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
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)
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!
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
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
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
I've got fourteen more panels to place 😅
I should've done this years ago
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
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
(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.
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!
Also if you're wondering why it's passing 30w of power from the mains straight through to my load while it's also drinking 400 watts from the sun, while I was writing that last post the battery percentage crossed 45% and then it cut off the mains, so right now my rack is battery powered and the battery's still charging and the smart plug it's plugged into is at zero amps.
I expected 600 watts instead of 400 but it looks like I'm getting more, like, 450 watts but for much longer in the day and bonus trickle-charging in the morning
All these graphs are from home assistant and I've got a different thread about home assistant and why it's brilliant and also horrible and why you should absolutely not do it, check my stickies
This whole thing is absolutely fucking dadbait, like you won't get owt else done 'cause you'll be watching the volts and amps and nipping out to look at the sky all the time
Or maybe you're normal IDK, but you're reading this on fedi so I Don't Think So
Have we talked costs yet, have we added all this up yet
I don't think we have, not properly anyway, right. Two grand for the battery. That's the big "Oof" chunk but honestly, if I didn't have refrigerated meds to worry about, if I just wanted to Play With Solar And Save Money, I could've done it for way less. Here's my notes from when I was comparing the different all-in-one batteries (next post)
---this is taken STRAIGHT from my notes file in my personal wiki (it's dokuwiki-powered!) and I'm sure other people have done better comparisons, also this is only looking at fairly-big batteries, you can get smaller ones for WAY less money, so take this as it comes---
Growatt Infinity 2000:
* $650 for 2 kWh, so $325/kWh
* 2.4kW output
* 1200W solar charging: 12v to 150v
* 20ms UPS
* Inverter losses: 34 watt
* server fuckery, see https://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2023-11/03-growatt_and_home_assistant
Ecoflow Delta Pro 3:
* $2300 for 4kWh, so $575/kWh
* 4kW output
* 2600W solar charging via two ports: 30-150v to 15A (1600W), 11-60V to 20A (1000W)
* 10ms UPS
* Can do 240v
* Can be controlled locally via BLE: https://github.com/rabits/ha-ef-ble
* Inverter losses: 50 watt
Oupes Mega 2:
* $760 for 2kWh, so $380/kWh
* 2.5kW output
* 2100W solar input, 18-140V to 15A (manual suggests 6 240W panels at 148V OCV in series)
Oupes Guardian 6000:
* $1700 for 4.6kWh, so $369/kWh
* Can do 240V
* 3.6kW output
* 2100W solar charging at 18-130V/15A
Jackery Explorer 2000 V2:
* $800 for 2kWh, so $400/kWh
* 2.2kW output
* Only 400 watts solar input? Fuck off
Pecron E3600LFP
* $1050 for 3kWh, so $350/kWh
* 3.6kW output
* 2400W solar charging via 2 ports, both 32-150V to 20A
* 20ms UPS
* Inverter losses: 46W
* BUT: for $2200, nearly same price as the Delta Pro, get two of these and run 240v and have 6kWh of storage.
* BUT: quite loud!
Bluetti Elite 300
* $1100 for 3kWh, so $366/kWh
* 2.4kW output
* 1200W solar input, 12-60V panels
* 10ms UPS
Anker Solix F3800
* $2000 for 3.8kWh, so $526/kWh
* 6kW output
* Can do 240V
Anker Solix F3000
* $1400 for 3kWh, $466/kWh
* 2400W solar charging via two ports, high and low like on the Ecoflow: 11-165V@17A for 1600W and 11-60V@17A for 800W
And the panels were $45 each off Facebook marketplace, I bought 16 of them 'cause I was figuring they'd be WAY more degraded than they are, but the whole solar-panels-degrading-a-lot thing turned out to be a another BIG FAT SMELLY LIE to go on the PILE of BIG FAT SMELLY LIES THAT PEOPLE TELL ABOUT SOLAR PANELS. $720. But dude threw in a bunch of 8-gauge wire as well.
I already had nice big crimpers that can do MC4's, but if you don't then maybe about $30 or $40. I've spent maybe a hundred bucks on this-and-that bits-and-bobs like connectors and conduit and drill bits and shit.
The next chunk of money will be in permanent mounting for these rather than leaning them jankily against the front wall of my house; some folk might buy pre-made racks but I plan to raccoon the fuck out of it with leftover chunks of timber that I've got lying around the place.
We're under three grand and it's Working, but you can absolutely start dipping your toes in for WELL under a grand if you don't currently have designs on doing The Whole Ass Entire House, and you know what, if you buy a tiny little battery and a single solar panel and just plug one thing into it then a) you're doing more than most folk and b) if you get Bit by the solar bug and change your mind about the whole-ass-entire-house thing, it's not like your one solar panel instantly becomes junk, you can incorporate it into whatever future plans
Two things to note about these all-in-one solar-generator doodads:
1. This is The Most Expensive Way to do it, because these boxes have charge controller, battery and inverter all in one convenient lump that you can lug around, go camping with, take to your friends when they've got a power outage, all that stuff. The true Way Of The Raccoon involves buying all those components separately and screwing them to a sheet of chipboard for like a third of the money.
2. If you look at the battery capacity you can get in, say, an Anker Solix C1000, they're $450 off Amazon, and you see only one kilowatt-hour and do Sad Face because that's half a grand and it won't even run a fridge for a full day, remember that you can also pull 600 watts into that battery from the sun as long as it's shining
Solar system update, wired my three panels in parallel now and plugged them into the low side and now it's going great.
