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.
In the event of an apocalypse basically nothing that you can charge is going to be of any use other than flashlights.
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.
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?
Yeah, light in the dark is totally useless.
Yay! I hope it comes in handy.
I don’t have solar yet, but I have a small portable power station that lets us avoid the manually started gas generator 90% of the time we have an outage. It’s important people prepare for smaller, more common events too.
I’ve been scheming to install panels on my garage roof for a year or so. My biggest hurtle is needing to make space for an inverter next to the circuit panel, but first my hot water tank is installed too close to the panel so it can’t pass an inspection until I move it. Which means a ton of new plumbing before u even get to the new stuff. Ugggh
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
I’ve got one of these for camping. It’s great for keeping my phone charged when there is no power available.
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).
This seems quite big for a 30W 😅.
If that’s really an usb A port on the side, my own 25W is basically the size of one of your panels. But mine is 5V only. In theory, it is 2 15W ports (5V3A), but in reality it is more 10W (5V2A) each, when both are used, in ideal conditions.
https://www.amazon.fr/gp/aw/d/B0DMNY4HWV
Got another one which delivers 60W (45W using the PD USBC port), with integrated stand.
https://www.amazon.fr/gp/aw/d/B0DQ8PY91X
(Links are not sponsored)
I also tested for Amazon Vime multiple solar pannel, but my biggest grief with all of them is that they lies about their IP rating. They simply gives the pannel own rating, wich doesn’t applies to the connection box. That’s not respecting the specs, which requires the whole item to be rated, not only part of it. If one follow that logic, my e-bike is IP68 too (if you take the chassis only and not the electronic bits).
Those backpack folding units arel great for powering a speaker when gardening.
Have a look at solar blankets. More expensive, but same storage footprint when folded and you can get more wattage out of them
That was a typo and that’s 300 watts, right? Not 30.
300 watts would need at least two full size panels.
Uh no? It’s fairly small.
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How much did you pay for that? I might be interested in something similar.
30W is plenty for a smartphone or powerbank. I usually charge mine at sub-20W as not to stress the batteries too much. The phone still charges to full (or 95% to be precise) in an hour. I’m in no rush.
Now if it could do 60W - perfect for all mobile devices. Everything from a smartphone to a laptop or a big handheld console.
It was only 30 euros
can it run my mitsubishu wand?
It’s like fucking the sun
And a rabbit
I kinda want to get some solar for USB power, largely phones/tablets. But it doesn’t really make much sense to for me currently. Just getting another battery is a better choice and something I actually use. Solar would only make sense if I planned to need to keep recharging for an extended duration.
But at the same time solar is pretty cool… What else can I power to make use of it. Of course full home solar makes sense. But small portable stuff seems cool and affordable. Just don’t really seem like it makes sense.
I got one of those Anker Solix boxes, and a couple hundred watts worth of solar panels. I kinda want it rather than a generator for power outages. I’ve tested it, on battery alone it’ll power my fridge for about ten hours, with the panels I have the practical limit is about 24. And I’m not at the limit of number of panels I can install.
But, it has an interesting thing about it: It has a Time of Use feature. So if you’ve got peak power billing, you can set it to run whatever’s attached to it on battery during peak time and recharge during off-peak or discount hours. So it may get attached to my fridge for that purpose, with or without solar.
Yeah, I think it’s pretty situational. I go to a lot of festivals and travel somewhat often, so it’d be useful for me. I also don’t have a permanent home (some day… <Sigh>)
I did think of stuff like a few days away, but solar takes much more time than that to make sense over more battery.
IIRC it was about a week or so before solar starts to make sense. 2 batteries or 1 battery 1 panel. After a month the panel option gives far more energy, but 3 days the 2 batteries is going to be more.
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.
That’s the dream though
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.
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
have battery system and solar since jan 2023, still love it
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
A hobby pays itself just by enjoying it. I’ve never calculated how long it will take to pay off my gaming rig
Am I satiated now? Only time will tell.
I haven’t heard you say a word about your solar powered electric car…
Could setup a solar powered desalination plant to water your garden too
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.
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 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.
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!
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.
Am I satiated now? Only time will tell.
