Home wiring for a mining rig: outlets, cables and breakers

Plenty is written about the rig's power supply, and almost nothing about what sits between the PSU and the breaker panel. Unfairly: a rig drawing one and a half to two kilowatts is a space heater that runs not for a couple of hours but for months without a break. Household wiring tolerates that only when it is not pushed to the limit. Let's go through outlets, cables and breakers — the parts that actually burn.

The short version (for the no-time-to-read)

  • Count from the wall, not from the cards' watt limits. The system and the PSU's efficiency add 15–20% on top.
  • One rig — one outlet. No splitters or extension cords under a permanent load: they are the parts that overheat.
  • Two rigs or more — a dedicated circuit from the panel: proper-gauge cable and its own breaker. That is an electrician's job, not a weekend experiment.
  • A warm plug, a burning smell, a discolored outlet is already an incident. Not "keep watching" — switch off and investigate.
  • Grounding is not a formality. Without it, static and a floating neutral add strange crashes no software test will ever catch.

What a rig actually draws from the wall

Mistake number one is sizing the load by the sum of the cards' power limits. The rig pulls more from the outlet: the cards plus motherboard, CPU and fans — all divided by the PSU's efficiency. Six cards at 250 W is 1500 W of cards; with the system and PSU losses the wall sees roughly 1.7–1.8 kW. On a 230 V line that is around 8 amps — permanently, for months.

A household outlet is rated 16 A "on paper", but the rating is about hours, not months. For a round-the-clock load a sane ceiling is 70–80% of nominal — roughly 2.5–2.8 kW per outlet. One average rig fits; two do not.

Outlets, extension cords and why things heat up

It is not "electricity" that overheats — it is a bad contact: loosened outlet terminals, a thin cord on a power strip, a half-seated plug. A bad contact spot becomes a small heater; the heat loosens the contact further, and the spiral spins itself up. Practical conclusions:

A dedicated circuit, breaker and grounding

With two rigs or more there is exactly one right answer — a dedicated circuit from the panel: a cable of proper gauge, its own breaker, and residual-current protection where possible. In older housing with aging aluminum wiring the apartment's total load is already near the limit: one light rig is tolerable, a farm is not. This is not where you save: the question costs a cable and a couple of electrician's hours, the mistake costs the wiring inside the walls.

On grounding. Without it, the farm's chassis carries stray potential, static accumulates on everything you touch, and grid surges hit the cards directly. No grounding in the building is not a reason to skip the rig, but it is a reason to avoid adding sketchy adapters and power strips on top.

And about protection on the rig itself: a PSU with headroom is part of the wiring too; why "just enough" costs more is covered in our PSU article.

Where automation fits

A bot cannot replace the wiring in the wall — but it sees everything past the outlet. OCBot keeps the rig's total power budget within a set wattage and distributes it among the cards, so fitting a rig to a specific circuit's limits is one setting instead of hand-tuning presets. And if a card starts behaving oddly because of power, you hear about it in Telegram before you smell it.

This article is general information summarizing public practice, not electrical installation guidance; panel work is done by an electrician. OCBot is an independent project: not affiliated with NVIDIA, HiveOS or Hiveon. Use at your own risk — see the disclaimer.