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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • I live in a small town, and I love it. Rent is cheap, I can bicycle to the grocery store, and it’s just 30 minutes from a major city where all the cool stuff happens! The only downside is nobody wants to commute to my place for house parties

    Same! I consider that last bit a win, a couple of times a year is enough for me.

    if your small town has a small town theater

    We did, but they didn’t make enough to stay in business. One of the local churches bought it instead of paying to renovate their place of worship. I haven’t been over there, but I assume their youth movie nights are top-notch.




  • FTA:

    The so-called plug-in systems involve routing the direct current generated by the panels to an inverter, which converts it to an alternating current. They can then be plugged into a conventional wall socket to feed power to a home.

    So, yeah, almost certainly illegal in pretty much any grid-powered home in the US.

    The basic problem is that if the grid power goes down the inverter can back-feed the grid enough to electrocute the people who are working to fix it.

    Utilities require an approved isolation system of some kind that prevents that happening. They are pretty strict about this for various other technical and political reasons too, but evidently it is mostly a safety concern.

    I’ve got some good locations at home for panels, and about 500W in panels that I use for camping, but the equipment I’d need to handle easily and safely consuming the power at home is kind of expensive (just running an inverter and a battery for an isolated system is easy enough, I’ve got all that, but it’s not cheap to seamlessly connect it to my home power system). Would love to have a safe and approved system like what is described in the article.