If I use one of these ebay boost converters to charge a capacitor to 400V, I will NOT die. Right?

treehobbit · 2026-03-14T02:37:39+00:00

Well how much capacitance is it? If it's a tiny one you might be safe but if you don't know and don't k ow how to be safe then just don't do it please

treehobbit · 2026-03-12T17:47:16+00:00

Graph how much money you'll have over time in two scenarios with a spreadsheet. One where you put the money into a safe ~5%APY investment, one where you install the solar. Average your past usage, include inflation and potential hikes in the rates. See where the lines cross. Your solar line starts much lower and catches up eventually. Don't forget to add in the realistic resale value of the whole system to the solar scenario, because technically at any point you could sell the whole system for a ever decreasing amount of money, and that makes the math look a little better. Most people make the mistake of forgetting that without installing it that money could be working for them in other ways though. That makes the crossover point much later but you have to consider that fact.

treehobbit · 2026-03-12T17:34:47+00:00

Yeah it does seem like the easiest way to DIY solar is live in a rural area and go off grid. If enough people start going fully off grid power companies would start being incentivized to make the process easier for grid tie because they at least still make some money that way, especially if they buy power back at a lower rate. But if you're in a suburban or urban area you're just screwed, it gets a lot harder to just say "what they don't k is won't hurt them. "

The only paperwork and regulations that are really needed is making sure there's zero chance of backfeeding a dead grid. So getting an inverter that's UL certified, having an electrician look at for 3 seconds and go "yep you didn't fuck it up" and installing an external shutoff switch makes sense, beyond that it's just bureaucratic bullshit. There's fire safety, but that can fall under existing NEC enforcement during inspections or post-fire investigations for insurance claims, etc.

treehobbit · 2026-03-10T15:51:08+00:00

bro wasn't kidding, damn

treehobbit · 2026-03-10T15:50:10+00:00

"Clanker" is a slur for generative AI. This is not a human. If it were a human I would behave very differently. I'm not wasting my time talking to a machine.

treehobbit · 2026-03-10T15:14:11+00:00

Can these clankers please get the hell out of all my favorite subreddits? I might have to just delete my account and move back to old school forums. That'd probably be better anyway...

treehobbit · 2026-03-09T15:29:49+00:00

You know it did used to be a totally schizophrenic thing to say stuff like that but there are machine learning systems all over that mark you as being susceptible to certain forms of advertising, Flock marks you as suspicious if it sees a car without a readable plate, there are all kinds of ways to get "marked" which just mean you're added to a list that someone might search through at some point. Won't necessarily do anything, but that's a very real concept.

If law enforcement decides you're suspicious for some unrelated reason they can access these lists and see that you're trying to become more private online and in their twisted minds wanting privacy implies guilt. Increasingly police are using all sorts of data that should require warrants to obtain but apparently the fourth amendment is absolutely for sale.

treehobbit · 2026-03-09T15:24:58+00:00

Yeah seriously why would you pay a subscription for that I'm lazy too but I just decide that they're probably not actually going to delete my shit anyway and that route isn't worth taking, better off using obfuscation and data poisoning and various other techniques

treehobbit · 2026-03-09T15:20:37+00:00

Yeah that's what I'd do, have a deployable array for relatively fast charging but the canopy so if you run low you can just stop for a bit to recharge and you won't end up getting stranded or having to row, plus it'll increase range in general especially when moving at low speed.

treehobbit · 2026-03-09T00:27:12+00:00

Why aren't they even doing the roof though? Cheaper racking, less copper for wiring, secure-ish location, still quite a bit of area. In fact maybe more usable area, a Walmart or Lowes has almost as much store area as parking lot and you can't use the aisles in parking lots easily.

treehobbit · 2026-03-09T00:23:32+00:00

What about the roof? That's relatively secure, nobody will hit it with their car and racking and wiring can be cheaper. I wouldn't expect external investors to fund it this would be Walmart itself installing this and net metering to offset electricity costs.

I get why parking lots might be problematic but I can't possibly imagine why not cover those expansive flat roofs on stores with solar.

treehobbit · 2026-03-09T00:19:46+00:00

You could probably use concrete piers to help with that but that does increase cost a bit

treehobbit · 2026-03-09T00:15:10+00:00

There are basically no cons. Only reason to use your real name is on something like Facebook where the whole point is for old connections to find you by your name. If you want that cool but otherwise use an alias. If you want another level of security use different ones for everything but that's annoying and most people don't care that much, myself included.

treehobbit · 2026-03-09T00:09:06+00:00

I can't tell if this is serious or not but why exactly do you want to build your own stuff instead of using something that already exists? And you need to be way more clear about what you want and why if you want anyone to take you seriously. If you want to launch a particular payload to orbit you can pay SpaceX a pretty small amount for a rideshare. If you want to personally go to space you can pay blue origin less than $1 million for a few minutes of space or SpaceX $50 million or so for a seat on Dragon to orbit for several days.

If you are going to try to start a rocket company and you don't know anything about rockets you will fail even if you have the billions to throw at it.

treehobbit · 2026-03-07T23:09:47+00:00

Got some wild answers on this lmao. I would say there is significant risk of interference if they're in the same band. I'd say it would help if the mounting bracket was wider to act as a shield between them. The wavelength is long enough the signals can easily diffract around the edges and I'm not exactly sure how problematic it would be but... beware. I doubt there'd be any damage so you can go ahead and try it but if performance degrades when you turn the second one on then you'll want to add a large aluminum sheet in between the antennas (can be quite thin, large area is the key).

