this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2025
134 points (94.1% liked)
No Stupid Questions
42379 readers
1687 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Probably because it would weigh 40 pounds and cost $1700. It would probably also suck, and break very easily.
And having any of that shit anywhere close to saltwater? Hell no. The electronics should be corroded within a week.
Edit: while we definitely have the technology to do this, we just don’t have the capability to mass produce them at a reasonable price or of any reasonable quality. Current technology and materials also come with a lot of really crappy limitations. Maybe something like this might get developed if a lot of people suddenly show interest in it, but aside from that happening, it could be a while.
Developing a product like this could take hundreds of millions of dollars and 10 years to get something like in the picture above.
There's plenty of solar panels that don't weigh a lot these days
Nah. You could DIY something like that for 30€ or something, let alone mass produce. The only problem is that the folding would be more clumsy and probably take a bit more space folded
Edit: picture of a real product from which you could DIY one:
I have 2, around 25cm x 30cm and, when perfectly aligned to a strong summer sun, they do 1 watt and 2 watts respektively. Amazing.
Also, sitting outside in the harsh sun with a laptop? No thank you 😁.
This is really niche stuff for when you can't even reload your power bank once every couple of days IMO.
Yeah, that's my experience as well, you leave them out all day and get half a power bank if you're lucky. Basically only worthwhile if you're camping somewhere remote for an extended period of time.
I got one to charge my phone to 1%. Pretty happy
Now look at the standard umbrella and figure out if it is 25x30cm...
I've got a very similar panel myself, in fact it's probably a bit bigger.
If you leave it out all day, under ideal conditions, it will put around 10AH worth of charge into a power bank, maybe a bit more, so 40-50 watt-hours if you're lucky, over twelve hours.
Not a worthwhile amount of power.
Yeah this has always put me off solar panels like this, for their cost they make fuck all and if you just need power for a day or two it's better to get a battery. Only if you need weeks does solar+battery start to make sense instead.
That charges a phone just fine?
I use a smaller panel to charge a battery at a summer cottage. That keeps my and a few other people's phones charged pretty alright.
Not worthwhile if you're carrying it around all day.
Why? You can carry your phone and charge it at the same time.
Why do you need to charge your phone during the day anyway? Does it not last a full day?
Modern smartphones are terrible for energy consumption tbh, if you just want calls/SMS an old Nokia is so much more energy efficient.
I suppose turning the phone off can help save, but how many people could even comprehend that these days?
Slapping one together out of spare parts is not at all the same as mass producing one in a factory.
And whatever you could slap together for 30 bucks would, as I said, in previous comment, suck and break very easily, not to mention that you wouldn’t be able to bring it anywhere close to the ocean for fear of everything corroding extremely quickly.
Yeah. Mass producing can be orders of magnitude cheaper.
It’s a ridiculous argument. Of course something like that could be manufactured, it’s just too niche of a market so nobody has made it a reality (yet).
Lol that tiny ass solar setup ain't charging both a laptop and a phone, least of all with them running.
That can just barely charge a phone (source - I've done a lot of math around this, solar panels have very low output per square meter).
I would think of using the solar panel to charge a battery pack instead, then you can power devices from that. Although you may be charging the battery for 8 hours to power a laptop for 2.
Who said it would?
The picture clearly implies that.
A computer?
There is a cable running from the solar panel to the laptop, implying the panel is charging the laptop.
Which, based on my experience with them, ain't happening.
Oh in that picture. Yeah I didn't even think about that, I'd imagine for the original use case you would charge a phone. Laptops need a lot of power, I didn't even dream of charging one off of a portable solar panel lol :D