I’m only half kidding. I’m a bit of a prepper and I have lots of powerbanks and devices that charge from USB but besides idling my truck I really had no other way to charge any of them in case of a long-term power outage which seemed a bit of an oversight on my part.
Not like this solves the issue. 30 watts (under ideal conditions) isn’t much but it’s a start.
Judging by the comment section, this is also the secret solarpunk forum.
All i need is a gun to kill the local prepper and I’m set.
A looter - finally!
- That local prepper, probably
The prepper will likely be camped and there will be signs someone’s been in the area recently, the looter or looters would have a pretty big advantage.
Doesn’t the defending side in a war usually suffer fewer casualties?
If you’re talking about an entrenched battle. A looter would have the element of surprise, which in a 1v1 is basically an instant win.
See preppers camp, setup in some shrubs, wait, pew pew, now you have the preppers stuff.
Good point, if you observe from a safe distance and setup an ambush.
Be sure to check your local raid boss’s tier now before the content releases. A lot of them you’ll be able to solo with the right load out, but if you’re unlucky you’ll need to start putting together your party roster now because they aren’t all made to be soloed.
I’m gonna give this warning: I have a panel of that type but much larger. It’s rated at ~200 watts. I’ve never seen it make more than 80. I don’t think it’s a great idea to make large, flexible solar panels, I bet something internal is cracked in it. It’s…virtually impossible to handle gently. It has kick stands on 3 of its 4 panels and you CANNOT stop that one inner panel from twisting. So…I am going to avoid that style of panel if it’s larger than, say, a book. OP’s 30 watt panel is probably fine but if you’re dealing in the hundreds of watts honestly my glass panels are easier to deal with.
I don’t think this is able to reach the full 30 watts either. Probably closer to 20 under ideal conditions.
The panels themselves aren’t flexible - just the “hinges” between them. I don’t think the portability makes much sense with larger panels than this. Better just go with a proper setup at that point.
Yeah I have 100 watt panels that make 70 or 80 most of the time; those ratings are for “ideal conditions” which I take to mean “perfectly aligned, in space.”
As to the rigidity: It is a little flexible, compared to glass and aluminum. I bet it’s perfectly serviceable at smaller sizes, but when it’s 7 feet (2.13 Celsius) long:
the damn thing sags under its own weight. They shouldn’t be made this big. Those glass panels together have the same rating and they actually work worth a damn.
Nuclear war is followed by nuclear winter, which, among other things is caused by thick clouds, sorry!
Is OP prepping for nuclear war though?
Well for the apocalypse. Nuke war is the more probable cause i would say. Asteroid hitting could be too and that also means clouds
We’re not going to nuke each other. Everyone is gonna die of dysentery from Texas’ lettuce-borne ass plague.
I’d rather take the nuke to the face, personally
An ENTIRE 30w?
Oh wow, you must be an engineer to need soooooo much power.
That will checks notes barely charge a phone.
You just here to throw mud or was there a point to this comment?
what a smug sense of accomplishment!
I’m surprised you have the time to comment with all the superior dicks you have to suck to become so accomplished.
I can’t believe that we get the opportunity to interact with someone of your caliber that’s responsible for, checks notes, sucking the jizz out of dozens of flacid wrinkled penises.
Be careful. Those things are addicting.
That’s how I started: a little 5v, 6 watt panel I stuck in the window to charge my phone while I worked. Then I wanted to charge some other stuff, so I got a 15W panel. 15w panel was nice, but 100 watts was much better, so I bought two 100W fold-up panels like you’ve got.
Then I bought a big 1 KWh power station that could supply up to 2000 watts. I take it camping and charge it from the two 100W fold up panels.
But, sadly, the demon had its claws in me and refused to let go. “Why should I only use that solar power two or three times a year?” the voice said. So I bought 4x 200 watt panels so I could use the power station to power my homelab and refrigerator during the day.
Still, that wasn’t enough to satiate my addition. Now I’ve got 4 KW on the roof, 32 KWh of house battery, and a 10 KW inverter that is currently powering our house.
Am I satiated now? Only time will tell.
Have you calculated how long it takes/took to pay for itself?
