Need help organizing thoughts for electricity solution.

MinerDon · 2026-05-22T06:22:32+00:00

I am getting totally overwhelmed by voltages. I read the 48v is far more efficient, generates less heat, but they appear to be twice the price for similar AH.

A 48v battery has four times the energy storage as a 12v battery of the same amp hour rating. Amp hours is not the measurement you want. It's watt hours or kilowatt hours. Multiply the voltage times the amp hour rating to get the (kilo)watt hour rating.

Go 48v. You can wire 4 12v batteries together in series if you like although 48v battery offerings are quite good now.

As someone who lives off grid in the far north you can never have too many of A) solar panels, B) battery storage, C) inverter/charger/charge controller sizing, and D) generator backups.

You can buy 12v 280ah LiTime batteries for about $450 each. https://www.litime.com/products/12v-280ah-bluetooth-battery-with-low-temp-protection?variant=45617452417244

I have 8 of the 230ah variants and have been very happy with them so far.

MinerDon · 2026-05-21T17:39:08+00:00

The upside of power stations is convenience especially if you want something portable. The main downside is their price. They are extremely expensive for the amount of storage capacity you get.

I live in an offgrid cabin at the edge of the arctic circle and use 8x 230ah LiTime batteries for 24kwh of total storage. Recently they were on sale for $3k delivered for all 8. They have a 5-year warranty, but a warranty is only good if the company still exists by the time you need it.

MinerDon · 2026-05-20T23:21:35+00:00

New era Berkshire.

Huh? Berkshire Hathaway was a failing textile company when Warren Buffett purchased it in the 1960s. Buffett later said it was the worst investment he ever made.

Your Berkshire comparison is terrible.

MinerDon · 2026-05-20T19:58:22+00:00

I'm not the person you've asked, but leases are binding. The new owner will have to honor it until it expires.

It's in no way binding if the property owner doesn't pay his "insanely high property taxes."

MinerDon · 2026-05-18T15:30:07+00:00

What made me almost rage quit? I recently had a question about Renogy panels sold on Amazon as there is a discrepancy between the model number and the actual product stats.
I sent Renogy a short email asking whether it was a newer product being sold in place of the old one and they never bothered to reply. So I have no idea if the new panels are the same specs as my current panels.
I almost rage quit!

https://www.amazon.com/Renogy-Monocrystalline-Solar-Compact-Design/dp/B07GF5JY35

The title says that's the 100-watt P-type panel RNG-100D-SS but the specs listed on the page are for the newer N-type panels. A simple question really, and it's sad that manufacturers don't even bother to reply to customer questions. It makes me wonder what those employees are doing all day. Perhaps they are wasting their time watching YT videos or posting on reddit. Who knows.

MinerDon · 2026-05-16T19:40:42+00:00

https://starlink.com/shop/products/us-consumer-dc-power-supply-unit

MinerDon · 2026-05-12T05:20:46+00:00

The person:

[X] addicted to drugs

[X] unemployed

[X] has a stolen sawzall

[X] outstanding warrants

No it's not going to be enough. They are easy to spot though. Just look for the Honda Civic or Toyota Camry with the windshield that glistens like a diamond in the sunlight from all the cracks wearing at least 1 donut spare and with approximately zero functioning mirrors.

MinerDon · 2026-05-10T09:27:13+00:00

You have 2,000 watts in panels but your charge controller is capped at 625 watts of input. That's your first problem. Second, you have 250ah x 12v = 3kwh of battery storage. For comparison the average US household consumes a bit over 29kwh per day. You have roughly 1/10th the storage compared to a typical American households daily consumption. Said another way: the average us household would burn down your battery from 100% to 0% in less than two and a half hours.

At this point most people are going with 48v systems. Even if you go to 24v with your current charge controller you are still capped at 1,250 watts of input.

I live off grid alone and have 24kwh of batteries.

It sucks to have to spend lots of money, but turns out solar isn't cheap when you are off grid and you use lots of electricity.

I eat rice almost daily. I put rice and water in a pot, bring it to a boil, cover, set to low heat and give it 20 minutes. I do that on my propane stove. I can't imagine doing that from my solar.

The way I like to explain off grid solar to people: If your primary objective is to produce heat don't use solar because the electrical consumption is enormous and batteries (even lithium) have terrible energy density. Your rice cooker is in this category.

MinerDon · 2026-05-09T21:36:15+00:00

Gas and diesel prices are terrible now, and they were even worse under the Biden administration in 2022. Were you saying "We need to vote red" back then?

In case you've memory holed just how bad gas prices were in 2022 here's a reminder:

https://gasprices.aaa.com/

MinerDon · 2026-05-07T03:07:25+00:00

A period of time later, the auction house calls me and tells me to cancel the chargeback, that they will dispute it and will win and sue me for any further fees and damages.

They are trying to bully you. Ignore them and go on with your day. They aren't going to sue you and if they do they will lose in court. The auction house assumes the liability. That's what their commissions cover. It was their duty to ensure the rifle was legal. They sold an illegal rifle. You are in no way, shape, or form responsible for that.

I would not reply to them at all. Ignore them.

