To tinkerers, hobbyists, entrepreneurs and adjacent industry professionals (in the farming, real estate and oil and gas sectors, for instance), bitcoin mining is an opportunity to add efficiency and margin to highly-competitive spaces while recapturing costs and waste.

Of course, a home miner can use a new-generation machine for the same purposes I’m detailing above, but for the sake of accessibility and startup cost, I adore the older generation S9 as a tool for learning and tinkering. They are physically robust, easy to acquire and can be run on your standard 110-volt electric system while tuned with Braiins firmware for greater control.

I’ll [...] pull air from an outside vent, push it through the miner, then dump it into my HVAC return duct.

The most difficult part of the build was cutting a hole into the HVAC return to mount the starting collar (where the heat is actually dumped into the system from the miner).

You may be wondering how we are going to mount our ducting to our ASIC. For this, we take a detour to the 3D printer to produce two of these (freely available). If you don’t have access to a 3D printer, various mounts can be found for purchase.

Changing settings to run without fans is incredibly easy in Braiins. With the inline fan on 90% power and the ASIC underclocked to 900 watts, I let Braiins’ auto tuning work its magic. What I first noticed was that the tuning took an incredibly long time while running without fans.

I noticed that the inline fan was very, very quiet. So much so that I began to hear another sound, the fan on the PSU. Yes, the fan on the power supply was louder than the inline fan pushing air through the ASIC.

By drawing air from my laundry room directly, I am able to keep a more consistent input temperature, which assisted greatly in tuning via Braiins. Also, by drawing air from the inside, I don’t create a pressure differential in my house by pulling air from outdoors into the home via the inline fan.

I purchased a 60-millimeter Noctua fan to replace the stock 60-millimeter PSU fan. [...] The fan runs perfectly at full speed and sound is reduced.

After our initial construction and final tuning, the system has stabilized at around 800 watts consumption and is consistently producing both ambient heat in the home and about 10.25 terahashes per second.

These are the early days of home mining. Residential products like the Upstream Data Black Box are in their infancy and open the door to entirely new and creative categories. Bitcoin mining isn’t just for the big boys, and you’re more than welcome to join the conversation as we build and learn together.