Login
You're viewing the post.lurk.org public feed.
  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    May 7, 2026, 4:03 PM

    I've had two panels up since Monday but it's been pissing down with rain since then, today's the first sunny day. Excited to see how much it peaks at later on

    💬 3🔄 0⭐ 0

Replies

  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    May 8, 2026, 1:48 PM

    2026: 🦝 Every time something scary happens in politics I put up another solar panel

    2027: 🦊 Dude why are you smiling so big, did you not just see the news today
    🦝 I took some of those little panels out of calculators and I put them on my FUCKING TEETH

    💬 3🔄 6⭐ 0
  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    May 8, 2026, 2:56 PM

    I'm like this with everything tbh. Whenever the world gets scary I gotta go nuts-and-bolts and do Repairman Things With My Hands which is why lately I've been most enjoying working on, like, bikes, 20-year-old ereaders, solar panels, all stuff that's either low-power or make-power

    I've talked about this before on here but when I was teaching the new pinball techs how to not be scared of complicated machines I told them the most complex intimidating system you've ever seen is made up out of smaller and simpler systems that are connected together, and those subsystems are made out of yet smaller and simpler subsubsystems, and you don't fix an arcade you fix machines, and you don't fix machines you fix coils and switches and connectors, we work on the things that systems are made of because that's what we can reach with our hands and understand with our heads, and if all the little bits work how we want them to then the big thing has no choice but to work how we want it to

    💬 2🔄 12⭐ 0
  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    May 8, 2026, 3:10 PM

    When you were a kid did you ever go to a science museum with a hand-crank generator and a buncha lightbulbs?

    So how this works is you'd spin the crank and it'd rotate pretty freely y'know, you could feel magnets kinda resisting you a little bit but you'd take your hand off the crank and it'd carry on a bit, it wasn't hard to turn. And then you'd flip the light switch on and turn the crank again but this time you'd be trying to light up a little bulb, and it'd fight you. The same crank would give you hot biceps and a sweaty forehead. Some of these machines had more bulbs in parallel with switches between them and you could build up speed and have your mate flip a switch and you'd FEEL it! Not, like, understand the principles, not be able to rattle off Ohm's law or whatever, you'd really FEEL it, you'd KNOW it in your body

    I think that was a good machine and we really need more of them. We need to feel the burn in our biceps so that we understand viscerally what electricity means, what power actually is, what really happens when we boil a kettle

    💬 9🔄 13⭐ 0
  • 💬 5🔄 1⭐ 0
  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    May 8, 2026, 3:49 PM

    I got Numbers for yesterday btw, the first day when I had 2 panels up and it wasn't raining literally all day long, but I'm not posting them yet 'cause there's a clown with an old freezer and a watt meter who I'm waiting to hear from first

    💬 2🔄 0⭐ 0
  • 💬 1🔄 0⭐ 0
  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    May 8, 2026, 5:01 PM

    Right he's shown me his now I'll show everyone mine, lemme grab a screenshot real quick

    💬 1🔄 0⭐ 0
  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    May 8, 2026, 5:13 PM

    Alright so remember how I said these were 240 watt panels, well I misspoke, they're actually rated for 230 watts on the label.

    Now the label, fucking LIES. If it says 230 watts on a panel what it means is, you'll get 230 watts under like Ideal Laboratory Conditions, noon on the solstice at the equator on a really clear day kinda thing, you're never gonna get that IRL. Plus, these panels are like 15 years old. So I figured, well, if I can get 150 or 180 out of them then I'm still quids-in for how cheap they were secondhand, and if I have two in series then a bit of shading on one is gonna pull down the other, so 300 watts would be a result. With that in mind, screenshot in the next post

    💬 1🔄 0⭐ 0
  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    May 8, 2026, 5:16 PM

    Oh - also, before I show you this, these panels are leaned jankily and temporarily against the front wall of my house, I haven't built anything to angle them properly or even measured the angle okay so temper your expectations

    💬 1🔄 0⭐ 0
  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    May 8, 2026, 5:19 PM

    393 watts! (edit: oops left an ID uncovered, it's not like a serial number or owt so it's probably nbd but just in case)

    Screenshot from Home Assistant showing a graph in like a bell curve sort of shape, rising from about 20 watts at about 1030 to nearly 400 watts from like 1330 to 1500 and then falling back down to cut off entirely at maybe like 1700
    💬 1🔄 0⭐ 0
  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    May 8, 2026, 5:22 PM

    So panels that were optimistically rated for 230 watts 15 years ago are still spitting out about 200 watts without much effort at all!

