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Guide · Nov 12, 2026 · 8 min read

What a bitcoin miner's warranty covers, how long it lasts, and what voids it

A new mining machine comes with about a year of manufacturer warranty, and the clock starts the day it leaves the factory, not the day it reaches you. Here is what that year covers, the handful of things that cancel it, who pays the freight when a board goes back, and what to do on day one so a claim is never refused.

Firsthand card: "What a bitcoin miner's warranty covers, how long it lasts, and what voids it", 365 days, the standard Bitmain miner warranty counted from shipment

About a year, counted from the day it ships

Every new bitcoin miner from a major manufacturer comes with a warranty, and for the current generations it is roughly a year. MicroBT's own after-sales policy, printed on each Whatsminer product page, says it plainly: "MicroBT promises to provide users with a one-year warranty period and repair services within the warranty scope." Canaan's order policy gives "a warranty for all delivered AvalonMiner Products for 360 days from the date of dispatch". Bitdeer's sales agreement for its SealMiners covers them "for a period of 365 days from the Shipment Date". Bitmain gives 365 days on its S19 and later Antminers, subject to the sales contract, according to a repair shop's summary of Bitmain's warranty page, and its own repair rules define the warranty period as "starting from the date of dispatch".

Notice the word every one of them uses. Dispatch. Shipment. The year does not begin when the box arrives at your door or at the hosting site. It begins when the manufacturer hands it to the carrier. A machine that spends five weeks at sea and a fortnight in customs arrives with about ten and a half months of warranty left, and nothing you do changes that.

It also means a machine bought second-hand, or one that sat in a distributor's warehouse for a season, may have far less cover than its age suggests. The manufacturers let you check: Bitmain and MicroBT both look up a machine's warranty by its serial number, and the first thing to do with any used machine is run that check before paying for it.

The warranty starts when the machine leaves the factory. Every day it spends on a ship or in customs is a day of cover you will never use.

The machine is covered. Some of its parts are not

A miner is four things: hashboards, a control board, a power supply and fans, or a water loop in place of the fans. What is inside a bitcoin miner walks through them. The warranty is written for the whole machine as it shipped, and the hashboards are where almost every claim lands, because they are the expensive part and the part that fails.

The small print differs on the rest. Canaan says outright that it "grants no warranty for the PSU", the power supply, beyond three days to report a defect after delivery. Bitmain treats a control board bought on its own as a spare with a shorter term, and spare parts such as fans with none, according to the same repair shop's reading of its policy. Bitdeer's agreement is the most generous in its wording: "the entire mining rigs shall be covered under warranty during the warranty period" when a machine is bought complete.

The practical reading for a first-time buyer is simple. A hashboard that fails in the first year is the manufacturer's problem. A fan is a consumable you may well end up paying for yourself, and it costs very little. A power supply sits somewhere in between, depending on who made the machine.

The handful of things that cancel it

Warranties are not refused at random. The exclusion lists from the four main manufacturers are long, but they describe the same few mistakes, and all of them are avoidable.

Touching the seals. Bitmain voids cover if the ["original warranty stickers ('fragile' labels) [are] altered, defaced or removed"](https://assets-product.bitmain.com.cn/shop-product-s3/clause/ticketsRulesEn.html). Bitdeer excludes machines with "missing, altered, or defaced warranty stickers or SN labels". MicroBT lists products whose "serial numbers have been maliciously modified, defaced, or intentionally removed". The serial label and the tamper seal are the warranty. Leave them alone.

Opening the case. Bitmain excludes "disassembly or alteration of Product by anyone other than us or our authorized service providers". MicroBT excludes "unauthorized disassembly, modification, or repair" without its written permission. Bitdeer says the same in almost the same words. A machine that has been opened by anyone but the maker or its agent is, in the maker's eyes, out of warranty.

Pushing it harder than it was built for. Bitmain will not cover a product "damaged due to the use of third-party over-frequency software". MicroBT excludes products "that modify their operating parameters (such as overclocking) on their own" and products that use "unofficial supporting software". Bitdeer excludes "unofficial or unauthorized supporting software" and names overclocking. Third-party firmware is popular because it can squeeze more out of a machine. It can also end the warranty on a machine that cost you several thousand dollars.

Running it somewhere it should not run. MicroBT's list covers damage from "humid environments, corrosive environments, ultra-high temperature environments, dust particles, abnormal voltage and current (surges, impacts, instability)". Bitmain excludes damage "caused by not operating in accordance with specified product parameters". Bitdeer names "water exposures". A garage, a shed or an unstable domestic supply is exactly the environment these clauses were written about.

Fitting the wrong parts, or the wrong boards. MicroBT excludes machines that use "unofficial designated accessories", naming power supplies, control boards, fans and cables. Bitdeer excludes "any hardware modification to the original structure or components". Swapping a hashboard from one machine into another is treated as a modification by the makers that mention it. Each board belongs to the serial number it shipped under.

