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I'm only half kidding. I'm a bit of a prepper and I have lots of powerbanks and devices that charge from USB but besides idling my truck I really had no other way to charge any of them in case of a long-term power outage which seemed a bit of an oversight on my part.

Not like this solves the issue. 30 watts (under ideal conditions) isn't much but it's a start.

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[–] IcedRaktajino@startrek.website 200 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (43 children)

Be careful. Those things are addicting.

That's how I started: a little 5v, 6 watt panel I stuck in the window to charge my phone while I worked. Then I wanted to charge some other stuff, so I got a 15W panel. 15w panel was nice, but 100 watts was much better, so I bought two 100W fold-up panels like you've got.

Then I bought a big 1 KWh power station that could supply up to 2000 watts. I take it camping and charge it from the two 100W fold up panels.

But, sadly, the demon had its claws in me and refused to let go. "Why should I only use that solar power two or three times a year?" the voice said. So I bought 4x 200 watt panels so I could use the power station to power my homelab and refrigerator during the day.

Still, that wasn't enough to satiate my addition. Now I've got 4 KW on the roof, 32 KWh of house battery, and a 10 KW inverter that is currently powering our house.

Am I satiated now? Only time will tell.

[–] Serinus@lemmy.world 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

That's a weird panel to battery ratio. Guess you've gotta work on that now. Got more room on your roof, preferably south-facing?

Though if there are ground systems that can aim the panels and you have room there, that could be really cool.

[–] IcedRaktajino@startrek.website 5 points 2 weeks ago

The usable south-facing roof area is full, unfortunately. I'll have to do ground mount in the back yard and run a bunch of conduit if I want to add any more PV.

The 32 kWh of batteries are made of two 16 kWh batteries in parallel. Since this system is in lieu of a backup generator, I have it configured to only draw the batteries down to 50%. That leaves the bottom 16 kWH available for emergency use. Basically, for day to day usage, I treat the battery as being half the capacity it really is.

I've only been running this system for about 3 weeks now, but the batteries have been operating between 65% and 90% pretty consistently even running the A/C pretty heavily. They've been closer to low 60s this past week, but the wildfire smoke was choking out the sunlight Thursday and Friday.

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