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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

#351
post #289

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Recycling isn't free. Currently it costs 20-30x more to recycle a panel than to dump it in a landfill. Maybe the aluminum frame, the glass and polymer sheets, and the junction box containing the copper wiring are relatively straightforward to recycle, but it takes much more complicated (see: expensive) machines to get to the smaller parts like the intra-cell wiring and the silicon itself. And the silicon wafers aren'…

Okay, so we’ve moved on from: Panels can’t be recycled. To: Panels in the US aren’t recycled enough because the economic conditions aren’t right. Thats a much more nuanced point. Government regulation can help here for sure.

Umm, it's not just that. The most advanced company in the world at recovering precious materials from solar panels is a French company that uses a chemical treatment to recover the silver intra-cell wiring. Even they are not really economically feasible. The reason the EU recycles is because they have to. Not because of economics

So no, it's not just solar panels in the US. The technology to make recycling solar panels feasible just doesn't currently exist

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s usually not images but rather the CMS making 100 read queries and 20 write queries per page load without any object caching that brings sites down. Even a slow uplink serving big image won’t bring an nginx server down, it’s all async.

Serving a lot of images at the same time will work the disk I/O up in many cases. Probably gotten a lot better with NVMe though.

It’s typically one page that hits Reddit/HN/whatever with its fixed set of static images. It’s pretty much the ideal scenario for the kernel’s in-memory cache.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#353
post #240

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I ran a webserver of sorts on an STM32F767, a python one of all things. 200mA looks like about par for the course, ethernet and all.

What's the supply voltage? Do you have a breakdown of which parts of the board consume how much? I feel like one should be able to use way less than that, but there are plenty of ways to waste power on a board that isn't designed to be battery powered. One project I've been thinking about recently (if I only I could find the time..) is to build a tiny server around a microcontroller coupled to a small NiMH pack (just…

3.3V, that's pretty standard nowadays.

I don't have a breakdown, it was cobbled together from whatever was around, an STM32 devboard, some regulators, some half-dead li-fe-pos, almost useless BMS from ali, this sort of stuff. Obviously that ate significantly less than an RPi, but I can't say how much, don't actually remember since that wasn't the problem.

Another take was a weather station, basically an ESP on a ~2500mAh 18650 li-ion.

That lived for like a week on a charge, stuff being fetched from it every minute over wifi.

I would recommend against using NiMH for that, just get some 18650s and work them between 80-40% charge, they'll last forever.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"In economics, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises due to increasing demand." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

It is interesting they consider it a paradox. When the demand curves show it. As making something more efficient moves the supply curve around (and moves where MR=MC is). Or in econ 250 class speak 'shift the supply curve right'. I think the 'paradox' comes in where they do not consider there is more demand on the other side of lower prices? Not all goods goto infinity on cost vs demand curve. But some sure act like…

In urban planning there's the 'law of induced demand' that has parallels to this and shows the paradoxical nature. When a road starts to see congestion, the reaction in the past has been to add lanes, widen the road, and/or increase the speed limit to get more cars through faster. This has its intended effect in the short term, but makes the road more attractive to drivers. More drivers start using the particular road, exceeding the planned capacity and in the average case causing worst congestion than existed before.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#355

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> I think this is true, but it’s still counterintuitive. Makes me think there’s something more useful we could make electric space heaters do with their energy and still produce the same amount of heat. Indeed: people have experimented with mining during the winter to recoup electric heating costs, which makes sense but only if you ignore the (expensive and getting more expensive by the day) cost of procuring the ori…

Hardware is a high cost if you're using current gen mining hardware to be competitive. If power is essentially "free" (since you'd use it anyway for heat), then even very old mining hardware would have a net positive benefit for you. It might only be worth a cup of coffee a week, but it is "free" money you can collect...

It still depends on what your alternative is. Much of the world does not use electricity for heat; in the United States, electricity is rarely used for heat in in the parts of the country that traditionally get brutal winters. It's cheaper for me to heat my home via the forced-air natural gas furnace (even though it is a less efficient fuel-to-heat process as compared to resistance heaters) given the disparity in pricing between residential electric and natural gas costs. I tried mining ethereum for a month last winter and I don't think that I broke even (despite using a relatively recent RTX 2080).

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#356
post #167

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Give them a call? Or switch ISP if yours doesn't allow it. Otherwise you need a relay service, at which point you might as well host with them directly.

I'm in a weird situation, hence my confusion. I live next door to an Xfinity hotspot. I signed up with Xfinity so they sent me a modem. I couldn't get it to work, but I found I could just use the hotspot. It works great but it serves potentially thousands of users so it's not personal to me.

That's an interesting situation indeed! Hosting a service on there might be rather tricky but if you do get support to punch through the CGNAT on it (I presume they use that) it will be even funnier :D

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to be contrary, but if your site is largely static and you're fronting it with Cloudfare, then you're essentially saying Cloudfare can handle load. Not much revelation there, right?

Mine isn’t static fwiw. Just running Elixir w/ Postgres. Elixir usually performs well enough uncached that you need to justify any caching needs.

So, specifically, why are using Cloudfare? Kind of sounds like you're saying both that you do and don't need it.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#358

*located in Barcelona* I hugely admire this website and the tech/philosophy behind it. So much so that I decided to build one myself. But here's the problem: I live in Yorkshire (UK) where good weather usually means a thinner layer of cloud cover. I tried, I really did, but I'm not about to move to Spain :) Long may this project continue (while I dream of more sun).

just use a bigger solar panel and battery

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mine isn’t static fwiw. Just running Elixir w/ Postgres. Elixir usually performs well enough uncached that you need to justify any caching needs.

So, specifically , why are using Cloudfare? Kind of sounds like you're saying both that you do and don't need it.

It’s free, solid DNS product, gives me a CDN on top of it and stops a lot of pesky bots. Plus moving the domain registration there keeps the renewal at the lowest possible price.

I can’t see any good reason not to use it.

Re: This website has 81% battery power remaining

#360
post #349
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't trust the client with that, or everybody is getting goatse'd.

A. Cryptographically verify the final version B. Schedule the work to be performed on multiple clients in case some fail

> A. Cryptographically verify the final version

How?

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