All of the labor has been DIY, and I’ve got about $9,000 invested in the system components.
Back of the napkin math, at current electric rates, puts my ROI at just under 9 years. If electric rates keep going up, it’ll pay back even faster.
Edit: Depending on how you look at it, ROI could be in as few as 1.5 to 2 years. This system is in lieu of a whole house generator that would have cost us about $7,000. Had we gone with that instead, it would never have paid for itself (other than peace of mind) and we would have been perfectly content. So if I’m only considering the price difference between this and the generator, it’d only have to pay back $2,000.
Yeah, buying peace of mind when it comes to self sufficient power generation has no price tag. Decentralization of the grid is a good thing regardless of if you “pay it off” or not.
buying peace of mind when it comes to self sufficient power generation has no price tag
$10,000? $100,000? 75% of your salary for the rest of your life?
It obviously does have a price tag at some point. If someone wanted true self-sufficiency they’d have to get a full solar setup plus a generator in case the grid went down at a time when solar power wasn’t covering the needs. (That’s likely if, for example, your power is knocked out due to wildfires, and the wildfire smoke is making the solar setup unable to produce power.)
And, you can’t really consider yourself fully self-sufficient when it comes to electrical power unless you have a n+1 setup, so you have a backup generator in case the primary one fails and needs to be repaired.
Sure if you want to be hyperbolic about it, but in my experience with people that argue like that, they will also say dumb things such as government owned entities such as schools, public transport, postal service or water access needing to make profit or its just all bad …
If you enjoy it, it already has.
I get you but it was worth the money you spent ≠ it earned back the money you spent.
Okay but for real how long
Time, in hours (H), equals average solar kilowatt hours per month (K), multiplied by the price of one kilowatt hour (P), divided by the total cost © of all the purchased components.
H = (K * P) / C
I’m sure if you were patient and dedicated enough, you could approximate each of those numbers using the info OP has already posted and get a general idea (weeks, months, or years).
Time, in hours (H), equals average solar kilowatt hours per month (K), multiplied by the price of one kilowatt hour (P), divided by the total cost © of all the purchased components.
H = (K * P) / C
So you’re dividing the average saving per month by the total cost and expecting to get hours?
If we generously estimate a very high 3000kWh/month generated and high $0.40/kWh price and it cost OP $9000, then you formula is (3000×0.40)/9000 = 0.133 hours.
Breaking even after less than 1 hour?!??! Extraordinary!
It’s pretty easy to cry about bad math, but it’s a lot harder to figure out the right math.
Don’t worry, I’ll try to do it for you again a second time.
Power consumption varies. Use the average monthly power draw from the solar array, let’s assume for demonstration purposes 1,000 kWh/month.
Multiply that by the cost of 1 kWh from the power company, let’s say 20 cents.
In one month, that means you saved $200.
Let’s assume the solar equipment costs $1,000.
The answer is 5 months, or 5,000 kWh.
Sorry, I’ll make sure the free work I do for you is better quality next time.
Bro. Don’t act like this basic arithmetic and unit cancelation is hard. Not my fault you were so confidently incorrect.
Or I could read the comment where he said
Then do that instead of asking random people who aren’t in any position to know.
It was more of a comment on your comment
have battery system and solar since jan 2023, still love it
A hobby pays itself just by enjoying it. I’ve never calculated how long it will take to pay off my gaming rig
What about a neighborhood scale micro utility company/collective?
ew socialism
I recently got a bluetti for off grid onsite work and it has awoken something in me. It’s like carrying a wall outlet around with you, absolutely incredible.
Needless to say I think I have caught the bug. Where would you point a feller who wanted to walk your path and learn more?
I’m more of a hands-on learner but that can get expensive depending on the hobby haha. For going solar, I’m still very much in progress but definitely on the path to where i want to be.
Basically the first step is to decide what your goal is. Do you want to go totally off grid? Just reduce your electric bill? Have backup power? All/some of the above?
If you only want to reduce your bill, check into what’s called grid-tied or “balcony solar”. That’s the easiest to get started with, but it requires cooperation from the electric company since you’re feeding back into the grid. I can’t do that here, so I went with a standalone/battery-based system.
