I thought the US had some law about unsubscribing within two clicks r something?

I guess it depends on the specifics of what you are worried about. I have a catchall set up for a domain I own, and so I can make up an email on the spot. I’ve never had trouble getting those accepted.

But for random internet stuff I tend to use either Firefix Relay or Simple Login. I use these most of the time and don’t normally have issues, but if I do then I use my own domain.

I think these relay email services (which are not temp/disposable emails btw) let you set up with your own domain too.

There is already plenty of empirical evidence to support the claims of the harms of social media, but in spite of this, change is glacial.

I think at one point you could make the same argument about medicines. The problem is that politicians are appointed with a popularity contest.

I don’t remember all the arguments of the article, but when you think about it, the harms of social media are medical. It’s possible that we could expand the scope of the current medicine approval boards to include algorithms, with their job not being to understand the algorithm but to understand the research on mental health.

I don’t have all the answers, but I do think it’s an idea worth exploring.

I was meeting with my team the other day, and the conversation turned to our mortgages. My boss: ah yes, the reason we are all here.

In my view social media is probably not the problem, but the algorithms they use that are designed to be addictive and manipulative.

I saw an article once arguing that the algorithms should be regulated in a similar way to medicine. Give some base ingredients they can use freely (e.g. sort by newest first), then require any others to run studies to prove they are not harmful.

There would be an expert board that approves or declines the new algorithm in the same way medicines are approved today (the important bit being that they are experts, not politicians making the decision).

Lemmy is a different kind of platform. Twitter wasn’t for me, but I never clicked with Mastodon either. Some people like the microblog format but I just never got it, or maybe I never worked out how to use it probably.

90s me would have killed for speeds like that!

But a vehicle that new would be pretty far outside the budget right now.

40kWh of house batteries is probably going to run you closer than you’d think to the price of one of these cars… unless you can find some second hand ones (all the same type so you can string them together).

Anyway, you’ve got me a bit curious now about the possibility of finding an EV battery in a junkyard and maybe using that as solar battery storage. Though … those usually run at pretty high voltages.

They often come in multiple cells, depending on your abilities you might be able to wire them up to keep the voltage low. One thing to consider is that your ability to monitor the battery’s charge level and your power usage, in my experience, came as part of the battery. If you’re going to be living off grid, it might be important to have that functionality which wouldn’t come with random ex-car battery cells.

And there’s always the backup generator, which will cost a fortune to run, but will prevent anybody freezing.

If you’re gonna burn stuff inside, maybe a (modern) fireplace would help? Cost to run depends a lot on where you can get wood from, but it doesn’t need power, they generally put out a lot of heat, and you can even get wet-back varieties to help with hot water heating. That would go a long way to getting you less reliant on solar generation in the winter months.

Don’t worry about that, they’re plastic drums. The biggest concern would be that they might at some point freeze and burst … but that would never happen if I fill them with an antifreeze solution. The real biggest concern is just how much space they would take up … and possibly how much weight they’d be adding to the floors.

Plastic cracks with age too! Especially with 200kg of water inside them for a long period. The weight on the floor could be a concern, water is very heavy.

Yeah, may end up having multiple charge controllers in addition to the inverter’s built-in solar charge controller(s).

Personally, I’d prefer to have those systems be entirely separate in the first place, so each one can be sized according to need and each one can be independently replaced if it breaks. But it seems that most inverters capable of handling our ~6.2kw absolute peak usage already come as ‘all in one’ inverters with solar charge controllers built in … I guess I might as well use the built-in charge controller, at least for part of the solar array.

While we miss out on a bit of power when our generation is over 10kW, I don’t think it’s that much, and we have a 15kW system. Realistically making 10kWh over a big portion of the day is way more important than making 15kWh briefly in the middle of the day. You might need that time in winter though, depending on daylight hours. But personally I’d think more panels to get generation up over a long period would be more important than capturing the peak generation.

Our solar company used this site for their estimates, https://www.opensolar.com/ which you might be able to sign up for and see estimates of what you’d need in your location.

6.2kW isn’t actually that hard to hit. You might use that if you oven is heating up while you use the microwave. Well, maybe this is harder to hit if you have 120v power, but with out 240v power it’s pretty easy. I presume you’re talking kW (power load) not kWh (energy usage over time).

Even if we changed absolutely nothing about our usage, if we built the system to be capable of providing 4kw reliably, we’d only need to use the generator ~6 hours per year.

Your battery can likely handle the peak loads above this. I’d expect you to break out the generator only when batteries are running flat, not to handle peak loads. A battery will probably provide 10kW peak load or a bit above this. Your main issue will be if you don’t manage to charge your batteries during the day due to poor weather, then you need to run 2 (or 3) days on your batteries instead of 1.

And sure, I wouldn’t mind seeing that data.

I’ll find somewhere to upload it and DM you. I’d rather not feed it into AI scrapers by posting it publically 😅

I think 20kwh battery would be the absolute bare minimum for us, and I’m leaning toward at least 40kwh.