The ecoflow's got two solar inputs (the exact specs are in that comparison post above) and on the low side it starts sniffing for power at a much lower voltage, which means I'm getting 50 watts at like 7:30! 30 watts is the tipping point where the battery starts charging a little bit rather than discharging so I'm happy with that. Understanding now that this is less about chasing the Peak Output High Score and more about how can I make power continuously throughout a big proportion of the day
May 8, 2026, 5:31 PM@ifixcoinops I'm all in on racooning 👍
@ifixcoinops Wow you weren't kidding! I'm seeing a 10 year old 9KW setup, inverters and all, for $2,500.
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)
@ifixcoinops can confirm, electron-hole pairs are magic
@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...
@Dtraslerwriting
I don't know exactly what Dan's got but it's something a bit like this:
https://us.ecoflow.com/products/river-3-portable-power-station
Dan's is probably bigger and more.powerful than that one. Have a look at the various models and get a feel for the price-performance curve.
@sheddi @Dtraslerwriting aye that's how it's going, just like that but bigger, Ecoflow Delta Pro 3.
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?
@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.
@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...)
May 10, 2026, 9:37 PM@sheddi @ifixcoinops Hydropower, too. It's really all sunlight, even the fossil fuels (although over a very long timespan), except nuclear.
@cm
I mean nuclear power is from the sun too, just not our sun.
@sheddi @ifixcoinops
@sheddi eh? Did they think that running the same heater off coal somehow made *less* heat?
@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.
@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 :)
@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?
@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
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
@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
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.
@ardaxi Eh? How do you put 26 amps through a 16 amp breaker without opening the breaker?
And what's drawing the 10 amps?
@ardaxi And also is there not a fuse in the plug coming off the inverter?
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.
May 15, 2026, 4:05 PM@ifixcoinops The concern is that you could have one wall socket that's got wires rated for 16A loads drawing much more than that because only some of the power comes through the 16A breaker. It's also directly connected to the inverter that's on the same side of the breaker, so it can take power from that too. That gets the wires to the wall plug hotter than you'd like.
Definitely not a thing that's going to immediately burn your house down and it can be done safely if there's enough give, but I still worry about these plug things and whether people know the risks involved.
@ardaxi you're gonna have to draw me a diagram here mate, I'm still not seeing what's drawing the extra 10 amps here
May 15, 2026, 4:17 PM@ifixcoinops It's about the potential power draw. Here's a rough diagram where the breaker won't trip even though the circuit is overloaded.
It's not an immediate danger, the danger is that you're defeating the safety a breaker provides.
![flowchart TD
A[Power grid] -- 16A breaker ---> B[Wall socket]
C[Inverter] -- 10A supply ---> B
B -- 26A ---> D[Load]](https://hsnl.social/system/media_attachments/files/116/579/483/554/005/019/original/86b4063659031a73.png)
@ardaxi Ah, I see. Can't wait for all the forum posts about why does my breaker only trip on cloudy days :P
@ardaxi ohhhhh I get it now
So, like,
Mains -> busbar -> breaker -> outlet A -> three kettles and a welder in parallel -> outlet A -> breaker -> busbar -> mains, opens the breaker
but
Mains -> busbar -> breaker -> some other outlet B in parallel with a microinverter plugged in -> outlet A -> three kettles and a welder -> outlet A -> breaker -> busbar -> mains, fed partially from the microinverter without involving the breaker at all, so outlet A could theoretically pull more than the breaker's rated for, is that right?
May 15, 2026, 5:45 PM@ifixcoinops oh no, oh dear... You've got me looking at the stone built shed in my garden with the shonky, but perfectly angled, tin roof and thinking "that's very solarpunk datacentre shaped"
@reb haha do iiiiiittttt
May 15, 2026, 8:36 PM@ifixcoinops If you're up for it, I'd love to ask some questions about your solar learning when I'm not knee deep in prep for a show. Would that be okay?
@ifixcoinops Now I'm curious about used panels, and I see that someone an hour's drive south of me is offering 40 used 380 W panels for USD 2000. They're only selling as a complete lot, but damn.
@ifixcoinops What does it mean for a solar generator to be “quite loud?”
@Albright quite roary fans apparently
@ifixcoinops I imagine you forevermore responding to "Watt's up?" by checking the data first and then saying "yes they are!" or "no, clouds are keeping em low today"
@ifixcoinops my guess is that the MPPT is not great at low voltages. Some MPPTs fall back to PWM when the voltage is too close to battery voltage. Three panels upped the voltage to a range where it manages better peak tracking.
Anyway, the best thing about panels being so cheap is you can just overwhelm these petty details to the point you'll be charging your car when it's raining. In my experience.
@ifixcoinops Your raccoon approach is wonderful. There are trade offs about positioning the panels for your site. We are trying to be mostly off grid here in Southern Minnesota. December and January have our biggest loads from heating the home. At the same time the solar generation is at a low point from the angle of the sun and the short daylight hours. A 45 degree angle for the ground mounted panels is maximizing collection. Half the panels face south east, half face southwest.
@ifixcoinops Part two. The panels facing SE maximize catching morning sunshine. Thus getting power to the batteries as soon as possible. Thus keeping the system from switching to the grid. The panels facing SW maximize catching evening sunshine. Thus feeding power to the batteries as long as possible. The utility company doesn’t have room for collecting private solar. Therefore we have no incentive to build up credit for the winter. #minnesota, #solar