🤣
Yeah 30 watts isn’t enough. The rule of thumb for off grid is it needs to be able to boil water (12A power station)
I have multiple ways to boil water that take no electricity at all.
Depends what you actually need power for. If you just want to power some basic communication devices and batteries for them, 30w may well be overkill.
Do you really need electricity to light a fire? 🤔
You need a safe place to burn. It’s illegal where I live.
Who’s arresting me during the apocalypse?
If you are preparing for an emergency situation, laws like that probably don’t apply anymore.
Don’t you have a fireplace, or can’t you get/build one? Even if it is a temporary stove.
It seems they just wanted something to help power their devices during an outage. You can use fire (like your stove) to boil water during a power outage.
30 watts into a power bank that can output more watts on demand should keep your phone and one laptop usable indefinitely unless you use them 24/7.
Obviously a proper setup in the range of at least a few kilowatts would be more useful, but that’s expensive, may require permitting (changes appearance of the house), etc.
If we’re boiling water why not skip the middle man and get a solar kettle?
Why not wood stove?
I live in Sonora Mexico, sun is abundant, wood isn’t
OP probably doesn’t. This is something I find odd about replies to stuff like this.
Hey guys, got 30w! Should be plenty.
Omg no you need 50kW to run a desalination plant.
But I have a fresh water spring next to me?
Yeah but I live next to the dead sea.
Obviously discussing different use cases and needs is cool, but some seem to try and apply requirements to others when it doesn’t really apply to them.
If you actually read this thread it would make more sense right? Are you able to read? Do you know how conversations in a thread work?
OP says they got 30w, they don’t actually say it “should be plenty” and you just made that up and in fact plainly says “it isn’t much but it is a start”
The person who replied to them says “Yeah 30 watts isn’t enough. The rule of thumb for off grid is it needs to be able to boil water (12A power station)”
to which the next person says “If we’re boiling water why not skip the middle man and get a solar kettle?” please note this one because this is where the context for my comment comes from
then the next person says “Why not wood stove?”
If you were able to understand how threaded conversations work you’d understand I was agreeing with 9point6@lemmy.world who said why don’t you skip the middle man and get a solar kettle and giving a reason to thatGuyWithGlasses who said why not a wood stove. In some places, like in my specific use case, a solar kettle makes more sense than a wood stove.
Then you wrote to me your non sequitur post about whatever it is you wrote that doesn’t accurately reflect OP and doesn’t accurately reflect the thread.
I’ve kept the old wood stoves in my house just in case I ever need them. I used them all last winter cause they were all I had at the time. Learned how to chop wood and start a fire and everything. It was kinda fun, but hard work. Defo not something anyone should have to do their whole life, but perhaps something everyone should try once. Quite humbling
EDIT: I used them for heating. Had to keep a fire going about 3 hours a day in each
My primary heat source is the wood stove. I have my heat pump as back up.
I have a 400 yo oak tree shading by home and a metal roof so I only need to turn on the ac from 5-8pm in the hottest days of summer.
Love my Kelly kettles - yes I have multiple, different sizes. Gathering wood to boil enough hot water to make tea for 6 people? About 30 seconds of work. Once you have filled 1 hand with sticks and twigs that is about enough firewood.
Wood is a potentially scarce resource, access to it is situational, it requires significant storage space, wood smoke is bad for you, fire is dangerous and requires skill to manage that can take a long time to learn, same goes for the process of preparing the wood.
Depends a lot on what you are making and how. Haybox cookers require very little fuel. Just get the food up to almost boiling point and that is all the fuel you need.
I looked up haybox cookers, seems like a neat idea to insulate already boiling water, but a wood fire doesn’t seem like the most convenient or efficient choice if what you want is to efficiently heat something up a specific amount but no more.
Just light a small fire and keep it pretty small and it can burn out once you are done.
I use a Kelly kettle stove a lot, tiny fire but still a few thousand watts of thermal energy. A few sticks at a time as fuel.
With 30watts, you can power the electrical lighter to light a fire. Or something like that.
Or just use some matches or a lighter…
I’m getting solar panels and a battery later this month. It’s mostly to keep the bills cheap and the house green, but power outages are always in the back of my mind. There’s just so many ways they can happen
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?
I didnt know the meaning of “manure” but it became clear by the end of the paragraph