Don’t underestimate how expensive that will be! Ripping all your electricals out and re-doing it to code will start to look like the cheaper option! It’s not unusual for one battery to be more than half the cost of a solar system. If you have the money it will give you peace of mind, but you don’t need the capacity for daytime usage as you’ll just go straight from solar panels through inverter to what you’re powering.

And the batteries will lose capacity over time, so it’s better to overbuild and not need to replace them as soon

Batteries are a quickly evolving technology, you may well save money or gain higher capacity by only buying as you need the capacity (as the capacity of your batteries falls over time). Also, there is evolving technology in relation to cars too. A mid-range EV may have a 60kWh battery. Tesla is testing technology where you can plug your car in and have the car power the house overnight then charge in the the day when you have excess solar production. I would never suggest buying a Tesla but the technology sounds like a good idea and in 5-10 years it might be available across a wide range of cars.

*Another upgrade path for the future is to run a DC power circuit through the house, at least for some lights and little stuff like phone/tablet chargers. DC power will be significantly more efficient because you don’t have to go through that 80% efficient inverter to get it out of the batteries. Maybe I can even manage to find a heat pump that runs directly on DC.

Unless you have incandescent lights, I think that’s the wrong thing to focus on. Lights use hardly any power compared to heating. Heating air, heating water, heating your over, heating a clothes dryer. AC can use a lot too. If you can get those via DC that might help, but honestly that sounds expensive compared to just throwing on some more panels and using them in the day.

You can get heat pump hot water heaters, which will save energy. Ours also allows control for excess solar production, heating to a higher temp when solar production is high. By heating to 75 Celsius (the max) it will go all night without needing to heat again, and be about 65 in the morning. It can get to 65 with the heat pump, then has an element to get to 75 (less efficient but it’s only used for the excess solar anyway). It still comes out of the tap at 50 even if the tank is 75 so I don’t have to worry about scalding the kids or anything. I do this control via Home Assistant and a wifi connection but it is advertised as “solar ready” and has a cord that apparently can connect to a solar system to control that excess usage. It’s an all in one unit, the whole thing sits outside.

You can also get heat pump clothes dryers, and of course a heat pump for heating/cooling.

We’re on pure electric everything here, after all. No gas of any kind.

Depending on climate (I keep saying that as I don’t want to be responsible for you freezing to death), that could make a big difference. We are a family of 5, but the house is insulated in ceiling/external walls/under floor and it has double glazed windows. Yours is 100 years old. So I’m thinking that 40kWh may actually be a good amount of battery capacity for you.

For the water heater in particular, I’ve already got a plan: going to put that sucker on a timer, so it can only run during the daytime. Actually already got a $1 thrift store timer, big old electro-mechanical thing, that should be able to do that job.

I’ve heard of this a lot actually. It’s a good plan, seems to work for a lot of people.

In fact, after some experimenting to see how quickly it heats up from dead cold, I might not even have it run during all daylight hours, just start it up a few hours before we usually shower.)

If it’s a modern hot water heater, like you say it will stay hot easily. Let it turn on some time in the morning once the sun is up and strong, that way you have it hot if you need it and it’s unlikely to make too much difference in the power - especially since most of the year you’ll be making more than you can use.

To some degree, I might try to do the same thing with heat, using programmable thermostats to raise the temperature during the day and then reduce heating demand during the night. Thermal storage is a lot cheaper than battery storage, after all. Who knows, might even go super crazy and actually build in some water tanks that can be heated during the day and then release that heat at night.

This sort of thing used to be what people would install in their houses. Older houses around here often have “night store” heaters, which is where they are on timers for the cheap night electricity and they heat bricks within a metal cover that then leak that heat out the rest of the day. That sort of thing but heated in the day would be ideal, I have no idea if you can still buy that sort of thing off the shelf but your hot water idea seems like the same thing - just that you need that water stored inside, and one day (whether next year or in 30 years) they will rust through and make a big mess! If you keep an eye on it, then it seems like it would work. After all, it’s basically a radiator.

If it gets really desperate, I might even put the refrigerators on timers. They should be able to stay cold overnight okay, and then they can run all they want during the day.

If you use one of the many online tools to mark your location and roof angle, it can tell you your estimated production over the course of a year. Inverters tend to only handle 10kWh production at a time (with short term spikes above that), but if you can generate even an average of 5kWh over 8 hours in winter that’s 40kWh of power. It’s hard to imagine 2 people using more than that outside of very specific events, in which a backup generator will likely be cheaper than another battery (if you don’t have one already) and can be filled up again even if the sun isn’t shining (which isn’t the case for an extra battery).

Right, I’ll find that solar generation data and send it through.

A) Ah ok, well good that you’ve thought it through. I had disconnecting from the grid in mind when we fist did ours, and it turned out to be the wrong approach, but our situation was quite different.

