scarecrowbob

I mean, fortunately for me it's dry enough that I can run a small swamp cooler for the couple of weeks a year where those are the temps in my place. But yeah, you're correct that this is what it looks like where I am at, temperature-wise.

Though I have no A/C, per se... I have thought about it. I'm 100% off grid, but the only time I would like that is when the sun is so far up that the batteries have all already charged.

True, I have learned a lot and that has been very interesting and quite fun. I'm at 6500' but am still planning on setting up an outside shower just because it's pretty here. I am waiting on that till I figure out an indoor situation, though.

I got a quote for a backhoe rental today and am a little apprehensive (it's by far the largest machine I will have operated), but hey, I get to run a backhoe for a weekend...

I can see how small efficiencies would matter a lot in that sitation.

When I had 6 100W panels and was trying to keep my laptop (and lights) running off that, then I did a lot more trying to keep them clean. If I was having to burn fuel for electricity, I'd certainly be trying a lot harder to squeeze what I can out the array.

Anyhow, good luck.

I likely am in a similar position. My hope is to get a cistern buried this year so I can have more than 40L of liquid water on hand at any given time... and then maybe even a shower :D Washing myself with a bucket is starting to lose its charm.

If they are like me, keeping the fridge from freezing during the winter is more energy that keeping the fridge cooling during winter...

Ah, that makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, the one tree branch that hits my array until 10a prevents it from charging at all even though it only obscures 1/4 of one panel in the 10-panel set.

But I like the branch and have plenty of full sun, so I haven't cut it.

Horses for courses. My system is off grid, so any extra power is just not used, and its designed in a way that a 2-5% change doesn't do anything. That might be a more meaningful change if I were selling power to other folks.

Kind of off topic, but I see a lot of folks proximate to me have built systems to turn panels so they face the sun more closely. I can see the use in that if you don't have much space or if you have a large commercial operation, but this area is very rural.

My array (4kw) which I built myself has 10 400W panels. The panels cost me $1200 because the minimum order is 12 and the supplier suggested buying extras; shipping large panels one at a time isn't cheap. In fact, the shipping for the entire system (about $5000 worth of equipment) was almost $1000.

But my feeling is that for the cost of a moving array that tracks the sun / time of year would have cost quite a lot more and have involved construction that I personally wasn't comfortable with. The conclusion I came to is that it would cost about the same to build a second array, angle it for "summer" (mine is angled to be most efficient in winter), and hook it to the other MPPT on my controller.

That would take up a lot of space, but a) I am 40 acres and b) then I could run a mig welder with impunity during the day...

I am curious how much of a difference it makes.

I have 4kw of panels and 15kwh of storage. I only get down to about 80% most nights (I heat with wood and propane).

But my system will charge completely in about 2 hours of full sun. If it took 3 hours it wouldn't make a difference. So I generally don't clean them (well, the rain and snow do that work).

I do remove snow, because that has a very noticeable impact.

Is the difference that you are pushing back to a grid (I am not), so the power all gets used regardless of you being the one to use it?

"Taking us back to the previous system, and putting in the hard and mundane work of keeping it working is the much better solution if people want redress, not continuous 'we just need to break it a little more because feelz/it's simpler/our political class (that we could, you know, work to get voted out) suck (and all we do is whine about it)'."

What, this actual system, where (even ignorign the deep violence it metes out to folks in other places) every fucking week I get to hear about how someone has been murdered by it?

It's rich to hear folks talk about "wannabe murders" out of one side of their face while ignoring long-term, violence that this system does every day.

I don't know your situation but surely you've tried ventilating at night and then closing up the house at a specific time in the day?

I only ask because when I moved from the US south to the high desert in NM (about 2KM) I had to learn how to time that transition.

Very few folks here run A/Cs, we generally have homes designed to stay warm and during the summer usually fans go on about bed time and off in the morning, and that's enough to keep things cool because of insulation.

It was not obvious to me how that worked and I spent one very sweaty summer before I got the timing correct.

