A hundred watts is a guy and every time I make a cup of tea that's like having eighteen guys in my kitchen pedalling on static bikes hooked up to dynamos sweating while I moan "This kettle takes ages, I miss English kettles that run on thirty guys"
I never mentioned how cheap these panels were. They're 240 watts each, 36V, from 2011 - more modern panels you can get twice the watts in the same space, and that's why this bloke had upgraded and was selling these ones for fifty bucks each cash. $45 to me 'cause I was cheeky enough to ask for a bulk discount.
19 cents a watt is hard to beat.
They still put out over 30v each even in woodsy-light where I checked them. Now that might drop like a rock the moment I get a load across them, they're 15 years old so some of their watts have probably run away by now, but even if these end up being like 25c a watt that's still pretty damn good
I did look into newer panels, you can get them for a great price but you've typically gotta buy ten at a time and shipping would be like $400
A solar array below 1kW doesn't need a permit where I'm at. That's a good thing because I now have Anxiety about how exactly I'm gonna mount these things.
My grasping raccoon hands are dexterous and crafty but there's always a period during any new project where I don't know WTF I'm doing - this period passes as I gradually figure out what exactly TF I'm doing, but it can be very hard to remember that the IDK phase is temporary
Inspections and permits and associated bureaucracy need you to make a plan first and show it to the dudes before they give you the thumbs-up, and how I tend to work is by staring at materials and then bashing stuff together until I've made enough mistakes that I know how not to do it, the friction between these two approaches is part of Anxiety
Alright I've had some time with measuring tape and spray paint and graph paper and now my anxiety ebbs because I have the concept of a plan
Called the code enforcement guy and asked him questions and took pictures and drew a rough sketch and emailed him with the general gist and if he tells me the general gist isn't flat-out illegal then I'll do proper drawings to scale
That battery took Forever to get here, man
OK time for an update, so I've got an Ecoflow Delta Pro 3 in my basement, it is HUGE and HEAVY and obviously pictures and videos don't properly convey the mass and presence of this thing. I happened to be outside and saw the fedex guy coming and he was very very glad of that.
It's 50kg of battery in a pretty small space, very dense and not very conducive to positioning your body in a way that makes 50kg easy, but if you have two guys then it's all fine and you can have the fore guy use other hand for opening doors etc. Once it's out of the box it's got wheels on the back and a loooooongly-extensible handle on the front that lets you get good leverage, but it's still a put-the-cats-upstairs kinda situation. Moving it around to mates during big-storm-aftermath will probably be a two-man job because although moving it is OK, lifting it into and out of a vehicle is gonna be a back-tweaker and this thing's all plastic on the outside, it can't take a drop of any distance at all under its own weight.
Gonna have to have a ponder about the best way to protect this thing from dust 'cause I want it next to the rack with my projector/amp/computer/consoles etc in the workshop near to the table saw and it runs fans whenever the inverter is turned on. I mean hell I've been meaning to build a new media rack anyway
~~~ SOLAR UPDATE ~~~
1. I don't enjoy drilling through brick. I also don't enjoy that there isn't, like, an Incredibly Standard Box That Literally Everybody Uses that goes on the outside of your house and takes standard MC4 solar connectors. Like, there's these things they call GLANDS that are supposed to go on RV's and some people put on their houses, or you can penetrate the wall with a standard L-shaped wire conduit guy, or you can just leave a window open and stuff a wire through it, but there isn't a Definitive MC4-outside-to-inside solution that everyone agrees on, so for the time being I'm using a gland. Which will work, but feels... inelegant. I don't like ambiguity, which leads me to:
2. These panels use Tyco Solarlok connectors, which are obsolete and also wired up backwards to how you'd expect because of reasons. So to get these lads to go into normal MC4 connectors, I've gotta either cut off some original plugs and crimp new ones on (not a fan of that) or find some new Tyco connectors and use them to make up an adapter harness (not a fan of that either because electrically-speaking, more connectors = more troubles, but this seems the better option overall).
