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Solar Shed Summary: My Off Grid Office

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Re: Solar Shed Summary: My Off Grid Office

#31

Post by jws »

tejohnso wrote: post #13
Syonyk wrote: post #3

There's been some conversation about this at the previous link, back when it was over at syonyk.blogspot.com (I moved off that because Google ruined their new Blogger interface). Five years later... still the best place I've ever worked from. Nothing to say, really. Power is reliable, I have more of it than I really need with how much solar I've got, the generator works fine in the winter, my speakers rock, and I don…

I didn't expect Starlink equipment to be very power hungry. That's unfortunate. Really damages my rural off-grid small home fantasy.

2kWHr/day is about 500 watts of solar panels (just for starlink, similar math for the rest of the stuff). So that's about $750 plus brackets, wires and stuff. You'll need a battery bank and you will trade off the size of the battery bank against the size of the solar array to survive partly cloudy days, but there will always a cloudy period longer than your batteries will provide, so get a small generator running on whatever fuel is convenient (you want to charge using at least 1/4 the capacity of your generator to keep the efficiency up, so small generator unless you have vast batteries). Then you don't need such a big battery bank or solar array.

In the cost of a small home, the solar/battery/generator is minor. $1500 panels, $1000 inverter charger, $1000 lead acid batteries (5 years, then lithium will make sense), $2000 generator, $2000 more because I underestimate… $7500 all in.

Fantasy is still a go!

Re: Solar Shed Summary: My Off Grid Office

#32

Post by pkaye »

In the bay area, also check out "The Shed Shop". I'm a happy customer myself. You can also make it a studio shed with sheetrock, flooring, electrical. They have a pricing sheet on their website and lots of sample sheds in their showrooms.

https://www.shedshop.com/models-prices/studio/

Re: Solar Shed Summary: My Off Grid Office

#34

Post by turbocon »

Syonyk wrote: post #3

There's been some conversation about this at the previous link, back when it was over at syonyk.blogspot.com (I moved off that because Google ruined their new Blogger interface). Five years later... still the best place I've ever worked from. Nothing to say, really. Power is reliable, I have more of it than I really need with how much solar I've got, the generator works fine in the winter, my speakers rock, and I don…

I'm curious how your batteries are holding up? I know effectively nothing about lead acid battery lifespans, but I saw a question asked on your blog concerning the heat the batteries would be subjected too. Did you ever hook up a AC system for the batteries?

Re: Solar Shed Summary: My Off Grid Office

#35

Post by extrapickles »

franciscop wrote: post #28

This is an amazing read, and something I might do some day. A thing I've learned recently living in Japan's tiny places, is that good insulation helps you keeping electricity costs down but has the disadvantage of building CO2 faster. So I would strongly consider getting a CO2 monitor for the shed. Considering size and the strong insulation you added, I doubt you can be more than a couple of hours before getting into…

You can always put in a energy/heat recovery ventilator. They use the outgoing stale air to warm/cool the incoming fresh air, so it’s more efficient than leaving a window open. Downside is they need a small amount (20-60w) of power for fans.

Re: Solar Shed Summary: My Off Grid Office

#36

Post by fomine3 »

franciscop wrote: post #28

This is an amazing read, and something I might do some day. A thing I've learned recently living in Japan's tiny places, is that good insulation helps you keeping electricity costs down but has the disadvantage of building CO2 faster. So I would strongly consider getting a CO2 monitor for the shed. Considering size and the strong insulation you added, I doubt you can be more than a couple of hours before getting into…

Heat recovery ventilation unit is also helpful. It ventilates air while keeping temperature and humidity. Lossnay (ロスナイ) is most popular one in Japan, and it's sold from 20k JPY.

Re: Solar Shed Summary: My Off Grid Office

#37

Post by akiselev »

Syonyk wrote: post #26
pengaru wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI TFA is just a blank dark scrollable page without js here on FF w/noscript.

Interesting. Indeed it is, I just tried with JS disabled. That certainly wasn't the intent, I'll have to figure out what it's doing. However, it shouldn't be setting any cookies... Web dev is no longer my strong suit... never really was, but I used to know a lot more about it than I do now.

It's the fade-in animation on page load. Everything is blank until Javascript adds the "is-in" class to

Re: Solar Shed Summary: My Off Grid Office

#38

Post by oh_sigh »

tejohnso wrote: post #13
Syonyk wrote: post #3

There's been some conversation about this at the previous link, back when it was over at syonyk.blogspot.com (I moved off that because Google ruined their new Blogger interface). Five years later... still the best place I've ever worked from. Nothing to say, really. Power is reliable, I have more of it than I really need with how much solar I've got, the generator works fine in the winter, my speakers rock, and I don…

I didn't expect Starlink equipment to be very power hungry. That's unfortunate. Really damages my rural off-grid small home fantasy.

It's about as power hungry as your laptop. Less so than a desktop. It's totally reasonable if you're installing a solar system to add a little more capacity to handle that much load. You can also turn it off when you aren't using it(or have your access point turn it on only when a wireless device connects to it, or something like that).

Re: Solar Shed Summary: My Off Grid Office

#40

Post by uxp100 »

lostapathy wrote: post #10
uxp100 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just rent the drywall lift? If your work stretches across a week it's not cheaper, but the goal would be to rent the lift, hang all the drywall, return it to the lumber-yard/home improvement store/hardware store by the end of the day.

1000 sq ft of drywall is probably several evenings of work for a DIY'er, and not something you want to force into one long day. I will sometimes buy tools like this (new or for craigslist) and resell on craiglist, and then I think of it as "renting from craigslist" but without a deadline to return it.

Good point. I’ve got friends who use the same approach, but I gotta say, I think they do less reselling of things than they think. But that’s not really a problem (unless you run out of room) of course.
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