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Comment by SamBam | Hacker News Reader

I remember back in 1989 or so(!), my mom used to work at our summer cabin which had no electricity using a ~1m^2 solar panel, hooked up directly to a car battery, which was hooked up to a small laptop (a Compaq, I think).

I have no idea if such a setup would be remotely feasible today.

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Oh, it’s feasible. That’s close to what I’m fiddling with (just GoalZero.com products instead of bare car batteries etc). It’s quite workable, but you have to be keenly aware of usage & limitations, and fiddle with stuff often (ex.: coping with passing shadows). Most people are expecting complete reliability - that’s costly.

Panels are better, MPPT are cheaper, and the right laptop uses hardly any power... I would think it should be more feasible in every possible way aside from increased expectations.

A Surface Go averages something like 5W, and a 100W array can provide that in virtually all daytime conditions even without aiming.

Additionally, the right laptop can use its internal voltage regulator to convert the 12-16 volts from the battery into the internal voltage.

One of the secrets of the openwrt community was that those little linksys routers used a 9v power brick but the power regulator was still stable somewhere north of 12v, giving you a lot more options for repeaters or mesh networking.

12V DC 0.5A was typical, stable from 5-30V depending on the exact model.

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