• 2 Posts
  • 72 Comments
Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: November 5th, 2024

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  • pushing the power back into the grid.

    These units do not push electricity into the grid unless their fail-saves are bypassed deliberately or fail catastrophically.

    Anyway, no, it’s not that important. You already have a battery at home- your entire home. If you’re overproducing electricity then you can convert it to another medium such as hot or cold air depending on the time of year and save on AC. You can run preload your washer and make it run when production is at peak automatically. Be creative. Most people will not be overproducing electricity with one of these kits.

    Additionally, local energy independence is not about being off-grid, it’s about being able to charge and use a radio or the internet in an emergency where the grid is out. A solar panel on the balcony provides that, it makes you independent of the grid even if you’re still using the grid to run your washing machine and the oven in a non-emergency scenario. A battery will only be a boon to you if you expect the grid to go out for days at a time regularly or if your kit is large enough to actually overproduce at any point, which again, most don’t; they supplement.

    the battery component is extremely critical for energy independence as the time period people want to minimize grid usage the most should be during the peak hours, which inconveniently is when the sun is down.

    I don’t understand what you mean by this. The time people want to minimize their grid usage is during the hours of 16-19 which is peak usage and when electricity is most expensive. These panels will still provide a decent supplement in that time during the summer half of the year.

    In summary, I just don’t think a battery is going to add much unless you’re expecting to overproduce regularly which a balcony panel isn’t gonna do.

    edit: I should mention that the larger kits do come with battery options, because those could be expected to overproduce, and thus would be useful.






  • I say this as a fellow cyclist so please don’t misunderstand me:

    If your bike blinks, I hate you. You’re not more visible, because I have to look away or feel like I’m being attacked by an industrial grade strobe-light. Your lights are too bright, it’s pointed directly into my eyes. The blinking only irritates my eyes further.

    If you want to be visible, use an excessive amount of retroreflective tape because that only makes you bright to the source emitter and it makes you far brighter than your 3000 lumen rear LEDs do.



  • I’m not reading all that- anyway

    I switched to full-time Linux this year. One of my programmer friends, whom I never expected to embrace Linux, switched to full-time Linux and is not going back. Our libraries have switched to Linux on all user-facing computers. 2 of my e-friends have approached me about Linux. Another friend is, despite not being a computer nerd, going to switch because Windows is forcing him to- and that’s my point. It’s not that Linux doesn’t have deep flaws inherent to its development model, it’s that those flaws are now less significant than those of Windows. Nobody likes Windows 11 and it’s pushing people off.