    This is FANTASTIC because even though panels hold up way better than I expected, **rich buggers still replace them** because you can get 400 or 500 watt panels now that take up the same room, meaning that the secondhand market is full of panels that are cheap AND good! It's a raccoon's paradise!

    💬 11🔄 27⭐ 0
  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    May 8, 2026, 5:41 PM

    Another great thing about that screenshot, it wasn't a rainy day yesterday but it was a cloudy one, notice how it doesn't drop all the way to zero throughout the cloudy bit. Like it's still putting out enough to charge a laptop. Right now it's grey and miserable out and my two $45 secondhand panels are still kicking out 20 watts in the rain

    💬 3🔄 0⭐ 0
  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    May 10, 2026, 8:21 PM

    Alright I've actually plugged stuff into the battery now

    My amp, projector, kodi box, home assistant pi and basically everything in the big shelf downstairs are all sun-powered now

    💬 1🔄 0⭐ 1
  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    May 10, 2026, 8:29 PM

    Knowing how electricity is normally generated makes these things even more magical

    Like we all know that electricity is made by moving magnets around coils of wire or vice versa, and that's how I think of electricity, it's a big steel shaft in some really good bearings and at the end of that shaft is like a bunch of fins that get spun by steam or whatever or maybe it's like a portable generator with a 2-stroke engine to spin the shaft and there's all this metal moving and it all probably makes a terrible racket

    These two old panels off a bloke on facebook marketplace are just sat quietly in front of my house and there's four blokes on exercise bikes' worth of electricity coming out of them. There's no noise at all and nothing's moving, there's nothing to oil, there's no fluids to replace, it's just, fucking, some Elvish thing that gathers mana when it's in nature. It's absolutely magical

    💬 7🔄 20⭐ 0
  • 💬 2🔄 0⭐ 0
  • 💬 2🔄 0⭐ 0
  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    May 15, 2026, 3:14 PM

    Watched a video from a bloke who's also dipping his toe into solar. He's not doing a battery, just these Ecoflow Stream microinverter things. I think this is what people mean when they talk about balcony solar.

    Anyway how these work is there's no battery, you plug a solar panel (which puts out lowish voltage DC) into your hundred-quid microinverter box which bumps it up to mains AC voltage, and then there's a wire coming from that box and you just PLUG IT STRAIGHT INTO THE WALL. Like you literally plug it into a normal outlet and it just energizes the circuit that this outlet is part of, anything that's on that same circuit gets the juice from the panel. You don't need to turn the circuit off at the breaker or anything, all the smarts in the microinverter box just Figure It Out and when there's sun the circuit gets powered from the sun and when there's not it gets power from the mains like normal and you just leave it, you don't have to mess with it.

    So like, what does this even do? Without a battery there's only benefit if you use the power while it's being made, you can't save it up for later. Well, the idea is you plug it into the same circuit that powers things that are on all the time, like your fridge or whatever. There's also a lot of benefit if you've got stuff like, I dunno, a dishwasher that you can load it up and close it before you go to bed and then tell it "Do the dishes in x hours" and time that to start at like noon tomorrow when there's lots of sun to power it for free.

    So like, it's not as good as a battery obvs, but the good and interesting part about it is how CHEAP it is. A hundred quid! You'll have your money back in like two years, and then it'll keep sneaking beer tokens into your pocket for, hell, decades probably. And that's for like the fancy Ecoflow brand, I bet there's cheaper ones that're just as good.

    Anyway then he said what he was powering with his panels and it's this big nerd cabinet full of networking gear and computer shite and it's like THREE HUNDRED WATTS 24/7 CONSTANT DRAW and I got all Northern like 'OW MUCH?!