Of course, if the nights are hot (which sometimes happens) then that doesn't work so well.

I live a couple of miles from an airport that houses a fire-fighting air tanker base, and I am somewhat terrified of fires- 120K Acres has burned in my area of the state so far this year.

I've also been a ham radio enjoyer and had been looking for projects that work with radio. So I built a little antenna that works with ~1Mhz and hooked it to a raspberryPi running dump1090... it's amazing how far I can receive. 50-ish miles across a bunch of 12k-14k mountains.

However, I've switched to just using one of the ADSB sites because they have a lot more tracking info.

It's been super interesting to watch the tankers take off. Mostly c130 and md80, but there have been a pair of canadair float planes... quite a menagerie of aircraft.

Anyhow, the adsb stuff gets really interesting once you identify the spotting planes, as it's a little faster at identifying where agencies are looking at fires than WatchDuty (which also works very well).

Yes.

I live in a very rural spot with a difficult-to-deal-with Electric Association, with a Ute reservation on one side and unpowered parcels on other sides; I don't think that the easement is a typical issue.

And to be clear, I didn't count my labor in designing or implementing the system. I suspect that would have been somewhere in the neighborhood of another $10K if I had to get a hands-off, turn-key version of this same system.

And at some point I will likely double much of the capacity, at which point I will be able to run a mig welder at night if I want...

Fortunately for me, I could just bop down to the bog box store and buy a more appropriate fridge from vevor; horses for courses.

I've never had to turn off my fridge, though it does have interesting-to-me usage patterns; it's weird what you can learn once everything you use has a watt-meter. I can look at the weekly graph and recall when I turned on a hammond organ or cooked in my instapot.

I am about 2 years in to my off-grid solar setup. The cost for the easement was looking to be about $25k, plus about 30k for the wire, transformer, et.

I live in middle of nowhere so I just built out a system myself. I am about 8k into it. It's not the biggest system (6kw inverter, 4kw panels, 15kwh storage) but it's fine for one old man living a 2kM in the high desert.

I'm writing this from my off grid shack.

I have 15kwh of lifepo, and even if it weren't hooked to 4kw of solar I could still run my fridge, charge my phone, and run the fan in my fireplace for 4-6 days... longer if I dump the fridge.

It's 6U of deep 19" rack space.

So 2 x that isn't an entire shed-sized battery.

Though I'd happily have a shed-sized battery... I suspect that delivering and covering something that size would cost more than the batteries I already have, though.

If it helps, I have been in a work group on this issue locally for the last 8 months or so.

Most of the folks in that work group are to the left of Democrats, and most of the pro-flock folks here, locally, are Democrats and law-and-order GOP folks.

So to me, the (locally a-typical) political orientation of the person committing the politically-charged crime seems relevant.

A lot of us have very little love for authoritarian regimes.

At the same time, all through out my life I have seen folks in the US us their fantasies CCP as reason to accept a government that they feel is the gold standard for freeedom.

I submit to you that what you're hearing are folks who are even more concerned with not being oppressed than you are telling you that it's not that great here for those of us on, say, the anarchist left or among the black radical tradition or whatever.

If your history begins at the fall of the berlin wall and you are happy about the ecological destruction being directly created by the US and the carcerial state it represents then of course you're going to read things the way you do.

But the reality is that most of us are just tired of hearing how fucking free the US is when they just sentenced 19 of our people in Texas to what are effectively life sentences for participating in a protest that went sideways when one participant decided he didn't want to see the state summarily execute a kid for vandalism.

I don't think most folks I know in the US are willing to touch the historical wrongs (genocide and slavery) with a 3.048M pole.

I think this view indicates that you have either had very few personal interactions with specific fascists or you don't have a very specific sense of how they are working.

It's easy to hide a lot of objectionable stuff in metonymy.

It feels reasonable to me to think of a "country" as the people who live there; doubly so when discussing a putative democracy.