Once you identify your goal(s), you’ll need to figure out what your “base” load is, and then how much your peak loads are so you know what size system to shoot for. Then you’ll need to choose an inverter that can meet those with some extra capacity for unforeseen spikes. I started with a 10KW system, but it’s also expandable up to 60 KW( 6 units in parallel). My house only has 100A service, so two inverters would actually give me more power than I can currently get from the power company lol.
For the panels, you can really only expect to get 60-80% of their rated output most of the time. The rated output is under perfect alignment with the sun, at the perfect angle, and with absolutely no obstructions. In practice, you’ll never see that. As an example, I usually only get between 3 and 3.4 KW out of my 4 KW system on the best of days. This is normal.
For batteries, they’re technically optional depending on your goals. If you just want to shave some money off your electric bill, you can forego the batteries and the inverters will happily mix PV and utility to power your loads during the day. e.g. If you’re drawing 1,000 watts and only getting 900 watts from PV, then it’ll make up the missing 100 watts from utility power.
I sized my batteries based on my average daily usage plus an extra 10 KWh. We use about 20 KWh per day, so I got two 16 KWh batteries for a total of 32 KWh. That means, if there’s no (usable) sunshine at all and we lose power, I can run the whole house for a little over a full day. Any sun hitting the panels will reduce the current draw from the batteries while also charging them if we use less than the PV is producing.
The longest power outage we had was about 29 hours, but if we typically experienced multi-day outages, I might have gone for a larger battery.
I had a much longer reply written up, but it barely scratched the surface. So hope this helps in a general sense but happy to answer any specific questions if I can.
Thank you for the primer! I find it very interesting and you’ve certainly given me plenty of things to research and learn more about.
I think my biggest goal is actually power stability but the cheaper power bill would be a welcome bonus. In my new shop the table saw seems to trip it’s little built in circuit breaker a lot more often when it is cutting thick hardwood than it did in my old shop. Unless the blade is sharp as shit resawing on the table saw is a distant memory lol.
I think it’s because the run from the road to the house main is a long run and then from the house main 60 amps is routed out to the shop which is another long run out to the shops breaker box. Then from there I use a 25 ft 12 awg extension cord to power the saw and dust collector via an automatic vacuum switch. The saw very rarely tripped at the old house when the total run from the road to the saw was less than 50 feet and I never did it any favors. But now that it is hundreds of feet away from the source I think the voltage drops off and it over heats and trips the sawstops little breaker.
I hope that made sense, I’m a carpenter not an electrician lol. What I think I need is a battery set up for the shop that acts like a giant Uninterruptible Power Supply to combat the “dirty” power and put the saw closer to the source. The ability to power a hybrid solar/dehumidifier kiln in the future from the shop without sacrificing power reliability would also be something I would want to consider.
Thank you again for the write up on your setup!
That’s the dream though
Am I satiated now? Only time will tell.
I haven’t heard you say a word about your solar powered electric car…
Check back in 2-3 years when I (hope to) get an EV. I’m sure I’ll be crowing about it then 😆
In the mean time, would you like to hear about my solar powered lawn mower?
Unironically yes haha. I hope it’s just a manual lawn mower that you have your son push around.
Lol, no. And if you were expecting something clever like a goat, sorry to disappoint lol. Just a basic battery-electric push mower that I’ve charged from solar panels all season.
Could setup a solar powered desalination plant to water your garden too
I’ve been looking to get a so-called “Chinese diesel heater” to my shed to keep it warm over the coldest days in winter when electricity is very expensive and the two small radiators designed to only keep it above freezing can no longer keep up. However, those run off 12V DC and power supplies seem to be surprisingly hard to come by. Easiest solution would be a car battery and a trickle charger but I’ve thought about just setting up a tiny solar system instead because then I would have a kind of off-grid location to fall back to. My house doesn’t have a fireplace either but the shed does (sauna). This would also allow me to charge all my tool batteries that require a standard outlet.
