Why do the images look like someone took pictures of dotmatrix printer output? --- Update: for whatever it's worth, I just asked the Magic 8 Ball (Perplexity): Low-tech Magazine uses the option to display images as dithered primarily to reduce the energy consumption and data load of their website. Dithering is an old image compression technique that reduces the number of colors in images to just a few shades of gray…
How to build a solar powered electric oven
11–20 of 55 posts
Re: How to build a solar powered electric oven
#12This is fun, I'm curious to try it. An alternative that I experimented with and found to be very usable is one solar panel, a small camping battery ("portable power station"), and an Instant Pot. The total cost is not super high. The Instant Pot is power efficient and can cook a lot of food at once. Since it's battery powered you can start any time the battery is charged.
Some other interesting things I learned: the battery passively eats about 5-10W, and on a cloudy day the solar panel would only get 10W during the day. So in the cloudy PNW winters it can't even maintain the battery let alone charge it. The inverter eats another 30-50W or so, so you have to turn it off when you're not using the AC outlets. My battery lets me separately power AC and DC (USB-A and USB-C) so I was charging devices via USB and not wasting energy powering the inverter.
Re: How to build a solar powered electric oven
#13Re: How to build a solar powered electric oven
#14With the panels I have on my balcony I get about 200 watts even on overcast days. I would love to have appliances that were optimized for lower peak consumption. But many appliances like the fridge have low average consumption but high peak consumption so that while the panels on average produce about as much as I consume per day in reality I still have to buy power from the grid.
Re: How to build a solar powered electric oven
#15With the panels I have on my balcony I get about 200 watts even on overcast days. I would love to have appliances that were optimized for lower peak consumption. But many appliances like the fridge have low average consumption but high peak consumption so that while the panels on average produce about as much as I consume per day in reality I still have to buy power from the grid.
You need an “inverter drive” fridge. It’s effectively soft-start and stays on continuously instead of justt a binary on/off.
Many options available at the consumer level.
Dunno if it gets angry if it senses that it’s browning out its own circuit or just reduces its draw (vs increasing current draw). But does mean it can dial up and down its draw on a continuous basis.
Re: How to build a solar powered electric oven
#16Re: How to build a solar powered electric oven
#17With the panels I have on my balcony I get about 200 watts even on overcast days. I would love to have appliances that were optimized for lower peak consumption. But many appliances like the fridge have low average consumption but high peak consumption so that while the panels on average produce about as much as I consume per day in reality I still have to buy power from the grid.
batteryhookup is a great source for used batteries, it's pretty affordable to build your own setup to run stuff like a fridge
Re: How to build a solar powered electric oven
#18Even if insulated, isn’t this setup always heating the home? The insulation slows down the heat transfer but if I’m following correctly it’s basically running the heat element anytime the sun is up. I think this would be counterproductive in my climate as I’m cooling the home most of the year which is an even more energy intensive process
Re: How to build a solar powered electric oven
#19Even if insulated, isn’t this setup always heating the home? The insulation slows down the heat transfer but if I’m following correctly it’s basically running the heat element anytime the sun is up. I think this would be counterproductive in my climate as I’m cooling the home most of the year which is an even more energy intensive process
Re: How to build a solar powered electric oven
#20I know this is “low-tech” but still think it might be possible to fabricate something even if it means spending some of your power budget maintaining the vacuum with a pump.