21–30 of 64 posts
How many have realized how much stuff can be hosted at home with availability levels not really far from most common datacenters?
This is cool, but I mean... come on. This guy lives in a $2M apt in a big city. The amount of energy being "saved" yearly is wasted almost every second.
I can't speak for his specific apartment, but apartments in general are more energy efficient that a suburban house. New York City is one of the lowest per capita CO2 emissions in the US.
I doubt there’s a cement kiln, cattle farm or oil refinery within city limits.
Solar powered sites are cool and fun, but I find it ultimately lacking because so much of the rest of the networking infrastructure is reliant on the grid. It would be more energy efficient to just host the static site on cloudflare or whatever, and use the solar panel to charge some batteries, or something you would normally use the grid for. I suspect overall energy usage would be even lower if the site was hosted…
Agreed. When I see this type of thing, I am always turned off by people describing it as "greener" or “more sustainable”. Every small website having its own solar panel and hardware is not greener. People frequently think only of the carbon emissions of the energy used by the hardware once it's running, ignoring the carbon (and raw material) cost of building that hardware. Serving websites is an area where capitalism…
Solar powered sites are cool and fun, but I find it ultimately lacking because so much of the rest of the networking infrastructure is reliant on the grid. It would be more energy efficient to just host the static site on cloudflare or whatever, and use the solar panel to charge some batteries, or something you would normally use the grid for. I suspect overall energy usage would be even lower if the site was hosted…
You don't like that the rest of the infrastructure is on the grid, so you're proposing moving the site to the grid too?
it's 1000x more helpful to just like only run your big appliances when your grid is using more renewables.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't speak for his specific apartment, but apartments in general are more energy efficient that a suburban house. New York City is one of the lowest per capita CO2 emissions in the US.
I can believe it either way, but some of that is because carbon-intensive industry will be based out of the city and its products imported in. I doubt there’s a cement kiln, cattle farm or oil refinery within city limits.
City living brings efficiencies from operating at scale - fewer miles by car, block of apartments instead of single family homes.
Solar powered sites are cool and fun, but I find it ultimately lacking because so much of the rest of the networking infrastructure is reliant on the grid. It would be more energy efficient to just host the static site on cloudflare or whatever, and use the solar panel to charge some batteries, or something you would normally use the grid for. I suspect overall energy usage would be even lower if the site was hosted…
Yeah, it's only a 50W solar panel. The solar power could be upgraded to a 400W no problem and the issue you have will no longer exist.
Often people smart with a small system to get things figured out how they want it before adding more capacity. Seems reasonable, no?
Networking equipment shouldn't be much power, speaking from personal experience.
It can be on a small UPS, even one from Costco to run it all off battery, and then solar to refill.
Solar powered sites are cool and fun, but I find it ultimately lacking because so much of the rest of the networking infrastructure is reliant on the grid. It would be more energy efficient to just host the static site on cloudflare or whatever, and use the solar panel to charge some batteries, or something you would normally use the grid for. I suspect overall energy usage would be even lower if the site was hosted…
Agreed. When I see this type of thing, I am always turned off by people describing it as "greener" or “more sustainable”. Every small website having its own solar panel and hardware is not greener. People frequently think only of the carbon emissions of the energy used by the hardware once it's running, ignoring the carbon (and raw material) cost of building that hardware. Serving websites is an area where capitalism…
The carbon is hard to account for in manufacturing. Solar, for example, is pretty close to being produced entirely with electric consumption and very little required CO2 output (except perhaps in the transport of silicon and other raw materials). The big energy draw for solar and battery is a kiln stage in both. Solar has to melt down the silicon which requires a high temperature furnace and batteries are basically "cooking" the raw materials onto their foil.
The math for solar is something like 1 to 4 years of generation before it pays back the manufacturing power debt. Batteries tend to be much shorter as they take less energy in their manufacturing process (with some hopeful techniques in the future significantly reducing that number).
Now, none of this is to contradict you, just putting the numbers out there. I completely agree that a server farm is likely to be far more efficient for hosting a website than home built solar powered pi. The CO2 emissions will be hard to beat, particularly if your cloud host resides in the PNW where power is nearly entirely renewable already.
This is so cool! I'm so surprised I've never heard of someone doing this before :)
Archive of the website: http://web.archive.org/web/20200707101320/https://jewjewjew....
This is cool, but I mean... come on. This guy lives in a $2M apt in a big city. The amount of energy being "saved" yearly is wasted almost every second.
> When I started this solar-powered website project, I wasn't trying to revolutionize sustainable computing or drastically cut my electricity bill. I was driven by curiosity, a desire to have fun, and a hope that my journey might inspire others to explore local-first or solar-powered hosting.
> The cost savings? Looking at our last electricity bill, we pay an average of $0.325 per kWh in Boston. This means the savings amount to $2.85 USD per year (8.76 kWh * $0.325/kWh = $2.85). Not exactly something to write home about.