For heating, I’ve been wanting to try a solar collector. Not sure if you’ve come across Greenhill Forge on YouTube or anywhere that covers his projects, but he does all sorts of off-grid stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cPuVZjnbi4
That’s where he builds and tests several different styles of solar collectors for solar heating. The collectors are pretty inexpensive to build so that may be an option if you just want to (help) keep a shed warm.
That’s a weird panel to battery ratio. Guess you’ve gotta work on that now. Got more room on your roof, preferably south-facing?
Though if there are ground systems that can aim the panels and you have room there, that could be really cool.
The usable south-facing roof area is full, unfortunately. I’ll have to do ground mount in the back yard and run a bunch of conduit if I want to add any more PV.
The 32 kWh of batteries are made of two 16 kWh batteries in parallel. Since this system is in lieu of a backup generator, I have it configured to only draw the batteries down to 50%. That leaves the bottom 16 kWH available for emergency use. Basically, for day to day usage, I treat the battery as being half the capacity it really is.
I’ve only been running this system for about 3 weeks now, but the batteries have been operating between 65% and 90% pretty consistently even running the A/C pretty heavily. They’ve been closer to low 60s this past week, but the wildfire smoke was choking out the sunlight Thursday and Friday.
I got the power station first out of necessity, but am now at the point of desperately trying to justify adding solar panels even though I don’t camp or anything. I fear it could become obsessive though.
Maybe I keep can limit myself to only as many panels as I own violins? That would be a fair number… Or at least cap it off at the number of musical instruments in the house? That would leave some room to grow, if I can count my wife’s ukulele collection!
Instead of looking at number of panels, look at the total wattage. How many watts does it take to charge your power station? 30W-100W portable solar panels like these should work well for that. You could even go a little higher than what you need because of things like inline charging and dual charging, so you can charge multiple devices at once and still keep the power station topped off. That’s a good starting point.
Next, ask yourself how much wattage you could regularly use it for on a normal day. Ignore high-wattage appliances at first, like refrigerators, a/c, heater, stove, coffee pot, hairdryer, etc. Basically anything that produces high temperatures or has a motor a motor. But what else could you power on it? Chargers, homelab, router, etc.? There’s your second expansion. Probably some larger one-off panels and a couple power stations
Lastly, ask yourself what wattage you would need to run all your necessities in the case of an emergency with a long-term power outage. That’s when you calculate the high-wattage appliances. This will probably require a full rooftop solar installation.
So no need to dive all the way in at first if you can’t afford to yet, but don’t let that discourage you from getting some smaller panels to start.
Glorious advice, thanks !
It is a nice set of things to ask oneself. Motivating a question is way better for learning.
What are inline and dual charging ? My internet query wasnt fruitful.
Also, by “power station” do you mean batteries? Because I’m curious what specs to consider, say, for a camping day vs home setup
Lol, def can become an obsession. First hand experience there.
I’ve wanted a whole house PV system for a long time, and this is just me finally getting around to making it happen. SO and I were talking about getting a backup generator installed, but that would have been about $7,000 for something that would only get used two or three times a year since our power doesn’t go out often (we have no heat or ability to cook when the power goes out, and it’s always in the dead of winter when we lose power). The PV system I sketched out was about $9.000, but in addition to covering us during outages, we could use it daily to reduce electric bill so, unlike the generator, this would pay for itself over time.
SO finally came around to my way of thinking, so here we are lol. My limiting factor is usable roof area. Of the roof that’s south facing, only about 14x20 feet of it is suitable for mounting panels. There’s a west-facing gable, but it’s blocked most of the time by a tree. The east-facing side of the gable is available, but it’s pretty much always foggy in the mornings here, so it wouldn’t add much to the system.
Unless I build a ground mount setup in the back yard, we’re pretty much at the limit of how many panels I can buy. I’m kind of glad for that because otherwise I’d just keep buying them.
I keep thinking about this. I can’t justify solar when I live in a northern country and pay about $0.06 USD/kWh, but the value of resilience also counts.
about $0.06 USD/kWh
😭 The per-kilowatt hour rider fees on top of my base rate per kWh are way more than that lol.
Im “lucky” enough to live in a region with abundant hydroelectric power. It’s still cheaper to heat your home with natural gas here…air source heat pumps might get close when they work.