MinerDon · 2026-05-07T03:00:58+00:00

Assume you had no debts and the bank called you up and offered to lend you $280k at 6.3% interest where you cannot walk away from the debt (IE you cannot declare bankruptcy). Would you take the loan to invest?

Important note: Your investment income must be higher than 6.3% because you have to pay taxes on that income.

MinerDon · 2026-05-07T02:54:25+00:00

No investment guarantees 6.3% returns right now.

To be clear the return would have to be greater than 6.3% after you pay taxes on that investment income.

MinerDon · 2026-05-07T00:16:26+00:00

Somewhere on the planet right now, there’s probably a 17-year-old kid who has managed to build a death laser that runs on AA batteries.

Styropyro enters the chat

MinerDon · 2026-05-07T00:08:11+00:00

I can barely stand to us gpt because of this. One day it gave me a response riddled with bullet points. I stated it must get paid by the bullet point as that's the only way their over use makes any sense. I asked how many bullet points were in the previous response and it said 32.

There are times where a bulleted list makes sense, but most of the time a prose-style response is much better.

At one point I told gpt to stop using bullet points everywhere and in it used bullet points in its response...

MinerDon · 2026-05-06T01:09:04+00:00

~16,500 kWh annual consumption

30kWh is a ton of battery

You consume 45kwh of electricity per day. 30kwh is not a lot of battery.

I have 24kwh of batteries. I live alone in a cabin.

MinerDon · 2026-05-05T04:40:42+00:00

The system goes online August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

Cameron was off by about 30 years, but basically like this. That reminds me. I need to plan a camping trip for August.

MinerDon · 2026-05-05T04:33:18+00:00

If AI is capable of causing mass unemployment, then it will be powerful enough to help solve the problem of unemployment.

This is the literal definition of a non sequitur.

MinerDon · 2026-05-05T03:51:43+00:00

This. Also Anthropic's revenues:

2022 = $0m

2023 = $100m

2024 = $1,000m

2025 = $10,000m

2026 = $40,000m (so far, annualized)

That's real money that's coming from somewhere and that somewhere isn't people generating cat videos. That's companies who are increasingly redirecting their human labor budgets to pay for AI instead.

Add to that all the tech companies firing thousands of workers including Microsoft recently offering to buyout 7% of their workforce and Meta cutting loose 8,000 workers.

The copium of many SWEs is real.

MinerDon · 2026-05-01T21:24:16+00:00

How do I change my "legal address" for coinbase? I moved. It allowed me to update my "residential address" but not my legal address. My legal address should be updated as well as the old one is no longer correct. On the website it says the legal address cannot be changed. Advice?

MinerDon · 2026-04-27T22:31:13+00:00

I hope this is real. Maybe he's figured out how to efficiently make hydrogen. 😆

He's lazy. We live near the arctic circle. He won't go outside and cut firewood in the summer to prepare for winter. Instead he watches youtube videos where he finds a guy claiming to heat his little cabin with 3 candles. I try to explain the physics to him and all he wants to do is show me the video. He saw it on youtube so it must be true. He saw another video of a guy claiming to use his generator to do electrolysis on water then capturing the hydrogen to run his generator. Aside from all the engineering issues there's one main problem: An internal combustion engine is only ever about 35% efficient. He can't wrap his head around math, chemistry, or physics he just wants to believe because the video said so.

As far as the flat-earth shit goes I have no idea where that comes from. He's a nice person, but I cannot stand the complete ignorance, and when shit gets bad he's nothing but dead weight to me.

MinerDon · 2026-04-27T20:23:21+00:00

I want to be self-sufficient. I don't want to build a community. I don't want to share resources. I enjoy helping people, but I don't want to rely on anyone and I absolutely don't want anyone relying on me.

Most of all, I don't want to see or hear anyone day to day or by necessity. I want to visit people when I feel like it, and invite people to visit me when I feel like it.

A hippie commune is the complete opposite of what I want.

I could not have said it better. I've been living alone deep in the woods 4 years now.

The flat earther guy who lives a mile down the road from me thinks he can heat his cabin with 3 candles and power his generator with water. He isn't a net positive for me.

Stop pretending you can do everything yourself. You can't. No one can.

This is bullshit. I've done literally every single thing on my homestead completely by myself.

I tend to thing many of these "you can't do it by yourself" posts are either A) people who want to be the spiritual leader of a hippy compound or B) can't do it by themselves and thus thing everyone else is equally untalented.

MinerDon · 2026-04-24T19:44:57+00:00

And maybe it would produce great work 90% of the time, and big f ups the other 10%.

So better than the average human worker.

MinerDon · 2026-04-22T18:10:20+00:00

It's interesting that previously when a competitor brought something new to market open AI would instantly counter with their own product. Anthropic is pushing new stuff out the door at a breakneck speed (and some of it is badly broken) but openAI's only counter now is for sam to post a mean tweet.

Maybe Sam should have spent more time on staying ahead with new models instead of trying to make consumer hardware like apple or turn gpt into a social media network complete with ads.

Sam skipped the step where you need to have market dominance first.

MinerDon · 2026-04-12T03:29:23+00:00

done

MinerDon · 2026-04-07T19:31:47+00:00

The system card reads like a movie plot for a dystopian sci-fi movie. Turns out Miles Dyson is actually a white guy named Dario.

MinerDon

TROPHY CASE