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This website has 81% battery power remaining

solar.lowtechmagazine.com

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Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#91

Post by rightbyte »

pengaru wrote: post #70
louwrentius wrote: post #46

My own battery + solar powered blog [0] is 100% inspired by lowtechmagazine. I am based in The Netherlands and due to my sub optimal location, I have to cheat in the winter by recharging from mains about weekly. I still do get some sun, but nowhere nearly enough to get through the day, let alone the night. [0]: https://louwrentius.com/this-blog-is-now-running-on-solar-po... And lead acid is also terrible for solar ap…

> And lead acid is also terrible for solar applications because no matter the capacity, recharging is very slow. Even solar could recharge the battery, the slow adsorption rate prevents it from doing so. This doesn't make sense to me. Surely you can reach a sufficient rate by adding more lead-acid cells in parallel? You're kind of forced to do this anyways since they don't like being discharged below 50% of their act…

You want to top off lead acid with constant voltage to prevent gucking. It is time bound not power bound.

https://batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-403-charging-lead-a...

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#92

Post by TobTobXX »

user_7832 wrote: post #86
ralph84 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an area where Apple is way ahead of everyone else. A code change that increases power usage 25% wouldn’t make it past CI at Apple.

Sorry, what does CI stand for?

Continuous integration -- Software development practice based on frequent submission of granular changes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration

... basically check every small commit, ideally end-to-end.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#93

Post by noman-land »

scrose wrote: post #74

Semi-related —- does anyone have recommendations for where to find small hobbyist solar panels and/or kits to experiment with for small devices like a Pi? Also curious about how a setup like this compares with using a traditional electricity source in terms of cost per hr of running the site off of solar with batteries. What is the break even point against utility costs over there(if there is one)? And are there any…

Adafruit has a variety of them.

https://www.adafruit.com/search?q=solar%20panel

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#94

Post by Wowfunhappy »

onion2k wrote: post #78
marricks wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to be that old foggy but, aren’t websites just getting worse and bloated with JS crap? I’ve had a couple websites I use daily for work just get flashy new interfaces which causes 1/3 to 1/2 second delays in the interface which used to not exist, previously they just had normal page load delays. For example, SalesForce Lightning, their UI overhaul. Old UI is mainly just flat HTML with some loading on fields. Ne…

aren’t websites just getting worse and bloated with JS crap Maybe they are, but that bloat is just some static files that are sent to the user as far as the web server is concerned. They should have no practical impact on the battery life of the server. There are JS sites that render on the server as well, but that's not the bloat you mean.

And, heck, there's a solid argument that server-side rendering is more environmentally efficient, since the work is done in a data-center, which can (1) utilize caching to avoid re-doing work and (2) be built in an optimal location for electricity generation.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#95

Post by _jal »

jmondi wrote: post #66
Beached wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's gotten out of hand imo. page load times take longer than when I was browsing the web on dialup in many cases.

What a false equivalence. You are comparing static sites of the past to dynamic sites of today. Apples to oranges.

When you replace one with the other and notice a substantial change in time-required-for-task, I think you can make comparisons.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#97

Post by MayeulC »

As another commenter pointed out, Lead-Acid batteries are terrible for this. They are fine for backup power supplies that you don't expect to actually use more than a couple of times a year, but discharging them too much will completely kill them, and even if you keep a margin and discharge them to only 30%, the number of cycles is quite limited (1500 to 3000 cycles quoted in [1] seems a bit optimistic, probably depends on the specific battery).

Lithium-based batteries such as LFP are becoming very affordable [2] and can handle much more cycles. They can also handle more current variation and are more efficient.

[1] https://offgridtech.org/tech-updates-online/2021/lithium-iro...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28943741

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#99

Post by folmar »

scrose wrote: post #74

Semi-related —- does anyone have recommendations for where to find small hobbyist solar panels and/or kits to experiment with for small devices like a Pi? Also curious about how a setup like this compares with using a traditional electricity source in terms of cost per hr of running the site off of solar with batteries. What is the break even point against utility costs over there(if there is one)? And are there any…

For hobby/experiment use decomissioned panels from upgaded farms, sometimes you can get two years old panels that were swapped for more efficient ones for a fraction of the original price.

For setup with batteries there is (depending slightly on local electricy cost) no long time break-even - the battery deprecation due to discharge cycle costs more than electricity from the utility.

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