Blowing the Heat Out: Digital Shovel's Ventilation Revolution

Before getting into why you should blow and not suck, Scot Johnson told the room at Mining Disrupt Fort Lauderdale, he wanted to explain his company.

That was March twenty-fifth to twenty-seventh, twenty twenty-five, when Bitcoin traded at eighty-seven thousand, three hundred ninety-three dollars. Today it is eighty-three thousand and seventy-nine dollars.

Johnson started mining in twenty sixteen with a couple of GPUs in a closet. They took over a bedroom, then a basement, then a shipping container. In twenty eighteen he founded Digital Shovel, which now builds switchgear, container pods and power gear in an eighty-thousand-square-foot plant with sixty-seven full-time staff, robotic welding and its own circuit-board lines.

Most containers, he said, pull cold air in through an intake and exhaust it out the other side. That works. But new miners, and operators who want to overclock, need more ventilation. So Digital Shovel put centrifugal fans on the intake. In his words, "So, we're blowing the air through the miners."

Each fan runs at its own speed, and each awning has its own pressure and temperature sensor. That shows airflow, filter condition, and whether the container is pulling in its own hot air. When wind pushes exhaust back over the roof, it is usually the top intakes that suck it in, so the system slows those fans and draws from the lower ones.

There is also a double-stack version with no miners in the top half, only more fans and filters. That doubles the filter area and lets air come in more slowly. In snow, you block the lower banks and breathe from the top, above any drift. Filters last longer, and dust and cottonwood clog less.

Everything runs through the power distribution unit. As he put it, it is "talking to the fans, it's talking to the sensor suite and it's talking to the miners as well." On a cool night, it can tell whether there is room to overclock, instead of the operator finding out the hard way. That feature was coming in the Gen 3 line on the show floor.

Infrastructure had become one of the company's biggest sellers. Digital Shovel had deployed five hundred fifty megawatts of busway systems in two years, and it showed a compact four-thousand-amp switchgear with strips that watch the busbars and lugs for hot spots.

The full story is on Intelligence Disrupt at intelligencedisrupt dot com, and the conversation continues at Intelligence Disrupt twenty twenty-seven, March twenty-second to twenty-fourth in Irving, Texas.