ASIC Miner Warranty: What's Covered, What Isn't, and How to Check a Serial Number

Before you ship a failed miner for warranty repair, two things are worth knowing: whether the unit is actually still under warranty, and whether the failure is one the manufacturer will cover. Both take minutes to check, and checking first saves weeks of back-and-forth on a claim that was never going to be accepted.

What manufacturer warranties usually do not cover

Warranties from MicroBT and Bitmain cover defects in materials and workmanship. They generally do not cover damage caused by how a machine was powered, housed, handled or modified. The common exclusions:

• Power surges — damage from an unstable supply, lightning, or a faulty PDU or breaker.
• Burned boards — scorched or heat-damaged hash boards.
• Disconnected chip pins — ASICs that have lifted from the board, usually through thermal stress or rough handling.
• Physical damage — drops, bent boards, cracked connectors.
• Improper environment — dust, humidity, inadequate airflow, or temperatures outside the operating range.
• Corrosion or missing components.
• Third-party firmware — flashing anything other than the manufacturer's own firmware.
• Damaged tamper-evident stickers — a broken seal is treated as an opened unit.
• User error.

How to check whether a miner is still under warranty

Both manufacturers publish a serial-number lookup. Have the serial ready — it's on the label on the case, and also shown in the miner's web dashboard.

Whatsminer (MicroBT)

Go to MicroBT's support page and enter the serial in the Warranty Check field. The result gives you the warranty end date, in the form The warranty period is up to 2021-12-10. If that date has passed, the unit is out of warranty.

Antminer (Bitmain)

Go to Bitmain's warranty check, enter the SN and search. An expired unit returns The SN is no longer in the warranty period. Bitmain also notes that mixed-board, scrapped and parts-missing units are not covered even inside the warranty period.

The parts inside an ASIC miner

When you describe a fault to a manufacturer or a repair center, naming the part gets you a faster answer. Every ASIC miner, Whatsminer or Antminer, is built from the same six components:

• Control board — the brain. It runs the firmware, talks to your pool, and tells the hash boards what to do.
• Transfer board and I/O cable — carry data between the control board and the hash boards.
• Hash boards — where the ASIC chips live. Each board receives work from the control board, runs the mining algorithm, and reports results back. Most failures happen here.
• Power supply unit (PSU) — converts mains power to the voltages the control board and hash boards need.
• Case / enclosure — usually aluminum; houses the control and hash boards, and on some older models the PSU as well.
• Fans — cool the hash boards. The control board powers and regulates them, so a fan fault can present as a control-board fault.

Out of warranty, or an excluded failure?

If the lookup says the warranty has ended, or the failure is one of the excluded kinds, the unit can still be repaired. We are an authorized MicroBT service center for in-warranty Whatsminer work, and we repair Whatsminers of every generation and Antminer S21 and T21 units out of warranty at our Chicago facility. Tell us the model and the symptoms and we'll tell you whether it's worth fixing.