I got 8 solar panels today, gonna go back for the others tomorrow.

The panels were in the woods.

Just, like, big piles of them in the woods. Full of rain and leaves and twigs and creatures.

I mean I guess it makes sense and I don't know what I expected, these machines are weatherproof, they're meant to live outside.

Dude wasn't there when I turned up so I got the car ready and had a look around and got my meter on some wires and yup, they work. These mossy dirty sleeping machines in the woods are silently pushing electrons trying to find something to push them through, not asleep after all, just waiting.

I've never handled a solar panel meant for roof mounting before, only those like little portable camping jobs

These things aren't light and I've got stairs in front of my house, had to carry them up balanced on my head

Ready for a little sit down now

Solar update: still waiting for the battery to get here so there's no physical update, but here's minor emotional/noticing update.

1. People (who I know IRL in America and have talked to) generally don't think about kilowatt-hours. When folk look at their electric bill they think of nothing if they're rich and dollars if they're normal and kWh only comes onto the radar if they're having solarpunk thoughts. Nobody knows how much a particular appliance or device uses, people think that a server rack pulls more current than a kettle, this is an entirely normal way to live, the world is full of things and nobody has the spare brain cycles to notice this sort of thing until it comes up. I only notice it because It Came Up. So, a caution to those who might do this, It Will Come Up and then your brain will be filled with It whether you want it or not

2. Having solar panels lying around not hooked into anything is a special sort of liminal airport waiting purgatory because you go ALL THOSE LOVELY PHOTONS ARE JUST HITTING THE DAMN GROUND, look at that smug grass

I never mentioned how cheap these panels were. They're 240 watts each, 36V, from 2011 - more modern panels you can get twice the watts in the same space, and that's why this bloke had upgraded and was selling these ones for fifty bucks each cash. $45 to me 'cause I was cheeky enough to ask for a bulk discount.

19 cents a watt is hard to beat.

They still put out over 30v each even in woodsy-light where I checked them. Now that might drop like a rock the moment I get a load across them, they're 15 years old so some of their watts have probably run away by now, but even if these end up being like 25c a watt that's still pretty damn good

I did look into newer panels, you can get them for a great price but you've typically gotta buy ten at a time and shipping would be like $400

A solar array below 1kW doesn't need a permit where I'm at. That's a good thing because I now have Anxiety about how exactly I'm gonna mount these things.

My grasping raccoon hands are dexterous and crafty but there's always a period during any new project where I don't know WTF I'm doing - this period passes as I gradually figure out what exactly TF I'm doing, but it can be very hard to remember that the IDK phase is temporary

OK time for an update, so I've got an Ecoflow Delta Pro 3 in my basement, it is HUGE and HEAVY and obviously pictures and videos don't properly convey the mass and presence of this thing. I happened to be outside and saw the fedex guy coming and he was very very glad of that.

