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.

  • LincolnsDogFido@lemmy.zip
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    15 hours ago

    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.

    • merc@sh.itjust.works
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      14 hours ago

      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.