and Vlada. We’ve agreed that some sort of fuse is needed. However options for protecting 12V on 120A are quite limited. JayCar came with a sort of classical solution for this – one-time-fuse, but they wanted $7 per each. Having the experience from the previous experiment – that might become quite expensive, even through a single run.
Finally my friend Google came with something called “KICKASS 12V HiAmp 100A Manual Reset Circuit Breaker” .
100A is bit lower then 120A, but that should protect our brand new PSU with a decent margin.
Waiting for a delivery I’ve commenced a decent clean up and review. First we’ve got a new 5l container and gathered all our electrolyte.
We’ve also scavenged that dead PSU – getting its fan, but most importantly its passive coolers. The idea here is to support the anode cooling. It might be a bit naive, but it shouldn’t hurt.
We’ve also scavenged PSU main switch together with couple RC electric motors from some old boat models and had a bit of fun / exercise in measuring Voltage and Amps in there.
I still have few more ideas to get us ready. As we’ll start handling quite high currents, we should think about having all that electricity “boxed”. Also we need to have proper cables ready in place (Vlada says 25mm2). And finally we need to build an Electrolyte feeder! I have some ideas already … 🙂
