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Comment by fit2rule | Hacker News Reader

I'd be quite happy stepping off the grid and having my own small suite of power-harvestors, out on the property and so on, and generally share the overage of the system with any other nomad who needed to charge their suit, so to speak.

I've sort of come to the personal belief that the way to solve the power crisis is for us all to be harvesting it from the most local sources, and .. perhaps .. become less dependent on mass/social- infrastructure, reducing our group load, decomposing cities, &etc.

The technology is there. I could easily live off the stream and wind energy in most of the world, personally.

I just don't quite have the harvesting device. I wonder what an "iEnergyHarvester", y'know .. the cool new disruptive kind .. would look like?

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I live in a very windy rural area and looked at getting a small wind turbine.

But after researching I gave up the plan. The reason is maintenance. Every year have to find a way to get up to the thing and grease (too high and not suitable for a ladder, means renting a manlift at $300+). Also parts can go out and apparently do from time to time, it's mechanical with a lot of stress and movement. Can't buy these parts at home depot which means keeping a large inventory on hand or else potentially being down while on-line order comes in. The estimated expense barely justified the purchase (over a long period, I don't recall details but had it figured out at one point), with estimated repairs, particularly the need to reach the top every year, it just didn't add up and seemed like a fair amount of work.

I believe solar is much more feasible for home installations. Also, I have seen wind turbine models similar to the size I was looking at, quite often they appear to not work and are just sitting there. Maybe there are better models, but I really think solar is just easier to deal with at a small scale.

> "I wonder what an "iEnergyHarvester", y'know .. the cool new disruptive kind .. would look like?"

What do you mean by this? Are you simply talking about solar panels/wind turbine/etc?

I'm talking about someone like Apple, revolutionizing the local/personal power harvesting technology, by applying to this problem a similar ethos to that of the iDevices.

Like, I'd love to have a portable harvester that has a similar degree of comfort and performance as I'm used to with my laptop and phone. I'm sure they're out there - but I'd prefer an Apple-style level of quality ..

How many kW are you wanting this "personal power harvesting" technology to handle? When I first read your comment I thought you were talking about handling the energy needs of a single family house or something large like that.

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