UNLIMITED POWER!
Am I satiated now? Only time will tell.
🤣
You can buy a 100ah battery and 200w solar blanket for fairly cheap. its not a terrible idea to be a little bit prepped. Saw a car on youtube the other day that was 8k, had 10kwh battery, range of 150k and had a retractable roof solar panel that gives the car 55km a day of solar generation. perfect for the apocalype. cruise around the wastelands in style.
Lol just watched a video on it yesterday.
had 10kwh battery, range of 150k
That doesn’t really math out, its like 3 times the efficiency that car manufacturers normally give, and they already assume optimal conditions.
That sounds more like a beach buggy with a battery bolted to the back and a top speed of 40 on an even road.
It is the Solarky SunV, it has an aluminum frame and plastic panels. It probably wouldn’t pass safety inspections in EU/US and is really designed as a step up from motor bikes in places like Thailand and where I live in Mexico. I think the safety regulations and requirements for people in sprawl cities like the US are overkill for most of the rest of the world. I’ve had people on lemmy tell me that 200 km range isn’t enough but that is around how much I drive in a week lol. I never need it to go highway speeds, there are no highways thru my city only connecting to the next and for that I’d prefer the bus. For puttering around to my friends house or to grab something from the store I can’t walk to it would be perfect. I have a BYD Dolphin now.
It can pass EU safety if apply for a L6/L7 vehicle category
But from the website it looks like vaporware…
I don’t really know anything about the EU other than they have a lot of regulations. I’ll probably never go there.
These cars exist and have been sold in Thailand and Indonesia for the past few months, there are tons of videos about them on Youtube. Most people on Lemmy live in places where Chinese EVs are illegal and have no idea what we have available now. These are just typical cheap EVs with a retractable panel on top.
Interesting, it’s not vaporware, Google already tracked my Lemmy posts and showed me this in the YT algorithm
This is enough for my commute, I would never need to pay for energy again. Problem is that European resellers are going to sell that for at least 25k
car
perfect for the apocalype
battery
Yeah. Right.
With a carousel of 3 poorly AI-generated images.
Wow, got a link?
im always wanted to setup solar panel in mountain to reduce hiker gone missing type stuff
You thinking about setting up a public charging spot in the wilderness? I like that.
In the event of an apocalypse basically nothing that you can charge is going to be of any use other than flashlights.
Electric fire starter. Mesh nodes. Walkie talkies. Small computer with offline Wikipedia and Google maps. GPS may still be working for a while, so that would be useful to charge and use. Portable fans. MP3 player or other entertainment device. Camera. Small power tool batteries…
Yeah, in an apocalypse, a small about of electricity would be a luxury.
devices with offline knowledge. you can download wikipedia to your device.
also gaming consoles against the boredom and to maybe connect to the neighbor for fun?
Look: I plan solar panels, batteries, and a small TV set, so during the apocalypse, I will have my Netflix shows! And with the right EV, I will be one of the few who can still go to Costco!
You see: I’m ready!!
In the event of an apocalypse basically nothing that you can charge is going to be of any use other than flashlights.
My house is quite rural and I have a water well with a battery backup for the pump and UV filter. The battery lasts for about 5-6 days depending on use. I can charge the battery from the grid or with solar.
If the cities get nuked, my well system will still function.
We did a battery backup system! I think we’ll do panels next. Did you buy enough panel generation to replace it as you use it?
We bought the ecoflow batteries; we haven’t shopped around for panels yet. I was hoping their panels were competitively priced so we could kind of just plug 'n play.
Can you repair it if it breaks?
Laughing with mp3-player.
And meshtastic or meshcore to communicate
Intriguing. Go on…
There are small devices for off-grid text communication based on radio frequencies. It’s uses LoRa and it requires no Internet after setting up(you may need to download the app). Be aware that Line of sight is a bit factor and that buildings, tress and other stuff might affect it.
You can buy a device or build one on your own (you need to buy first chip and battery) and install/flash mesh on it.