MC4 connectors look like humongous chonk lads with like Incredibly Weatherproof gaskets and devices to grip the wire with monster-mouth-looking rubber flanges and torque specs and need-a-tool-to-disconnect features but that's all in the plastic, when you go to actually crimp a connector onto a wire the metal bit looks like a bog-standard round Molex and it's all very familiar-feeling. You don't need *special* crimpers, but you do need *big* crimpers.
Little angel on my left shoulder telling me to find a source for these old obsolete connectors and make up adapter looms, little devil on my right shoulder saying CHOP THEM OFF JUST CHOP THE BASTARDS OFF WITH YOUR BIG CHOPPERS GET YOUR CHOPPERS ON THEM AND CHOP THEM OFF and the angel looks around the usual websites and thinks about the bridge connectors for parallel setups and goes yikes alright devil, jesus and the devil goes YAYYY CHOPPY CHOPPY
I am glad that I figured out that these panels were from the "IDK LOL" era of connectors and polarity because honestly I thought there was something wrong with my brain
Like "Alright this still doesn't make sense so let's map the whole thing out, so the female plastic has male metal and vice versa and people could be talking about the plastic or the metal when they say male or female, plugs marked positive containing sockets hook into sockets marked negative containing pins so there's potential for me to get confused there as well, hole flow is opposite to electron flow, what the hell do I have my leads backwards in my meter or something," no. Once I realised the panels were weird and needed to be corrected everything else made perfect sense.
All that distilled into "Put the pokey on the positive"
pokey PLASTIC. Pokey plastic on posi. Ignore the metal where the pokey metal is on negative, pokey plastic positive
POWER! Power coming in! Electricity from the sun! Only a little bit but POWER!
the ecoflow app is of course a janky pile of shit that doesn't work haha
You've gotta agree to the TERMS before you can use the ecoflow app and so there's a link to read the terms and it just straight-up 404's
There's a button with an icon that looks like it's supposed to show graphs and stuff, press it, black screen
Ya this is going local-only haha
It's like this with all the smart-home shit because, like, fundamentally, when you get right down to it, you can be good at making lightbulbs or good at making apps and you can't be both, so the app is a thing you use so that you can get the thing onto home assistant and that's the end of it. I've got two things in my house with an app that works, an Aranet CO2 monitor and an Emporia clamp-on current meter - the lightbulbs and this ecoflow battery and my water heater are all also supposed to have apps but they all either fail halfway or straight-up crash on tryna launch them. So we end up with home assistant, a trap for dads
I got a watts readout on my phone and charts and graphs and shit and one nice thing about that is MAN AM I HYPERAWARE OF THE WEATHER NOW
Like I'm not usually this aware of the weather when I'm not IN the weather y'know, I feel like A Part Of The World and that's kinda nice
Still only two pane up, also they're literally just propped up against the house lol, but it's nice and sunny and there's a hundred watts of free power flowing right now and it feels pretty damn good
@AinsleyLowbeer there was a time this picture would stir some emotion in me but nothing you people do surprises me anymore
I'm going to defend it though
..okay not the part where the tea bag is already in it
But in the US, boiling water in the microwave is probably the _most efficient_ method that the majority of people have access to!
@ifixcoinops not to get too grim about it, but my dad lived through the last war in Western Europe in an occupied country.
Towards the end of the war, as the population were starved of food and electricity, my dad's family set up a bicycle on a stand in the house and family members took turns pedaling to provide some light after dark.
My dad told me he was stunned how much physical energy it took to provide a measly few watts of light. Everyone quickly agreed the light wasn't worth the effort.
That story has given me a very strong appreciation for just how much energy those of us living in rich countries in the 21st century use.
Those UK kettles you miss? I squeeze my toe gently on the accelerator of my electric car, and I draw ten times what each of those kettles draws.
