I want to get my PC off the grids power; any decent solutions for an apartment that has access to a roof?
I want to get my PC off the grids power; any decent solutions for an apartment that has access to a roof?
As title says. I think my PC is using like a max of 500w when it's juicing but idles for less. I was thinking of using an ecoflow high grade setup for this. Anyone have experience doing something similar?
I might switch to a small micro tower setup by Dell or Lenovo that uses like 120w max. The new Mac minis seem to cap out at 39w though which is crazy.
Or a laptop, those are crazy efficient, have a battery, and can deal with outages. I don't know anything about solar but perhaps there is a special solution for lower voltages? Remove the transformer from your laptop. For example there's solar for charging phones, and perhaps that works for laptops too.
Newer laptops often charge through USB-C I believe, so that should presumably work the same way as charging a phone. Whether one of those solar phone chargers could generate enough to charge a laptop I have no idea, but if anyone wants to try it I'd be interested to hear the results lol
You don't directly charge a laptop from a solar panel. You charge a power bank and use the power bank to charge your laptop. I think that works fine, but you're going to want a bigger solar panel setup than you'd use to keep a cell phone or tablet running, since laptops use a lot more power, power banks designed for laptops are correspondingly bigger, and you don't want to take days to charge your power bank.
And I'll take this opportunity to plug one of my favorite articles, on the details of running a server completely off of solar power:
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is-a-solar-powered-website/
A laptop with USB-C charging is probably the best option by far.
The setup would be solar panel ---wire---> battery -----usb-c cable -----> laptop.
This will be way more efficient than trying to power a full desktop setup.
If it’s possible, look into getting a DC-DC ATX power supply. Idk if it’s easy but you’ll save some efficiency by not converting DC-AC-DC if so
There are off the shelf options for emergency power supply, even with the option to add small mobile solar-panels. But they tend to be really expensive.
For low powered laptops there are even fold-able camping solar panels that have a USB plug. I have used that to power and recharge my Pinebook Pro on some extended trips in the past. Probably also works with chromebooks and some low powered ultra-books.
If you want to try your hand at a DIY solution: the best way is to get a PicoPSU ATX power supply that can be directly connected to a 12V/24V battery. They are meant for automotive computing, but work fine with a regular battery, a cheap solar-charge controller and some panels on the roof or balcony.
I have to ask how do you like the pine book pro?
I have one of their phones but the software at the time was really under developed so it mostly sat for a few years
It is basically just another Linux laptop. Small caveats with not all software being available for ARM64, but for the most part it works fine. Contrary to the PinePhones there isn't much complicated hardware in these laptops that needs special drivers, wake on notification or other battery-optimizations.
Cool the hear someone using pinebook, how is your experience with it so far?
After the first shock of all the import fees and taxes, which made it actually 50% more expensive than advertised, I got some good use out of it. Obviously one has to keep expectations in check, but 4GB ram with zram buffer turned out to be sufficient for all my usual tasks.
Look at Yoshino B4000. It's much smaller than an Ecoflow Delta but has the same performance.
Thank you! Appreciate it
Well the first question is what software you NEED to run, then we can figure out hardware.
I ended up figuring out im averaging about 120w on my desktop which isn't bad at all.
A web browser, a code editor and some docker containers or binaries. Nothing incredibly strenuous. Like I'm not gaming.
So effectively light enough that it could run on a raspberry PI 4. Well that would put you under 10W
Another option you may consider, if you’re already open to using Apple technology, is a MacBook. It would be like having a Mac mini with a built-in battery. I’m not sure if you already have batteries in your setup, but all of Apple’s current lineup of laptops are basically equally as performant as their desktop options right now (excluding the super high end stuff like the Mac Pro).
Definitely will look into the MacBooks power consumption. The logic checks out for sure. I have to measure my current laptops too.
Even if the CPU has the same clockspeed between desktop/laptop, the desktops usually have better thermals whereas the laptops throttle early. Although not the only one, Mac is notorious for advertising their maximum clock speed which is never achieved for more than a split second in reality. I'm not too knowledgeable about the replaceable parts on a Mac desktop but that's a general strength of desktops too. YMMV.
that’s not really the case with the apple silicone macbooks… it’s very difficult to get most of them to thermal throttle afaik