Read that list again and notice what is not on it. Ordinary failure is not on it. A chip that dies, a board that drops out, a power supply that stops: that is what the warranty is for, and a machine that has simply been racked, powered and left alone to mine is the machine a claim is paid on.

Nobody loses a warranty to bad luck. They lose it to a torn sticker, an opened case or a firmware file.

Who pays to send it back

A warranty repair is not free of cost. It is free of the repair bill. Getting the part to the manufacturer is your job and your expense, on every policy we read.

Bitmain's repair rules say that, in or out of warranty, "you are responsible for the shipping cost to send it to the service center", and that after a warranty repair "we will cover the cost of shipping the product back to you from the repair center". Canaan's wording is "you shall pay the inbound shipping charges and we will pay the return shipping charges". Bitdeer's agreement has the purchaser "bear the cost of inbound shipping to the repair center" and the seller bear the return. MicroBT's repair policy has you ship at your own cost and promises that for in-warranty work "we will offer free maintain service and pay the return shipping fee".

Two more lines matter. The clock keeps running while the part travels: Bitmain requires a repair ticket first, dispatch within seven days of it and arrival within fifteen, and if the part arrives late it "will determine whether the Product is within the warranty period based on the actual arrival date". And the box is yours while it is in transit: Bitdeer's agreement puts "any and all risks of loss or damage to the Warranted Products during transportation" on the purchaser, in both directions, along with "any customs duties, taxes and other fees". Canaan's policy says the same about risk in transit.

For one machine in a spare room, that adds up to a courier bill each way, customs paperwork if the service centre is abroad, and several weeks without hashrate. The repair itself is the cheap part. A failed hashboard is a line item, not a catastrophe explains why the downtime, not the board, is the real cost of a fault.

What happens after the year is up

An out-of-warranty machine is not an unrepairable one. The manufacturers keep repairing their machines for a fee: MicroBT's policy quotes the price, asks for payment within three working days of the quotation and says a repair "usually takes about 7 working days" before shipping. Independent repair shops do the same board-level work, often closer to home, and for the established machine families the board layouts and fault codes are documented well enough that a competent bench works through them every day.

Where the machine lives decides how that feels. Hosted with us in Argentina, repairs are done on site and billed at the cost of the parts, with no labour line. In the UAE there is a manufacturer warranty centre close to the facility, so a machine still inside its year goes to the people who built it without crossing an ocean. In both cases a fault is noticed on the monitoring the day it happens, rather than the day you next look.

One honest line about our part in it: the warranty is the manufacturer's, not ours. Our hosting agreement says that machines carry the manufacturer's twelve-month warranty, that we give no warranty of our own, and that if a unit is dead on arrival or fails within the manufacturer's period we will submit the claim on your behalf. We cannot promise how long the manufacturer takes or what it decides. No host can, and one that says otherwise is worth reading twice.

What to do on day one

Keep the shipment record. The warranty runs from the day the manufacturer dispatched the machine, so the order confirmation and the carrier's tracking page are the proof of when your year began. Save them somewhere you will find them in eleven months.

Photograph the serial number label and every tamper seal before the machine goes into a rack. If a claim is ever questioned, a dated photograph of intact seals on arrival settles it. If the machine is hosted, ask the site to do this at intake; a good one already does.

Run the serial through the manufacturer's warranty lookup and write the expiry date in your calendar. For a used machine, do this before you pay. A machine whose year ended in a warehouse is still a fine machine, but it should be priced as one with no warranty, because that is what it is.

Then leave it alone. Stock firmware, the power supply it came with, the case closed, the seals untouched, the environment the spec sheet asks for. Report any fault through a ticket before anything is shipped, and ship inside the manufacturer's window. Every refused claim we have read about on the forums fails one of those tests, and none of them is hard to pass.

Three photographs and one saved email are the difference between a paid claim and a refused one.

What this means for a miner

A warranty is not a promise that nothing will break. Hashboards fail, and the first year is when the manufacturer pays for it. It is a promise that if you treat the machine the way its maker intended, the costliest fault it can have in its most valuable year is somebody else's bill.

So the warranty is less a document to worry about than a short list of habits: know your shipment date, keep the seals and the serial, keep the stock firmware, keep it in a proper environment, and keep the paperwork. Do that, put the machine somewhere faults are routine work rather than an emergency, and the year of cover does exactly what it is for. The machine mines, the BTC are yours, and the repairs are a line on an invoice.

Sources and further reading

Disclosure

Firsthand Bitcoin sells and hosts mining hardware, including this machine. No manufacturer, distributor or affiliate programme paid for or reviewed this page and we take no commission on the links above. Historical figures are computed from daily bitcoin price and network hashprice, each day valued at its own prices. Nothing here is investment advice.