    I've got a nerd rack as well, it's got the router and a switch and TWO computers that are on all the time and an external hard drive that's constantly spinning and amp on standby and a projector and three game consoles and VR lighthouses and all their associated shitty tiny inefficient power adapters and its baseload is thirty watts.

    ARM, mate, you want some Acorn RISC Machine in there, reduce the instruction set of yer computing, you'll save a packet

    💬 8🔄 0⭐ 0
  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    May 15, 2026, 4:43 PM

    Anyway I added another panel, got three in series now, have a look at this graph and I'll explain and caption it in the next post

    Image attached toot
    💬 1🔄 1⭐ 0
  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    May 15, 2026, 4:48 PM

    (explaining the previous post while I'm at my computer rather than on my phone) so there's three graphs there, first is volts coming off the panels, about 80v right now at 1230ish, all dippy and squirrelly up until about half nine. Second graph is watts off the panels and watts off the smart plug feeding the ecoflow, it draws like 30ish watts off the smart plug all night and all morning with occasional brief spikes up to 400ish watts about every hour. Third graph is the battery percentage on the ecoflow, it spends the morning until about 10am dipping slowly to 40% then jumping up to about 40.5% as it charges and those coincide with the draw from the smart plug, with the last dip around half nine and then it charges very slowly until about noon when it starts charging much faster.

    💬 1🔄 0⭐ 0
  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    May 15, 2026, 4:59 PM

    Now, this isn't what I expected from adding a third panel to the series. When you put panels in series the volts add up, the amps stay the same, and since everything's gotta flow through Every Panel, if one panel gets some shade you're buggered. I meant to put three in parallel (put the third one out yesterday) but I couldn't make the leads quite reach, so I put them in series for now and ordered some more adapters etc.

    I thought I'd be getting more like 600 watts for a little bit of the day and then partial shade on one panel would screw me, but there must be some kinda quirk of circumstance I didn't account for 'cause the opposite has happened - two panels in series didn't start producing much until about half eleven or noonish, but three in series started producing earlier in the day, enough earlier that the battery started charging much sooner than it has been off two panels.

    I've got the battery set up so that it won't go below 20% or above 80% charge until I tell it Yo Emergency Time, just for the sake of the cells' longevity. But I've also got it set so that if it goes below 40% it pulls from the grid at 400 watts. The rack draws 30ish watts and it looks like it's mostly passing that straight through from the mains and occasionally taking a short 400 watt burst as it charges up enough to meet its own demand for the computery doodads wot makes it go.

    The headscratcher here is in the two-panel days, the time period before the sun actually hit the panels, when it was light outside but not Direct Sun kinda thing, I'd get watts in the low 20's until like noon, and now I'm getting like 50 watts during that same time. Adding one extra panel shouldn't go from 20 to 50 - I'm not gonna complain, that's the difference between the battery discharging and it charging for several hours, but I am gonna say that the moral of the story is that messing around with maths and theory will only take you so far, you've gotta plug things in and fiddle with it physically before you know what to expect!

    💬 3🔄 1⭐ 0
  • Mark Kruegermarkkrueg@treehouse.systems
    May 7, 2026, 4:48 PM

    @ifixcoinops Enjoying this thread a lot! I’m on a similar path…and going quite slowly. But eventually my workshop will have many free electrons flowing in. Hearing your journey inspires me to move forward more. Hope you keep us updated.

    💬 0🔄 0⭐ 3
  • 💬 1🔄 0⭐ 0
  • 💬 1🔄 0⭐ 0
  • 💬 1🔄 0⭐ 0
  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    May 8, 2026, 3:16 PM

    @sinvega boiling a kettle is a whole class of schoolchildren grunting against a crank, I know this because I grew up in the North

    💬 1🔄 0⭐ 0
  • Sin Vegasinvega@mas.to
    May 8, 2026, 3:18 PM

    @ifixcoinops here in london we are efficient and simply directly burn the child for fuel

    💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • AlexisLexYeen@plush.city
    May 8, 2026, 3:17 PM

    @ifixcoinops That is highway fuckin' robbery for what's ultimately inside the cabinet. :blobyeensad:

    💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    May 8, 2026, 3:19 PM

    @LexYeen probably about 400 bucks of parts and fifteen grand's worth of certifications and insurance and making sure the kids can't hurt themselves on it etc

    I do feel like I'd do pretty well at building science museum kidproof stuff given my background in machines-that-get-kicked-a-lot

    💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • 💬 0🔄 0⭐ 3
  • 💬 0🔄 0⭐ 4
  • bobbob@feed.hella.cheap
    May 8, 2026, 8:14 PM

    @ifixcoinops they used to be even cheaper, a couple of years ago I got about 50 panels for $20/each (though I had to go pick them up myself)

    💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • 💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • DTrasler WritingDtraslerwriting@mastodon.social
    May 10, 2026, 8:33 PM

    @ifixcoinops Can I ask how you get power from panel to actual objects? Because i have a nice panel for camping that I bought in case of Zombie Outbreak, and I haven't actually linked it to anything. Think it's meant to store power in a car battery...

    💬 0🔄 0⭐ 1
  • 💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • 💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • nflux back in exilenflux@gts.exile.social
    May 10, 2026, 8:36 PM

    @ifixcoinops free-sun-electricity is the best form of electricity 👌. there's like a 5% joy boost built right in. i have been known to just watch the "amps incoming" screen and wallow in all that free juice and general amazement that you can just pull electricity out of thin air...and as you say, silently.

    4 guys on exercise bikes? what's that in odin masses please?

    💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • Sheddisheddi@mstdn.party
    May 10, 2026, 9:09 PM

    @ifixcoinops I remember having a fairly long and entirely fruitless discussion with someone who was convinced that using solar panels (or wind turbines) to generate electricity and then using that electricity to run a heater or clothes dryer was "causing global warming" because of the waste heat from the heater or dryer.

    I was unable to convince them that the heat that came out of the appliance was the same energy that had been taken out of the sunlight or wind previously.

    💬 2🔄 0⭐ 1
  • rawestereo4x4@techhub.social
    May 10, 2026, 9:33 PM

    @sheddi @ifixcoinops but LED lights cost more to run vs. the old ones as they are brighter!

    (btw. found all the 25W Edison light bulbs I put in front of the house "for free" at a local restaurant. One over every table...)

    💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • 💬 0🔄 0⭐ 1
  • 💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • 💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • FarbsFarbs@mastodon.social
    May 10, 2026, 10:57 PM

    @ifixcoinops Welcome to the sun watcher's club :) Just yesterday I was planning my week based on the weather forecast & when I'll be able to charge my EV without hitting the grid, and now this morning I'm shaking my fist at a foggy sky.

    I know home automation is a bog pit that would swallow me whole, but an eInk display somewhere central in the house that showed battery %, solar generation, and load would be amazing.

    💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • LiamSocialGaff@cathode.church
    May 11, 2026, 12:12 AM

    @ifixcoinops
    Years ago you might not have been able to score this kind of deal on panels though!
    I'm just excited you're doing it now :)

    💬 0🔄 0⭐ 1
  • <10%OneInterestingFact@mastodon.ie
    May 15, 2026, 3:22 PM

    @ifixcoinops
    Depends: the power flows back to the distribution board and all round the property. Then it goes out to the grid. If you have an old spinny disc meter it might run backwards, otherwise the meter stops while you're producing more than you use. If you've an export meter then it doesn't go backwards, it clocks up on the export side instead...
    But a battery is expensive - is it worth the expense?

    💬 0🔄 0⭐ 2
  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    May 15, 2026, 3:28 PM

    @OneInterestingFact the maths on whether a battery is worth it is VERY different in the UK versus the US. Over here in the US, at least in Pittsburgh where I'm at, we have a LOT of power outages 'cause they don't bury the wires and sometimes those outages can go on for a very very long time. Combine that with massive American-style freezers that are most efficient when they're nearly full, and Costco-style cheaper-in-bulk shopping, and you might have half a battery's worth of food in the deep freeze at any given time.