Be careful though, do not get hyped from what you read or see, because in the end might not suit you. Here in Europe it has grown up a lot, lots of people use it, especially when traveling in another country l.I just gave you a basic explanation, for more information visit the meshtastic community
https://mander.xyz/c/meshtasticMeshtastic and meshcore websites https://meshtastic.org// https://meshcore.io/
Wow, okay, so this is way better and longer-range than Bluetooth. Cool. Thanks for sharing!
Depends on tge apocolypse, but Refrigeration… HVAC… Power tools… Could go on.
Maybe even your phone if you’ve downloaded books/manuals/maps needed to rebuild before hand
What is 30 watts going to do for any of those? I don’t think people here know how weak a 30 W panel is.
The argument was that: “basically nothing that you can charge is going to be of any use other than flashlights” not that 30 watts is sufficient for long term.
The one statement I replied to gave examples like refrigeration and HVAC that a 30w panel will not run. I made no commentary on what use can be made outside of flashlights.
That being said, as someone who runs 100w panels on my trailer parked on some land, 100w is not much other then topping off a deep cycle battery to then run lights and a propane furnace and fridge. Not that it is not useful at anything, just that those rollup ones are generally used to charge a power bank for phones, lights, and such. One of the better uses I have seen is hooking up one to a car to keep it topped up while sitting. But if you are going to use a panel you need a battery and at that point why not go with a non flexable 100w panel that is about the same size or smaller?
are generally used to charge a power bank for phones, lights, and such.
That’s exactly the use case I bought it for. In the picture I’m charging a powerbank. I’m intending to play around with a small-scale solar setup on my shed at some point but for now this is the one cheap investment that enables me to keep critical small electronics running indefinitely.
Check out some auctions, estate sales and such for some deep cycle batteries, solar charge controllers and panels. I have fixed my set up a few times over the years on the super cheap that way. The whole system is not bad other then the batteries for cost.
Person I was responding to said nothing that can be charged, not specifically charged by 30 W. People live comfortably off grid these days with panels and batteries to store. Nothing perfect, but the right setup could matter if things went bad
We’re not talking about a whole off grid home here lol. We’re talking about a guy with a 30W solar panel.
You’re moving the goalposts. You said nothing rechargeable besides flashlights isn’t going to be of any use in the apocalypse which is an obviously false statement as demonstrated by the pushback you’re getting. The size of the solar system wasn’t part of the argument you made.
do you have somewhere to be? if the power goes down long enough, it’s not like you’re going to be in a hurry. but yes 30w is pretty small. you can buy a 450w solar panel for under 200 bucks. add a inverter and 100ah battery and you’re laughing. most shit you can run on dc like lighting and small devices.
My strimmer battery charger takes 65w. So 8 hours of 30w to charge a battery is almost 4 hours charging the strimmer battery which would probably fill it’s small battery a few times over. If you are not depleting the strimmer battery multiple times a day, that is more than enough power.
You of course do need a battery to store it so many hours of solar are used in several minute short time loads.
A 30W solar panel is likely going to charge at about 5W, given the inefficiency.
There is some inefficiency in charging a battery but not that much. Main losses would be that the solar panel isn’t actually outputting 30w as you won’t be getting ideal conditions all day.
But it doesn’t necessarily matter either. 65w to charge a battery but you only need it once a week for an hour can easily be managed by 5w all day for a week.
Though planning for an apocalypse is kinda pointless anyway. Preparing for a disaster is more reasonable, such as a storm knocking out power for a while.
I was getting around 12 watts during the sunset when I was testing it. It can probably reach around 20 watts under ideal conditions.
You just get to learn to be VERY patient.
30w can charge a battery bank like a Jackery, and those can put out 1000w continously. It would take ages to charge, but it’s more than nothing.
It might be better than nothing for some things, but providing enough power to run heaters as needed when it’s -20F outside over the next week ain’t going to happen. And while it would work for an LP furnace for a while, that tank WILL go empty, and then where do you get more fuel?
I don’t think a high wattage battery is something that could keep you warm. I was talking more like creature comforts. Not something you would want on-the-go because of the weight, but if you were hunkered down you might at least have lights or some amount of entertainment. Shit, it could even power a tablet, router, and NAS, and give you something to watch in dark times. That’s a good thing to have on solar power if you are staying put.