Apr 12, 2026, 3:36 PM@fluidlogic @ifixcoinops at least if that would happen again today, the led lights would be much easier to power from a bike...
But Oof, what a story. Ingenious too
@sarajw @ifixcoinops exactly. And I expect there have been improvements in bike generator efficiency too.
Apr 12, 2026, 3:41 PM@fluidlogic @sarajw @ifixcoinops
also storage batteries are much more affordable and have greatly improved over the years
This chap in SE England has been running bicycle powered sound systems and other such setups since late 1990s (and even those could keep a decent sound rig going) and is still around..
Apr 12, 2026, 7:12 PM@vfrmedia oh that looks cool!
That image of the left behind, broken camping gear - I've only been to one big festival (think it was Leeds) and the wasteland with so much usable stuff left behind was crazy. I still have the sleeping bag I picked up on the way out amongst other things - brand new, it still had the shop price tag on it.
Apr 12, 2026, 7:22 PM@sarajw @fluidlogic @ifixcoinops
the big festivals have tried to clean up their act but only after being exposed as to how bad things were getting.
I've met Nick and some of the rest of that crew over the years when I used to live in SE England - its interesting how they've pivoted from sound systems and lightshows to sewing machines (although this does make more sense and is an indication they are genuinely serious about sustainability / resillience)
Apr 12, 2026, 7:42 PM@vfrmedia yeah interesting! Sounds like a good org whatever they're up to.
It was a great haul for me and the then boyfriend that morning. I was flabbergasted. After that I (by chance) only attended middle class things like Larmer Tree and Twinwood Festival, those are completely different animals.
@sarajw @fluidlogic @ifixcoinops it's kind of a mixed bag. The efficiency is higher for flourescent or LED bulbs, but there is a minimum voltage required, so the light just shuts off if you don't maintain high enough output (vs a dimming bulb with an incandescent). It's a classic physics demonstration https://youtu.be/OFeRppwCIbw
(Note that for demos, this wheel is *specifically* built for this purpose with many coils and magnets. A raccooned generator is likely to be less efficient at generating voltage and the human takes up the slack)
@ifixcoinops <pedantic>100W is roughly basal metabolic rate (i.e. 2,000 kcal/day is 97W), so your American kettle is actually eighteen guys sitting around contributing body heat (violating the second law of thermodynamics is left as an exercise). Vigorous exercise gets you up towards 500-600W, and so it's "only" three or four guys cranking on a stationary bike for four minutes to boil your liter of water.</pedantic>
Actually, if anyone has ever wondered why crowded spaces get hot and stuffy, it's in significant part because every single human body there is a 100W incandescent lightbulb's worth of heat.
@whbboyd no way you're putting 600 watts into my kettle
@ifixcoinops @whbboyd Not for sustained periods of time, but for four minutes? Sure you can
I've hit 1kW while biking before, for short periods of time. I'm pretty sure you can have conversion losses under 10%
so it's not unreasonable that someone who cycles even semiregularly would be able to put out 600W of usable electrical power for a four minute period!
(Doing so on demand and without any sort of bodily damage is a different question :)
...though, elsewhere in thread an olympic cyclist is measured struggling to sustain 700W, so my numbers are probably optimistic.
Maybe 6 guys with 400W is more practical? 🤔
> 1kW
...for like five seconds, I don't know why I used that to even make ana rgument
"Well I'm weak so a somewhat stronger person 🤔"
such a bad argument,s orry :P
@whbboyd @ifixcoinops average people cannot put out 600w, and certainly not for any length of time. Even tour de France athletes are averaging only in the 300-400w range most of the time. A typical non athletic person is going to struggle to maintain 100w of output, on a bike for a prolonged period.
