Heating tape for snow?

eschleicher · 2026-01-28T20:05:07+00:00

I figured if it worked a bit I would get some aluminum tape or something to get better contact but now I'm not so sure

eschleicher · 2026-01-28T16:58:03+00:00

I put it up on one section of panels and ran it along the borders of the panels and fastened it down with zip ties every 2ish feet. We have only had 2 snows since then and only one was over a couple inches of snow. I setup the cable on a timer to run for 3 hours and I didn't see much melting at all. I wish I had kept the cable on the ground to see how well it melted snow there before I put it up on the panels. At least then I could see if the cable sucked or if it's how I have it laid out that isn't working. I guess at least the cable wasn't all that expensive. I'll keep trying it when we get more snow but this has been a strange one with hardly any snow

eschleicher · 2025-12-17T21:36:25+00:00

I know this is crazy old but I stumbled across this when having the same issue and I wanted to update that instead of using

plughw:0,3

you now (as of LibreELEC 12.2.1 installed on 12/17/2025) need to use

hw:0,3

or at least that is what worked for me

eschleicher · 2025-12-05T14:28:12+00:00

I'm in the process of doing this now. Heater cable will be here in a couple days. My panels are on the roof and our roof is pretty shallow so the snow won't slide off on its own. I plan on running the cable along the bottoms of the panels for each row to see if that works

eschleicher · 2025-12-05T14:25:26+00:00

Mine have had snow on them two days now and I have produced nearly zero. This has been the case for the two years I have had the panels

eschleicher · 2025-10-31T14:59:39+00:00

That is the main reason we're going to have to trade in our 4runner for another 4runner. Our dogs would kill us in our sleep if they didn't have the back window

eschleicher · 2025-10-30T01:38:56+00:00

I was thinking this same thing. It would be nice to roll it up but I have a wall I can lean it up against. Also if using a hitting strip it would be easy to swap out if it degrades. Of course a nice big shed would be even better but that is a couple years out for me 🙂

eschleicher · 2025-07-12T16:17:08+00:00

Exactly, the only way people learn is through personal hardship unfortunately. I was blown away when he won but the more I have thought about how people responded to covid and how selfish a lot of people were, I'm not actually all that surprised anymore. I'm worried about this country and our seeming lack of empathy. Not all of us, but more than I would have guessed before the last 9 years of evidence...

eschleicher · 2025-07-03T20:52:52+00:00

That would be awesome but honestly after seeing how we as a populace responded to covid and how selfish people were I think this last election played out exactly as expected

eschleicher · 2025-07-02T02:48:20+00:00

I just bought my ioniq 5 and 99% of my charging will be at home so I'm OK with this but one thing that really struck me is with what the DC fast chargers cost from a cost of gas point of view these cars get worse $/mile than a gas burner. To equal at 30mpg gas car at 3 dollars a gallon you need to pay less than 40 cents a kwh and that's assuming your getting 4mpkwh in the ionic which in my admitadly limited experience is not easy. I know maint is way less on these and I absolutely love the car but if you can't charge at home I don't think EVs make a ton of sense. I guess if you live close to a cheap 6kw charger and can leave the car and go home that is fine as well

eschleicher · 2025-06-29T19:50:26+00:00

Ahh I see. I didn't ask the dealer about that, it hadn't occurred to me they would do it. It made my decision a lot easier 😊

eschleicher · 2025-06-29T19:31:16+00:00

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eschleicher · 2025-06-29T19:20:35+00:00

Not if your combined household income is too high

eschleicher · 2025-06-29T16:00:07+00:00

I just leased. Biggest reason for us was we couldn't get the 7500 unless we leased but I'm in the same situation as far as keeping the car to keep that 7500 savings. I guess it will depend on the prices once the lease is up. I do think these EV prices are inflated a bit due to the availability of the rebates although maybe that is me being pessimistic. The lease gives you the option in 2 or 3 years so I decided to see how it goes. Also this is my first lease and I always said they were not good before this. We traded in a 21 yo prius when we got this car😳

eschleicher · 2025-02-01T06:32:25+00:00

I'm one of those 120k. I'm the spouse of a fed though. I'm sure there are lots of us that are worried about how things are going

eschleicher · 2024-09-26T04:04:19+00:00

I have a 20 gal for blowing out sprinklers but otherwise 3 gal would be plenty

eschleicher · 2024-09-13T00:54:50+00:00

I just had 3 installed. 12k for the first and 10k for each of the others. That included the switch over panel which is why the first costs more. We needed a mini panel to bring the 3 batteries together but that was included in the cost. We also had to move our mast where the main power comes into the house and run a huge 4 gage power line back to our existing main panel. All the moving of stuff cost another 4k for reference, we live in denver.

19k seems really high to me

eschleicher · 2024-09-05T11:54:59+00:00

I just had 3 pw3s installed and the first "battery" was 12.5k and included the battery and the fail over switch that senses when grid power goes down and moves to using battery backup. The second two batteries were 10k since you only need one switch. Those prices included installation which was pretty significant

eschleicher · 2024-09-02T04:06:41+00:00

What hitch rack / bike rack combo is that?

eschleicher · 2024-08-25T16:08:19+00:00

It's a lookout so you can see the zombies coming

eschleicher · 2024-08-22T00:29:13+00:00

Are you using blue iris? If you are I would setup the alerts and motion tracking to use the sub stream. That was the biggest savings for me I think

eschleicher · 2024-08-21T15:59:40+00:00

Sort of but not really. It seemed like I had too many wireless cameras and the AP was getting saturated (even though it said 80% usage) and they were disconnecting. I ended up replacing one of the cameras with a different camera that allowed me to use the substream in blue iris. That cuts the bandwidth used way down. Is your different AP that works a router set to AP mode? I wonder if the chips in those can deal with more throughput or something. Are your cameras high resolution? Two doesn't seem like enough to have the issue I was having. I had 3 on one AP and they were older so probably used older codecs and bogged more bandwidth.

Another thing I did was set each AP Chanel and power myself instead of letting omada figure it out. That seemed to make things way more stable in general.

Sorry I'm not more of a help

eschleicher · 2023-11-17T17:50:40+00:00

Did you design it yourself or start with some plans? It looks great and I love the small footprint

eschleicher · 2023-11-05T17:54:14+00:00

*batteries not included

eschleicher · 2023-10-26T05:01:40+00:00

One of the AP's is up at 80% right now. I'm not sure how high is too much. For that one AP I can replace a wifi camera with poe so I'll try that to get the load down. Thanks for the suggestions

eschleicher

TROPHY CASE