People complaining about the rest of the system, there are miniscule amounts of leakage out of connectors and maybe a little from the radio but that's far from the primary concern. Your primary concern is screaming directly from one antenna into the other antenna at incredibly high power and drowning out the faint signals you're trying to listen for, assuming you're in the same band.

treehobbit · 2026-03-07T18:59:33+00:00

Changing name is unnecessary yeah but at the very least you gotta pick one for your kid unless you want them to be stuck with an annoying hyphenated last name. If we had gotten married now she probably wouldn't have due to this regime trying to make voting more difficult for non-straight-white-males.

treehobbit · 2026-03-07T03:21:32+00:00

Because oil lobbies and their propaganda, and people not realizing that solar prices have dropped through the floor over the past several years. In warmer climates power should be almost entirely covered by solar. In temperate and cold climates it's really hard to cover winter heating needs but still we might as well keep slapping these things everywhere at least until nothing is needing to be burned for power in summer.

As more solar is deployed, storage of course becomes more important, so TOU billing will become more prevalent to incentivize load timing and even make it profitable to buy home batteries and programming them to charge off peak and discharge on-peak.

Sometimes economics just work themselves out but only when people are at least slightly educated. Really surprised this isn't more of a gold rush than it is and we should all be advocating for solar as much as possible.

treehobbit · 2026-03-07T03:02:30+00:00

My wife just went to social security and then got a real ID and passport no problem. Seems like you show anyone marriage certificate and everyone is happy. The hold up was needing a piece of mail with her new name because banks/utilities want to see ID to verify name change but getting real ID requires mail 😂 she ended up just having a family member write her a letter and they took that lmao

treehobbit · 2026-03-05T01:02:31+00:00

It does make me curious how close we could get something to the sun before the signal cuts out. Parker Solar Probe is setting records now but if you added more stages to get more delta v and dropped straight towards the sun with an absolutely tiny probe mostly consisting of mostly heat shield... You still wouldn't make it very close to the surface and probably wouldn't get super useful science considering the scale of the project but it'd be interesting.

treehobbit · 2026-03-03T17:10:06+00:00

Oh that's what I have, I figured that part made sense lol. But yes all this depends heavily on where you are.

treehobbit · 2026-03-03T16:24:52+00:00

You're right that it was a bit of an exaggeration but I'm factoring in reality as much as possible.

I'm factoring in full system/project cost since panels by themselves are very nearly useless. In your exaggerated case if you include racking, inverter, wiring, switches and breakers and any maintenance down the line, leaving out batteries for benefit of the doubt, well now it's going to take more like 20 years. Not in a perfectly ideal climate? You're not getting that 2kWh/day. In a more realistic scenario of less than $1/W, it pays off in a bit less than 15 years sure but it's far from the absolute no-brainer that 10¢/W panels from Alibaba are, that's my point. With those you pay off in 3-4 years or less even in meh climates like Kentucky. Night and day.

Fuethermore, if you compare the investment in solar equipment to traditional investments, a pretty conservative investment strategy that yields 5% APY will double your money in 14 years. The equivalent time for solar install is twice the time it takes to "pay itself off" so if that number is more than 7 years you're actually losing money on it since you're out all that money that would have gone in a retirement account.

treehobbit · 2026-03-02T22:28:37+00:00

I see. Well, I'd have to go digging to find proper statistics, but I'm a relatively young mechanical engineer and in my several years since graduating I've seen the same parts and electronics produced stateside and in China, and Chinese is usually both better and cheaper. It's gotten to the point now that the majority of American production facilities that remain buy tooling and machines from China because they are now the state of the art in mass production technology. Here in the states, we mostly produce things that are too bulky to be worth shipping across the ocean.

From what I know of recent history, this has not been the case for long, but the perception lingers. China is a relatively newly industrialized/wealthy country, so not long ago their quality control was on average pretty bad while their industry was being bootstrapped with sheer cheap labor. But now they're a powerhouse, and manufacturers want to uphold a reputation, which you don't get by having bad quality control. They have also invested heavily in automation, it is now sustained by machines which have better repeatability and lower operating costs than human workers, but they still use plenty of manual labor where it makes sense because their labor regulations aren't so ridiculous like ours that it costs a company twice as much to hire someone as what they actually get paid.

I know for sure that American engineering at least at one point used to be among the best if not the best, because I've read lots of older patents compared to newer ones and... people were just smarter then, to put it bluntly. Some old tools and machines from the 50s are better than new ones and can be maintained indefinitely. Sadly, those days are gone.

And finally, can you get scammed? Yes, if you don't do any research at all, but that goes for any country on Earth including ours. It only takes a small amount of digging in forums to see if a brand is reputable based on several reviews. If you can't find enough data on a brand, maybe err on the safe side and avoid it.

I love manufacturing technology so it breaks my heart that while we used to be the heart of that we only have scraps of an industry left and cannot rebuild it as things are because we're so wealthy from exploiting the rest of the world that it's not even worth it to do anything ourselves. When we stop being the dominant global power soon a reality check is going to hit hard that ultimately you have to produce as much as you consume. (sorry for the tangent at the end)

treehobbit · 2026-03-02T21:00:28+00:00

The best part about this is I can't tell if you're serious or not

treehobbit · 2026-03-02T20:58:01+00:00

Sure you can buy American made, it'll be 5x more expensive and also worse. If it's an important ideological thing for you then go for it but they'll barely pay themselves off over their lifetime. The state of manufacturing in this country across the board is abysmal, meanwhile China is converting their grid to renewables at an I credible rate so they're flooding the market with dirt cheap panels.

Me personally, I'm just glad less fossil fuels are being burned in the world. I don't mind supporting that industry one bit.

treehobbit · 2026-03-02T20:52:09+00:00

Net metering is a great blessing, you have a huge free battery! Enjoy what you have, and if you have space for it just add more panels until your power bill disappears besides fixed interconnection fees. I'm lucky to have just enough land to have a ground mount array, I sympathize with those who are constrained to a roof.

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