It will keep you warm for a little while, but not for long.
If things hit the fan, lights can be a cheerful thing to have. But if it’s a widespread power outage that lasts, the internet goes down, and cell service follows pretty quickly. Maybe a Game Boy is usable, but your tablet will be a paperweight, and forget the NAS. On the upside, there just won’t be much you are going to need electricity to run at that point.
I’m saying watch movies on the tablet off of the NAS. That should work perfectly fine with no internet. You would only need to power the NAS and router. And charge the tablet.
Burning wood seems like the obvious solution to keeping warm in the winter. There’s much better uses for the little solar power there is available then.
Burning wood comes with its own extra work and costs. Plus the danger of burning your house down. I live in a forest, and wood heat is not uncommon here. There were 4 wood heat fires that destroyed homes this past winter, it was a cold and long winter this year. And I did grow up with wood heat as a kid, so I’m very familiar with it. I do remember a couple of chimney fires quite well.
You underestimate the amount of digital hoarders out there.
Or maybe hoarders overestimate how much and how long they can rely on their digital stuff.
Once you let go of heating and cooling, larger temperature variations are going to do a number on you consumer grade electrical devices. Your solar panels are one heavy hails storm away from destruction, and if we assume climate change is the cause of the apocalypse, you can count on those.
The best way to survive an apocalypse is to rebuild communities with a wide set of skills, and still dramatically lower our quality-of-life AND HEALTH expectations.
You know, you can charge your house? With a large enough battery and enoug PV power you can operate a heat pump off the grid to control the climate of your home.
The feasibility varies a bit, depending on where exactly you live, but there are definitely useful things you can do with solar power and batteries.
Nothing that a 30W panel can manage though. And I definitely agree to your point about rebuilding communities.
That’s a pretty ignorant thing to say.
Nah, those electric shoe polishers? All eight of them? Why did you get so many of them?
Those I can live without. I can just have people polish my shoes by hand for exchange to letting them charge their devices using my solar panel.
Hmm. So let’s talk resilience; lighting, battery power tools, refrigeration, Mobility (mountain eBikes, with solar recharging would make for great post apocalyptic transportation), and many more things.
There are power tools that run on batteries these days. I don’t know about you, but a chainsaw seems pretty useful to me.
At 30watts max I guess you can cut a log or two every once and a while sure.
Ehh, disagree. We have a battery backup system (they charge from the electric lines) for our house because we have a well instead of septic lines, so when the power goes out we don’t have water. Our next big purchase will be panels to charge the batteries as further backup.
Interesting. Where do you live?
Around here (Germany), most people get solar power first and THEN buy a battery, when they realize it’s financially more feasible to use as much of the energy the generated themselves instead of using grid power.
We live in the US (Maryland). We’re kind of rural, but not really that far out. A lot of folks in rural areas of the US have gasoline generators; this is just an alternative to that. The trees around here take out the power lines somewhat frequently and well… the state of the country makes us anxious. Around the time we bought the system, some right wing groups were floating ideas about shooting up electrical substations.
Anyway, if we were making the transition just for economics, we would also have gone in the reverse order. But we have two small kids, so we were worried about preparedness.
yeah, I get it. I know very few people who really have to make similar considerations, so naturally the thought process is different. Germany is fairly densely populated and even in more rural areas, like the one I live in, the power grid is pretty reliable. I can count the amont of power outages I experienced in my few decades of lifetime with my fingers, and when there is one it usually only lasts a few minutes to hours.
Nothing, a healthy person with a few supplies can’t bridge easily.
I get water from 800ft underground. Not a long term solution but being able to drink, cook, and bathe for a few weeks or months is going to be important. It is useful to be able to power the pump with batteries charged by the sun until enough people have died so I can migrate to a more tolerant climate without having to mad max it.
Yeah, light in the dark is totally useless.
I feel like you must have stopped reading my comment half way through to say that……
It wasn’t worth finishing.
gasmask, radiation tablets and suits, a working moter bike and a ton of gas are higher on my list.
How long does gasoline keep?