But sure, I will entertain the idea that you mean something different that literally every other person I've encountered who has uttered that similar sentiment:

if the claim is that the owning-class of the US are seeing the results of their 400-year-long racist, genocidal campaign to enslave the world and exploit every crevice of the planet come home to roost in the form of a decaying ability to present themselves as ethically okay...

sure I can agree to that.

But honestly, I don't think that's what you're trying to say.

How do some third graders in Alabama deserve this? How do my 22-year-old waiter friends in rural Texas deserve this?

What exactly did they do to deserve this?

People say this a lot, and I usually think it's said by folks who haven't thought about it much.

As a person who makes a lot of music, I don't care if folks have fun. In fact I am having such a hard time caring hat folks do or how they do it I can't get motivated to book any shows this season.

But the part you're missing is when folks make these things and then say "yeah, you see this thing we're doing? That's what we think -you- are doing." LIke when someone sets up an LLM to shit out some song lyrics, I don't care if they are having fun doing it, but I think it displays a lot of contempt for [insert an songwriting artist youlike here] to claim that the LLM is doing the same thing.

Which is fine and all- I've got plenty of unmitigated contempt for my fellow humans.

And you don't even need a computer to do that- I've released a certain amount of music that is facile and boring and in retrospect understand why folks were dismissive.

But if you want to understand why folks who consider themselves invested in their craft (or even invested in other artists' craft) are dismissive of these things, then you might consider how radically dismissive of craft these kinds of cultural products might seem to artists.

I get that it's a single case, but Darlene Graham did just take Lindsey Graham's spot, like, yesterday.

When folks who live around me vote for things I find unethical, then I don't feel bound by those decisions.

Also, your position on weapons development is premised on the idea that at lease some of the folks developing the weapons are on your side and always will be.

That might not be true at all.

Because they aren't "safer" for the folks getting killed.

Historically, the folks doing the murdering just don't care about the folks they kill, so "safer for the killers" isn't a win for most of us.

"More precision" isn't about killing less folks, it's about making it safer and easier for folks who kill folks to do that work.

So those of us who dislike killing don't like these tools because we consider them to be immoral.

It's possible that you're genuine in your confusion here; it is, however very hard for me to believe that there are people who genuinely don't understand that when the state spends money it -goes somewhere-.

Its fun for me to read these comments as a person who hates the US military.

Because I know the pipe hitters working for JSOC are really just as fucked up and superstitious as any boko haram nutjobs, and the magic that the "operators" believe in is just as idealistic and disconnected from material reality evn if it's stated "rationally" and scientistically as you've done here.

The "difference" that you're stating is purely imaginary, hoss. Those assholes are getting cranked up because it's easier to kill folks, and that's the same deal weather you're team "deus vult" or whatever odd stuff the Boko Haram folks are into- yall are all just into killing people at the end of the day.

"It's different because we have science"... get out of here with that LOL

Yeah, I don't know how this whole ARPANET thing is really going to play out...

"That said, it is undeniable that USA would have more issues pulling that off domestically, and, arguably, even internationally."

You think so?

I spend a lot of time working with (actual) anarchists in the US, and most of us are far more worried about the US gov putting us in jail (or murdering us outright) for our signal chats, protests, and "actions" than literally anything that the PRC might consider doing to us.

Yeah a lot of us are tired of it. I dislike the democrats intensely.

I also dislike the GOP folks intensely.

Which is why I dislike your line of reasoning here: -you- are playing the game we are all tired of.

Like, no shit the Dems didn't drop the files because it implicates folks like Bill Clinton.

But that doesn't make it the case that DT would be okay with the files dropping either.

And it doesn't make it the case that much of the highly spectacular actions his admin takes has nothing to do with achieving material goals and everything to do with keeping his base (which at this point should seem pretty damn dumb given how much damage he has personally done to them) entertained, angry, and confused.

And --you-- are the one who brought out the Dems here.

You. You are the person doing the thing we are all tired of.

Stop it.