Immersion Cooling Label Peeling — Adhesive Failure

Photograph every label on every miner before doing anything. Phone camera, good lighting, every face of the chassis, both sides of every PSU brick, every hashboard QC sticker. Save photos to a fleet folder named with the miner serial. This is your audit trail for warranty, insurance, and resale value, and it preserves the serial information that's about to get scraped off.

Transcribe every serial number into your fleet spreadsheet. Bitmain, MicroBT, Avalon serials; hashboard serials where visible; PSU brick serials. Cross-reference your purchase invoice. The serial is the single piece of information you cannot reconstruct after the label is gone.

Heat-strip easy labels first. Hair dryer or heat gun at ~70 °C low setting, no closer than 10 cm from the chassis, 15-30 seconds per label. PSA softens, label lifts cleanly with a fingernail or plastic scraper. Works for ~80 percent of paper and vinyl factory stickers in good condition. Do not blast Bitmain warranty seals if the unit is in active warranty — strip after warranty expires or accept warranty void.

Apply Goo Gone, citrus-based adhesive remover, or 99 percent isopropyl alcohol on a lint-free wipe to remove PSA residue. Wipe until residue stops transferring. Do not use acetone — it attacks ABS plastic chassis components on Antminer covers and leaves them frosted. Confirm the chassis face is clean before any further handling.

Mark the serial-number location on the chassis with paint pen or fine Sharpie so you know where the engraved tag will mount. Document the serial-to-location mapping in the fleet spreadsheet. Do not trust the Sharpie alone for long-term identification — it fades in heated tanks even though dielectric will not fully wash it off.

Order engraved metal serial tags. Anodized aluminum dog-tag style, 25 x 50 mm, laser-engraved with model plus serial. Source: Etsy, Amazon, or a local trophy shop. 5-15 CAD per tag, 7-14 day lead time. Engraving (not printing) is the standard — printed metal tags eventually weather even in dielectric. Order one tag per miner before committing to a fluid fill.

Mount tags externally where practical, internally where unavoidable. Externally: zip-tie to the lifting handle, pop-rivet to a non-wetted chassis face, or magnet-mount to the side of the tank with the serial mapped to its tank slot. Internally: pop-rivet or M3 machine-screw to a chassis location that won't trap fluid pockets. Both options keep the serial readable for the life of the deployment.

Strip remaining factory labels: heat-strip first, then mechanical scrape with a plastic scraper for stubborn ones, then citrus solvent for residue. Mesh-stand QC stickers and hashboard datecode stickers come off with ~30 seconds of heat each. PSU brick warranty seals usually require heat gun plus plastic scraper combo — they're polyester with aggressive PSA, designed to tear when removed.

Inspect for residual adhesive on every chassis face that contacts fluid. Use a flashlight at a low angle. Adhesive ghosting (slightly darker outline of the former label) is fine and won't shed. Tacky residue that picks up dust will shed into fluid. Re-clean tacky areas with 99 percent IPA until they stop transferring residue to a wipe.

Apply external (outside-the-wet-path) labels for inventory tracking if needed. Vinyl labels on the outside of the tank, on the lifting handle, or on a rack tag are unaffected by immersion since they're never in fluid. This is where you put the 'S19j-Pro Slot 02 / Serial XXXXXXX / Date Filled' inventory tag — outside the tank, where dielectric cannot reach.

Drain to a clean dedicated dielectric container if labels have already shed. HDPE jerry cans, never reused chemical containers, never PVC. Drain rate under 5 L/min to avoid foaming. Pull 100 mL samples before, during, and after drain — labels and adhesive concentrate near the surface (paper is buoyant after waterlogging) and at the lowest point (vinyl scraps tend to settle).

Filter the entire drained fluid volume through a 5-micron pleated cartridge and replace the filter even if it doesn't look clogged. Transfer pump rated for hydrocarbon service, 5-micron filter cartridge upstream of the receiving container. Engineered Fluids and similar suppliers will often filter back to spec for a service fee if you ship them the contaminated fluid; weigh shipping cost vs your fluid's per-litre value.

Pull every miner. Strip every remaining adhesive label per the Tier 1 and Tier 2 procedure. Photograph and document as you go. Inspect each chassis for adhesive residue and clean with 99 percent IPA. Do not reinstall any miner with an intact paper, vinyl, or polyester adhesive label still in the wet path — it will just shed on the next cycle.

Inspect every hashboard heatsink and fin pack for adhesive residue. Disassemble heatsink from each board if you have already drained — peeled-label PSA bonds preferentially to fin edges and fan-shroud surfaces, where it can locally insulate 1-3 fins and create a chip-junction hot spot. Clean residue with 99 percent IPA and a soft-bristle brush. Re-paste with Arctic MX-6 or Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut on reassembly.

Pump and circulation-loop teardown if pump performance has dropped. Pull the impeller, inspect for wrapped label fragments. Vinyl and polyester sheet wrap impellers cleanly and don't always come off in fluid flow alone — they need to be peeled mechanically. Inspect heat-exchanger headers and any flow-restriction points (manifolds, sensor wells, drain valves) for trapped scraps.

Refill through a 5-micron filter on the transfer pump. Refill rate under 5 L/min to avoid foaming. Top up to the supplier's recommended level. Re-energize miners one at a time, 5-minute intervals, monitoring pump pressure and chip-junction temperature for the first hour. Watch for any new residue pickup.

Stop DIY when: adhesive residue has migrated onto a hashboard PCB surface (visible at drain or as a thermal anomaly that won't clean up); a label fragment wedged into a heatsink fin pack and burned visible discoloration; a fluid-wicked label bridged a control-board connector; or any miner from a contaminated tank refuses to boot, hashes erratically, or shows visible scorching. You're now in board-level recovery territory.

D-Central bench process: strip the affected miner, ultrasonic clean hashboards in petroleum-compatible solvent, controlled-vacuum dry, reflow any compromised joints, full board-level test under load before return. Diagnosis distinguishes adhesive-residue thermal failures (recoverable with cleaning + re-paste) from fluid-wicking failures on control boards (recoverable with cleaning + dry + reflow) from already-destroyed silicon (chip replacement required).

Ship safely. Drain affected miners before shipping. Hashboards in anti-static bags, double-boxed with at least 5 cm of foam on every side. Note on the slip: dielectric brand and model, days in fluid, observed peel events, filter-clog timeline if known, photo of the contaminated filter pleat. Fluid history matters and saves diagnostic time and your repair cost.