B) That seems weird but ok, some power companies here don’t offer anything related to solar but we have a national spot price buy/sell system so almost anyone can start a power company selling the grid power, and you can use almost any power company from almost anywhere, but I know that we’re lucky with that. We are limited (everyone is limited) at how much we can sell at a time in order to keep the power line voltage within tolerance, which I guess your power company handles in another way.

C) Ah that sucks. We get paid 2/3 of the value of buying when selling to the grid - though it is in credit. I haven’t worked out what happens when we never use the credit but it doesn’t seem to get arbitrarily reset!

All that combined has me leaning more toward cutting the cord entirely and going off-grid with battery storage … even if it means I have to buy a shitton of batteries and/or have a backup generator available for those few exceptionally cold winter nights.

Yeah it sounds like you’ve got some strong arguments for it!

And wouldn’t it be great to tell the power company to fuck off and never get another power bill ever again?

Well, I like my power bills because most of the year they are credits 😆

It seems like most of my experience might not be helpful to you. I’m willing to send you a year of power generation data from Home Assistant if you think it would be helpful? It would show you the variation day to day and might help you see what kind of impact there is with poor weather.

At a guess I’d say I don’t think one 10kWh+ battery would be enough to go off grid. Two might cover most situations if you have enough panels, don’t live in a super cold area (or have non-electric heating), and do power hungry things only in the daytime (charge car, run dishwasher, run clothes dryer, etc). Also an electric stove can use more power than you might think, cooking a roast dinner can chew through half our battery no trouble. Plus it will work out better if you shower in the morning (so heating mostly happens when the sun is shining). Three batteries still won’t cover every day but I think if you have a generator available and are careful about timing during the winter period then it should get you through most of the time.

Solar panels are pretty cheap now, so don’t under do it. Load up on your daytime capacity and use the power then, to reduce your reliance on the still expensive batteries.

Maybe make the call based on the lead time to order the components. If you find you didn’t get enough capacity, it’s easier to solve if you have a 2 week wait to get some more panels and an extra battery vs if you have to wait 6 months.

Sorry, not sure if I’m helping 😅

We have a 15kWh system in a temperate area, and in the winter some days we only make 4kWh the whole day, and others we make 90kWh or more (so long as we can find things to use that power - it only generates power that has somewhere to go, and we are capped at 5kW to the grid at a time). As far as I’m aware, 15kWh is a large residential system, to the point it may be at or over a legal cap depending on your area.

One thing we noticed is that a battery doesn’t actually hold that much power. We will easily chew through double the battery if the heating is on overnight (a heat pump system, so it’s also reasonably efficient). Our hot water is also heated electrically.

Do you not have the ability to sell to the grid or have net metering? When I was looking at it, the calculation was easy. If you can sell to the grid forban ok amount compared to what it costa to buy, if you have enough generation capacity to be off grid, then it’s always worth being connected to the grid because excess power in the summer will easily cover the cost of being connected. I live somewhere with a lot of competition for power companies, with some specialising in solar, so YMMV.

As mentioned, the battery doesn’t help that much. I calculated a 40 year+ payoff time for the battery (the battery won’t last 40 years). To have enough battery capacity to cover the worst winter periods it may just be cheaper to save your money, not get a battery, and use the money you saved to pay for grid connection 😆

If your worst case scenario is in the winter (heating), that level of power generation may not be achievable on a residential system. If it’s the summer (AC), you have a shot.

Our system also lets us disconnect from the grid (and connect again) at the push of a button. You can always do your best, then use a setting like this (if yours has it) to test your ability before actually dropping your grid connection.

Sorry not sure if this answers your questions, seems more like a ramble, but I’m happy to answer any questions you have about my experience getting solar.

(I also did not DIY it, but did work with an installer to work out what we wanted)

I’m glad it’s not just me! Somehow video calls make everyone the same height, but I’m taller than average so inevitably I will get a shock at how short people are when we meet in person.

It does, yeah. If you aren’t averse to cloudflare then it’s a great option.

From memory I think it’s limited to http/https traffic, but that’s normally not an issue, just have all your services behind a reverse proxy.

Before I commit, is there a similar movie that would help decide if it’s my thing? The reason I’m asking:

Evolution received mixed-to-negative reviews from film critics with criticism for its storyline, screenplay and pacing; however, the performances of the cast received minor praise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_(2001_film)

IMO the header should stay at the top as part of the page. I know where it is, I’ll scroll up to it if I need to.

Like you, I find a header appearing and hiding quite difficult in specific circumstances.

This is a whole thing. The idea of karma (or something like it) is called the Just-world Falacy.

Thanks for the info, these were exactly the questions I had!

So this morning I had to go to my mother’s house for IT support as one of her monitors wasn’t working. I plugged the power cable back in to the back of the monitor and the problem was solved.

I’m not sure the level of IT support I provide is high enough to get blamed for anything 😆

I just generally try to avoid letting people know how technically savvy I am. I’d rather not do basic tech support for everyone I know.

At first I thought "well, an AI to help you get through hard parts sounds like a selling point for some people. Then I realised that Xbox is gonna be branded as the n00b console and people will tease owners for choosing the system that does it for you.