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Comment by ryukoposting | Hacker News Reader

Did some quick research on a major American car parts retailer's website. The biggest batteries they sell are rated as high as 188Ah (though they use a weird industry-specific unit to say that). Many are closer to 25-50Ah. Definitely enough juice to power a terminal for several hours.

This lines up with my personal experiences. I have personally used a car battery to keep a big gaming laptop charged for an entire weekend, and it was being used (if not under heavy load) for about 10 hours a day.

Those big batteries are extremely heavy and very expensive, but we're talking about people who want broadband internet service on their boat. Money is not a concern here.

I'm sure Starlink has different power modes for these things, but the average consumer is likely far more interested in optimizing for connection speed and latency.

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Pretty much all of us in the vanlife/overland space run Lithium batteries now, the smallest of which is basically 100Ah. I'm just about to put either 300Ah or 400Ah into my new Jeep camper to run an induction cook top, water pump, hot water, lights, charging and a lot more.

I also just mounted 600W of solar on the roof.

The power needs of Starlink is a tad annoying, but certainly not a deal breaker for anyone living in a vehicle that actually needs internet anywhere on the planet.

Yep, on my boat, I converted the original square dish to run off my 12v lithium batteries.

I have plenty of solar and batteries to run starlink 24/7.

Even if you don’t have a lot of amp hours, starlink allows you to set a sleep schedule where it would use way less power.

But ditching the starlink router and converting to run off 12v isn’t that hard

Interesting. How does the cost of the lithium conversion compare to the Starlink terminal?

With sat, the power needs are mostly a physics problem. You can't generate a 30 watt signal unless you draw 30 watts from somewhere. It's just the nature of the beast. It's also why lower-power sat systems like Iridium or Apple's thing have relatively limited functionality.

You likely wouldnt be running this off a lead acid car battery.

You’d have a lithium battery and an additional power source, like solar or generator, to top that battery off.

I was operating under the assumption that the system would be wired into the boat/car's existing electrical system, which in most cases will use one or more lead-acid batteries.

Edit: a vanlifer showed up and informed me that Lithium conversions are a thing. Turns out you can have your Lithium and eat it too. Cool stuff.

Normal car batteries really hate if you discharge them anywhere close to their capacity. You can get deep-cylce lead acid batteries built for that, but at that point just get lithium iron phosphate batteries.

That's the whole thing, though - shove a large enough lead-acid battery into the boat/car's electrical system, and you won't need to discharge the battery very far at all. 60W on a 100Ah 12V battery is nearly a full day's worth of battery life.

Now consider that the real power draw is probably well below the supply's rating, so it's actually 40ish watts on a 1200Wh battery. Now we're pushing 30 hours.

Now consider the real sickos of the "rich boat owner" class. These people have large engines in their boats, and those engines have alternators. All cars have those, too. That's a power source already integrated into the boat itself. A simple DC step-up regulator wired into the boat's existing electrical system is a much more elegant solution than a second set of batteries and a second power source to charge those batteries.

Needing to add an extra battery to an off grid power supply just to power a “portable” router designed to accept grid power and not 12V is a huge fail on starlinks part, regardless of the cost of the battery to power it.

For reference 60w is similiar power draw to a Dometic fridge or a laptop.

Also adding a huge heavy battery to a boat is a non-negligible consideration in a lot of cases.

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