Immersion Tank
An immersion tank is a container of dielectric liquid the miner sinks into completely. The fans come off, the liquid carries the heat away.
How the tank works
The liquid does not conduct electricity, so the boards run right inside it. Heat goes into the liquid, a pump drives it through a heat exchanger, then an outer loop: a dry cooler or water. Figure tens of liters per miner, the exact volume depends on the tank.
People pour in either synthetic dielectrics or transformer oil. Dielectrics cost more but run cleaner and wash off easier. Oil is several times cheaper, but it stains everything it touches, and selling an ASIC after oil is harder: the traces show right away.
Fans are useless in liquid, but the firmware shuts the miner down without them. So emulators go on the connectors and report believable rpm, or you install firmware with an immersion mode where fan control is turned off.
The main win is more than silence. The liquid keeps the temperature even across the whole board, no dust and no local hot spots, so hardware in a tank lives longer and holds an overclock steadily that an air-cooled case cannot manage.
The short version
| What goes in the tank | a dielectric or transformer oil |
| Volume | tens of liters per miner |
| Fans | come off, an emulator fakes the signal |
| The loop | pump, heat exchanger, dry cooler outside |
| What the liquid won't forgive | water and dirt in the loop |
What to sort out before the dip
You can't strip the thermal paste, but you can copy down the labels and serial numbers beforehand: stickers peel off in the liquid, and an ASIC without a serial loses its history.
Check the liquid's compatibility with plastics and seals: aggressive chemistry eats through wire insulation over months.
Think through servicing: a miner comes out of the tank in gloves, drips for hours, and any repair starts with a wash. There is no quick 'pull it out and swap the fan' here.
Price the whole project: the tank, the liquid, the pump, the heat exchanger, and the outer loop together cost as much as another ASIC, sometimes more. For one miner it rarely pays off, the sense appears with a row.
Example from practice
A row of six miners in a shared tank in a garage. In summer on air they throttled at 34 degrees, in liquid they hold nominal, with the same quiet pump hum all year. The downside showed up when a board failed: instead of ten minutes with a screwdriver, a whole day: drain, wash, reassemble, and top the liquid up to the mark.
Related terms
Where to go next on the site
Hardware
- ASIC Miner knowledge base
Guides
- ASIC Manufacturers knowledge base
Numbers
Questions and answers
Can any ASIC go into a tank
Technically almost any air-cooled one, in practice people look at the warranty: immersion voids it, and the traces of liquid cannot be hidden. Hydro models don't go into a tank, they have a loop of their own.
What happens with warranty and resale
The manufacturer's warranty is gone immediately. On the secondary market an ASIC after oil sells reluctantly and at a discount, after a clean dielectric it is easier, but buyers will still ask about the immersion history.
Tank or hydro cooling
Hydro is a factory solution with water blocks and a warranty, a tank is a project you build for your own room. For one miner at home hydro is simpler, for a row of older air-cooled models a tank is cheaper per terahash.
How the terms connect
Every link in the chain is clickable. Orange marks where you are now.
Looking for an ASIC miner
The catalog holds 212 models. You can compare them by hashrate and by joules per terahash, then plug your own rate into the calculator and see what stays in your pocket.
Page written and checked by Denys Klimchuk. Updated .