2 or so year, but that long enough to get you to where you need to, if it take over 2 years of driving to get what you need and you can’t find any more, sorry but you were probubly fucked from the get go
That is where a diesel bike and maybe a diesel truck as well would come in handy. You can continue making biodiesel long term, and use the engine for generator power in a pinch. You can even go with mechanically controlled engines and not have problems with EMP to be extra prepared.
Hm Good point
This can power a Steam Deck. Good choice.
Can it charge up enough batteries to run a typical Factorio session? So until sunrise where you can start charging the accumulators again.
If you weren’t using your Steam Deck all-out during the day then probably. Steam Decks draw about 29W max (the LCD models I have at least).
Factorio GPU demands are fairly low, CPU will be maxed out by late game though…
I think if it gets down to it, you’re not going to worry too much about your shiny toys when you haven’t eaten in three days.
Why wouldn’t I have eaten in three days?
Taco truck dude got eaten by clowns
How do you define apocalypse? You’re just larping, friend.
You’re just larping, friend.
Please elaborate. I have nothing against larping but that doesn’t seem to carry utility beyond the enjoyment gained from the act itself. A small solar panel, however, seems useful for any scenario ranging from a few day power outage to full societal collapse and zombies. It’s a genuine functional panel - not a prop.
How will a solar panel help against full societal collapse? I am on tenterhooks.
I can charge my flashlights/lanterns, powerbanks, tool batteries, a phone with offline maps and offline wikipedia …
OK buddy, good luck.
What’s with that passive-aggressive smugness? If you’ve got something to say then say it.
30w is plenty to run a few small lights and phone chargers. You can cook over a wood fire if necessary, or store food that doesn’t need cooking.
Kinda curious now what the back to reasonable normality for essential needs time is for most disasters. Don’t need to stockpile enough to last until completely rebuilt, if food supplies are going to be restored fairly quickly but housing takes a year you don’t need the full years food supply.
maybe consider upgrading to a full size wind turbine for the breezy autumn
I’ve got one of these for camping. It’s great for keeping my phone charged when there is no power available.
I have stockpiled an absolutely MASSIVE amounts of manure. That shit is going to be worth a fortune in the future. Every paycheck, I dump at least 10% of it into buying the freshest cow pie I can find. The neighbors hate me, but we’ll see who gets the last laugh when they sell their in-laws into indentured servitude to afford a bag of my brown gold!
Doesn’t it have a limited shelf life? Do you need to maintain it?
Well, I keep it fresh by urinating on it. I collect all my family’s urine in a bathtub so we can have an extra sanitary bath once a week, together, and then I dump the leftover on the pile with this big crane I rigged up outta grocery carts.
I didnt know the meaning of “manure” but it became clear by the end of the paragraph
Jokes on you when they nuke the sky
That’s why I skipped solar panels and went straight to human bioenergy pods
LOL “…but we know it was us who blacked the sky.”
—Morpheus (And not the Timothée Chalamet version)
also not the Highlander 2: The Quickening version where they blacked out the sky to stop global warming
At least that was just a shield you could disable by throwing an immortal alien through.
Nice! I’m gonna have to go back and watch that… either I’ve never seen that version or I’d completely forgotten about that detail.
And I even watched the TV show ;-)
It’s probably the worst of the Highlanders. There was an updated version called The Renegade Cut that might be better.
I had no clue they had made so many. Thanks for the bonus tip… was it just bad-bad or cheesy bad? Because I feel like a large part of the appeal for me is the vague cheesiness of the whole series.
Edit: Got a Standard directors cut, and the renegade version… But in the process, I rediscovered that I recently downloaded Hot to Trot because it was on somebody’s list of worst movies ever. So I’m gonna have to watch that first 😝
Highlander 2 just makes no sense in general. They bring in some crazy shit about the immortals being aliens from the planet “Zeist” and ridiculous stuff like MacCloud riding a flying hoverboard happens.
It’s still worth watching at least once though
Oh man… it’s coming back to me now. Was there some kind of weird council of space-elders or something like that? I kinda vaguely remember a scene where MacCloud testifying and lights going on like campfire ghost stories when each person talks?
IDK, I might be mixing in some Dr. Who 🤓