It's 50kg of battery in a pretty small space, very dense and not very conducive to positioning your body in a way that makes 50kg easy, but if you have two guys then it's all fine and you can have the fore guy use other hand for opening doors etc. Once it's out of the box it's got wheels on the back and a loooooongly-extensible handle on the front that lets you get good leverage, but it's still a put-the-cats-upstairs kinda situation. Moving it around to mates during big-storm-aftermath will probably be a two-man job because although moving it is OK, lifting it into and out of a vehicle is gonna be a back-tweaker and this thing's all plastic on the outside, it can't take a drop of any distance at all under its own weight.

~~~ SOLAR UPDATE ~~~

1. I don't enjoy drilling through brick. I also don't enjoy that there isn't, like, an Incredibly Standard Box That Literally Everybody Uses that goes on the outside of your house and takes standard MC4 solar connectors. Like, there's these things they call GLANDS that are supposed to go on RV's and some people put on their houses, or you can penetrate the wall with a standard L-shaped wire conduit guy, or you can just leave a window open and stuff a wire through it, but there isn't a Definitive MC4-outside-to-inside solution that everyone agrees on, so for the time being I'm using a gland. Which will work, but feels... inelegant. I don't like ambiguity, which leads me to:

2. These panels use Tyco Solarlok connectors, which are obsolete and also wired up backwards to how you'd expect because of reasons. So to get these lads to go into normal MC4 connectors, I've gotta either cut off some original plugs and crimp new ones on (not a fan of that) or find some new Tyco connectors and use them to make up an adapter harness (not a fan of that either because electrically-speaking, more connectors = more troubles, but this seems the better option overall).

I am glad that I figured out that these panels were from the "IDK LOL" era of connectors and polarity because honestly I thought there was something wrong with my brain

Like "Alright this still doesn't make sense so let's map the whole thing out, so the female plastic has male metal and vice versa and people could be talking about the plastic or the metal when they say male or female, plugs marked positive containing sockets hook into sockets marked negative containing pins so there's potential for me to get confused there as well, hole flow is opposite to electron flow, what the hell do I have my leads backwards in my meter or something," no. Once I realised the panels were weird and needed to be corrected everything else made perfect sense.

You've gotta agree to the TERMS before you can use the ecoflow app and so there's a link to read the terms and it just straight-up 404's

There's a button with an icon that looks like it's supposed to show graphs and stuff, press it, black screen

Ya this is going local-only haha

I got a watts readout on my phone and charts and graphs and shit and one nice thing about that is MAN AM I HYPERAWARE OF THE WEATHER NOW

Like I'm not usually this aware of the weather when I'm not IN the weather y'know, I feel like A Part Of The World and that's kinda nice

2026: 🦝 Every time something scary happens in politics I put up another solar panel

2027: 🦊 Dude why are you smiling so big, did you not just see the news today
🦝 I took some of those little panels out of calculators and I put them on my FUCKING TEETH

I'm like this with everything tbh. Whenever the world gets scary I gotta go nuts-and-bolts and do Repairman Things With My Hands which is why lately I've been most enjoying working on, like, bikes, 20-year-old ereaders, solar panels, all stuff that's either low-power or make-power

I've talked about this before on here but when I was teaching the new pinball techs how to not be scared of complicated machines I told them the most complex intimidating system you've ever seen is made up out of smaller and simpler systems that are connected together, and those subsystems are made out of yet smaller and simpler subsubsystems, and you don't fix an arcade you fix machines, and you don't fix machines you fix coils and switches and connectors, we work on the things that systems are made of because that's what we can reach with our hands and understand with our heads, and if all the little bits work how we want them to then the big thing has no choice but to work how we want it to

When you were a kid did you ever go to a science museum with a hand-crank generator and a buncha lightbulbs?

So how this works is you'd spin the crank and it'd rotate pretty freely y'know, you could feel magnets kinda resisting you a little bit but you'd take your hand off the crank and it'd carry on a bit, it wasn't hard to turn. And then you'd flip the light switch on and turn the crank again but this time you'd be trying to light up a little bulb, and it'd fight you. The same crank would give you hot biceps and a sweaty forehead. Some of these machines had more bulbs in parallel with switches between them and you could build up speed and have your mate flip a switch and you'd FEEL it! Not, like, understand the principles, not be able to rattle off Ohm's law or whatever, you'd really FEEL it, you'd KNOW it in your body

I think that was a good machine and we really need more of them. We need to feel the burn in our biceps so that we understand viscerally what electricity means, what power actually is, what really happens when we boil a kettle

Alright so remember how I said these were 240 watt panels, well I misspoke, they're actually rated for 230 watts on the label.

Now the label, fucking LIES. If it says 230 watts on a panel what it means is, you'll get 230 watts under like Ideal Laboratory Conditions, noon on the solstice at the equator on a really clear day kinda thing, you're never gonna get that IRL. Plus, these panels are like 15 years old. So I figured, well, if I can get 150 or 180 out of them then I'm still quids-in for how cheap they were secondhand, and if I have two in series then a bit of shading on one is gonna pull down the other, so 300 watts would be a result. With that in mind, screenshot in the next post

So panels that were optimistically rated for 230 watts 15 years ago are still spitting out about 200 watts without much effort at all!

This is FANTASTIC because even though panels hold up way better than I expected, **rich buggers still replace them** because you can get 400 or 500 watt panels now that take up the same room, meaning that the secondhand market is full of panels that are cheap AND good! It's a raccoon's paradise!

Alright I've actually plugged stuff into the battery now

My amp, projector, kodi box, home assistant pi and basically everything in the big shelf downstairs are all sun-powered now

Knowing how electricity is normally generated makes these things even more magical

Like we all know that electricity is made by moving magnets around coils of wire or vice versa, and that's how I think of electricity, it's a big steel shaft in some really good bearings and at the end of that shaft is like a bunch of fins that get spun by steam or whatever or maybe it's like a portable generator with a 2-stroke engine to spin the shaft and there's all this metal moving and it all probably makes a terrible racket

These two old panels off a bloke on facebook marketplace are just sat quietly in front of my house and there's four blokes on exercise bikes' worth of electricity coming out of them. There's no noise at all and nothing's moving, there's nothing to oil, there's no fluids to replace, it's just, fucking, some Elvish thing that gathers mana when it's in nature. It's absolutely magical