    Plus if anyone in the house uses medication that has to be kept refrigerated, you might have two grand's worth of meds in the fridge. All things that change the answer to whether it's worth it to get a battery, but my gut tells me in the UK it's not worth it but in the US it probably is

    💬 0🔄 2⭐ 0
  • Robin (going slightly mad)reb@retro.social
    May 15, 2026, 3:22 PM

    @ifixcoinops you've now got me wondering what the base load of all of my various computer-mabobs is. I could find out if I could remember where the little screen doohickey for my smart meter is.

    I very quickly realised that knowing how much power my house is drawing on an instantaneous level isn't actually that useful for me, so I cast the little screen into the abyss

    💬 1🔄 0⭐ 0
  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    May 15, 2026, 3:23 PM

    @reb See this, and yikes I never thought I'd say this, this is what Home Assistant is GREAT at. Charts and graphs and figuring out what draws what when, that comes in very handy

    💬 1🔄 0⭐ 0
  • Arda Xi :flag_nonbinary:​ardaxi@hsnl.social
    May 15, 2026, 3:48 PM

    @ifixcoinops Worth noting that this might be dangerous. If you have a breaker in front of the circuit, that breaker only sees the net power going through it. But if your battery supplies say... 10A, then you could have a single load of 26A going continuously without ever tripping a 16A breaker. (Using local values here but the math stays the same, just different values).

    Unless you really know what you're doing, you should never put producers and consumers on the same circuit without a fuse in between.

    Unless you're doing the ring main thing of course.

    💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • 💬 2🔄 0⭐ 0
  • 💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • Arda Xi :flag_nonbinary:​ardaxi@hsnl.social
    May 15, 2026, 3:55 PM

    @ifixcoinops The 10A comes from the inverter. So the net supplies 16A, the inverter supplies 10A, you end up with a circuit that can draw 26A without tripping the breaker. Breakers as safety feature assume that all the power flows through them in one direction only.

    💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • Russell Phillipsrpbook@gts.phillipsuk.org
    May 15, 2026, 4:59 PM

    @ifixcoinops my only concern about that is that you have a plug with exposed connectors that have mains voltage across them. That gives me the heebie-jeebies from a safety perspective.

    💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    May 15, 2026, 5:01 PM

    @rpbook Yeah that's a big concern of mine as well but video dude straight-up stuck his fingers across the pins and said well I guess the inverter's clever enough to sense the difference between a person and a plug and not turn on the juice until it's where it needs to be. Hell it might even be as simple as "Don't put out any electricity until you've sipped some first"

    💬 1🔄 0⭐ 0
  • 💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • Dan Cassidy 🦌whimsy@chitter.xyz
    May 15, 2026, 5:27 PM

    @ifixcoinops lol yeah my nerd rack is a bunch of orange pis and raspberry pis and a big pile of disks and all together it doesn't even draw 100W and most of that is the disks, but it has SO much computing power

    💬 1🔄 0⭐ 1
  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    May 15, 2026, 5:33 PM

    @whimsy Bloke worked out that he was spending two quid a day keeping all that running, and was all "Well that's not too bad," I'm like mate that's sixty quid a month! That's a whole brand new game every single month!

    💬 1🔄 0⭐ 0
  • Mre. Dartigen [renovator mode]dartigen@aus.social
    May 11, 2026, 2:56 PM

    @ifixcoinops If you can get some outdoor-rated timber cheaply or for free and you're reasonably handy, you could probably build some kind of frame to hold the panels up off the ground at least. (Or find someone who can weld and is easily bribed, if you'd prefer metal.)

    I've seen purpose-made folding racks for solar panels as well, usually intended for people with RVs and the like, but they're not cheap and I can't remember if they were intended to work with a specific brand of panels or not.

    💬 0🔄 0⭐ 1
  • Dan Fixes Coin-Opsifixcoinops@retro.social
    May 11, 2026, 3:11 PM

    @dartigen aye that's where this is going, ground mount with a frame driven into the earth, once the code guy tells me where I'm good to run it in

    💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0
  • vxovxo@digipres.club
    May 8, 2026, 5:42 PM

    @ifixcoinops
    Yeah I've seen them where the cells start to look sun bleached from decades of use and they still keep on keeping on.

    💬 0🔄 0⭐ 2
  • 💬 0🔄 0⭐ 0