RE: https://mastodon.energy/@drsimevans/117361324448269757
This echoes the experience here in my household.
My medium-sized diesel car gets around 10-11 miles per litre. With diesel now around £2 a litre, that's 18-20p a mile in fuel costs.
My wife's small electric car gets around 4 miles per kWh. With EV electricity at 8p/kWh, that's 2p per mile in fuel.
For a typical year's driving, hers costs ~£1500 a year less in fuel costs.
The portable split was delivered today! Delivered on a pallet, in the rain so I had to get it inside PDQ before the box went soggy. British summertime indeed ...
It seems to work as described; one end makes cold air hot and the other end makes hot air cold, and you can swap which end does what by pressing the right buttons 😆
It's a *lot* quieter than my old single-hose 9k BTU portable aircon, helped by the noisiest bit (which still isn't all that loud) being the outside unit.
I'm not quite ready to have tradies in my house for a proper fixed heat pump installation, but I wanted to get something a bit better (more efficient, less noisy) than my ancient single-hose air conditioner.
So today I've ordered one of these:
https://www.heatershop.co.uk/prem-air-eh1960-4-1-split-air-conditioner-with-app-control-12-000-btu
The SEER and SCOP look good, the quoted noise levels are reasonable and it's not quite as expensive as I expected (although half the price would have been nice).
Will share more info when it arrives.
On the plus side, I do now have two 450 watt panels installed* on the shed roof so tomorrow (if the sun shines) we'll see how they fare!
* As with most of my DIY projects, plans don't survive first contact with reality and so I need some additional brackets and screws and whatnot. But I can swap those another day.
Finishing some DIY off after a busy afternoon and realised just too late that I've crimped the wrong MC4 plug onto the end of a cable 😭
It's not a total loss; this cable was always going to be cut to make two (or more) shorter ones. It does however mean I'm going to be making up a connection on the roof rather than indoors next to the inverter.
Must be time to pack things up, have a nice cup of tea and think about bed.
A thread for the solarPV-curious, and anyone else who's been looking at those £20 used 250W panels on eBay and wondering what they might be able to do with them.
Might also interest @smallsolar and @balkonsolar although they probably know it all already!
https://mstdn.party/@ifixcoinops@retro.social/116376144710900945
Edited to fix typos, content unchanged. I shouldn't toot that late at night!
More info here, including photos of the installation in the dark:
https://www.photorama-project.eu/from-landfill-to-artwork-discussion-with-judith-fegerl-on-photovoltaics-and-artistic-approaches-to-the-energy-transition-and-circularity/
Not exactly the sort of "guerilla solar" installation that @smallsolar and @balkonsolar encourage, but here's a 2.4kWp PV art installation in Vienna's Museum Quarter.
Eight 300Wp glass-on-glass panels, Enphase IQ7X microinverters.
"converter:" by Judith Fegerl.
RE: https://wandering.shop/@susankayequinn/116409250217320175
The quoted toot reminded me of this song which I'm sure needs more listeners:
Tea Dragon has arrived ❤️
@welshpixie
Even here in dull, rainy England a hectare of crops will yield less energy than a hectare of solar panels. And that's before you go to all the time and effort of converting those crops into biofuels.
Is there an open hardware washing machine?
Mine glitched out but I think it was just a software fault. A long (18h) power cycle and a change of program and it might have cleared whatever bug or corruption was causing problems. I'll know in a couple of hours when it finishes a wash cycle (or not).
But fundamentally a washing machine is a pretty simple mechanical device with less processing power than a RPi Zero. I'm imagining that there might be a market for one you can drive with a SBC?
1/2
This place is a bad influence on me.
Why else would I have just bought a Futro S720 with the hope of installing Linux on it?
I blame various people including @neil and @vkc for encouraging this type of reckless behaviour. Also @Tattooed_Mummy just on general principles.
If I can tempt anyone else to the dark side:
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/196451532675
(What do you mean, I'm the last person on the Fedi to buy one?)
In case it's of use to anyone else, this message demonstrates that OpenVPN still tunnels through the paywall on aainflight.com - at least as it's currently configured on Boeing 737s.