@quixoticgeek @whbboyd later in the thread we figure out where the maths went wrong above (forgot that the person has to still be alive after powering my fridge)
Apr 12, 2026, 3:32 PM@ifixcoinops this is very connected to a thread I was partaking in yesterday:
https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/116385655062235770
Also I love the idea of the panels in the woods being like "hnnnggg" and not having anything to push their electrons into
@ifixcoinops
> I did look into newer panels, you can get them for a great price but you've typically gotta buy ten at a time and shipping would be like $400
Meanwhile here in Germany 800W sets (including the inverter and mounting brackets etc) are typically like 250-300€ on Amazon and in hardware stores, but very often they're on sale for 200€. And from time to time they also pop up in regular supermarkets, also for 200€. So roughly the same price per watt as the ones from 2011 you've got, but with higher efficiency, and inverter thrown in, and none of the watts having ran away.
(The inverters in these sets are often limited to 800W, even when the panels themselves can be e.g. 2x 500W plus 2x 150W on the back side, because by law, you don't need any approvals to install balcony solar, and for feeding up to 800W into the grid, so 800W sets are the most popular.)
@IngaLovinde Germany sounds nice
I've got it all worked out on the back of this envelope. That's good enough, right?
@ifixcoinops If y'want my opinion as a solar nerd with no real hands-on experience? It'll probably cost less over time to crimp new connectors on, as much as that makes me nervous too, 'cause it'll make future maintenance, troubleshooting, and repairs easier from the lower complexity and higher compatibility. If there's not enough of a tail on the panels for the new plugs, I'd say NASA-splicing more length of identical-grade or better wire to 'em to add slack is well within your capabilities.
@LexYeen That's the conclusion I'm rapidly coming to while trying to source these obsolete-ass connectors 😅
@ifixcoinops Well then, congratulations on your future acquisition of a crimp tool and a bag full of far more connectors than you think you'll ever need. :blobyeengrin:
@LexYeen bold of you to assume I don't already have more crimpers than my cats have nipples ;)
@ifixcoinops Hey, I figured it was a safe bet. Some connectors need their own crimp tools, it's impolite to ask for toolbox pics if you don't know a guy, and I'm out of the loop on modern solar connector specs. :blobyeengrin:
@LexYeen I figured I'd need like a special crimp lad but, like, when people say "special crimpers" they mean "not the colour-coded automotive-style Dickhead Crimps that you'd use when bodging up a car stereo," like everyone already has in their toolbox, but just a standard set of like the same crimps you'd use for the big round high-current molex connectors in those massive square blocks coming off a pinball transformer. But the biggest hole in the set of three jaws, which I never get to use, so yay!
@LexYeen Also I absolutely have been meaning to give you people some toolbox pics
@ifixcoinops Brain saw POKEY and I experienced a brief moment of cognitive dissonance.
May 4, 2026, 8:35 PM@ieure @ifixcoinops Something about @pokeythepenguin ?
HOORAY!!!
@jens @ieure @ifixcoinops HOORAY FOR FRIENDSHIP!!!
May 6, 2026, 4:06 PM
May 4, 2026, 8:42 PMI have a Delta 2 (much smaller but still chonky) that we use for power outages but (more often) to run my laptop and amateur radio setup in the field (all day plus, if I want). I have been planning to get some solar panels for it to provide another charging solution. It wouldn't run our household or anything but it's a start. Have been following your journey with interest. Thanks!
I started with an eco-flow and moved to something else bigger later. I blew out my River 2 when I needed to keep my fridge on it bc it kept tripping the gfi (which it should not have been on, but it took ages to get the electrician out to drop a dedicated line).
I am enjoying this entire narrative, however! I always learn from you. I haven't had the guts to try to figure out if I can actually wire panels or my Jackery 3K into the house. I just keep things cycling and charged for bad weather season.
@ifixcoinops my god American sockets are weird as shit. WHY ?!?!
@otte_homan so they can kill twice as many people per capita despite using half the voltage
Are these connectors after the inverter? Or is it still dealing with low voltage at a whole lotta amps (when fully working)?
