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

Watched a video from a bloke who's also dipping his toe into solar. He's not doing a battery, just these Ecoflow Stream microinverter things. I think this is what people mean when they talk about balcony solar.

Anyway how these work is there's no battery, you plug a solar panel (which puts out lowish voltage DC) into your hundred-quid microinverter box which bumps it up to mains AC voltage, and then there's a wire coming from that box and you just PLUG IT STRAIGHT INTO THE WALL. Like you literally plug it into a normal outlet and it just energizes the circuit that this outlet is part of, anything that's on that same circuit gets the juice from the panel. You don't need to turn the circuit off at the breaker or anything, all the smarts in the microinverter box just Figure It Out and when there's sun the circuit gets powered from the sun and when there's not it gets power from the mains like normal and you just leave it, you don't have to mess with it.

So like, what does this even do? Without a battery there's only benefit if you use the power while it's being made, you can't save it up for later. Well, the idea is you plug it into the same circuit that powers things that are on all the time, like your fridge or whatever. There's also a lot of benefit if you've got stuff like, I dunno, a dishwasher that you can load it up and close it before you go to bed and then tell it "Do the dishes in x hours" and time that to start at like noon tomorrow when there's lots of sun to power it for free.

So like, it's not as good as a battery obvs, but the good and interesting part about it is how CHEAP it is. A hundred quid! You'll have your money back in like two years, and then it'll keep sneaking beer tokens into your pocket for, hell, decades probably. And that's for like the fancy Ecoflow brand, I bet there's cheaper ones that're just as good.

Anyway then he said what he was powering with his panels and it's this big nerd cabinet full of networking gear and computer shite and it's like THREE HUNDRED WATTS 24/7 CONSTANT DRAW and I got all Northern like 'OW MUCH?!

I've got a nerd rack as well, it's got the router and a switch and TWO computers that are on all the time and an external hard drive that's constantly spinning and amp on standby and a projector and three game consoles and VR lighthouses and all their associated shitty tiny inefficient power adapters and its baseload is thirty watts.

ARM, mate, you want some Acorn RISC Machine in there, reduce the instruction set of yer computing, you'll save a packet

@ifixcoinops Worth noting that this might be dangerous. If you have a breaker in front of the circuit, that breaker only sees the net power going through it. But if your battery supplies say... 10A, then you could have a single load of 26A going continuously without ever tripping a 16A breaker. (Using local values here but the math stays the same, just different values).

Unless you really know what you're doing, you should never put producers and consumers on the same circuit without a fuse in between.

Unless you're doing the ring main thing of course.

@ardaxi Eh? How do you put 26 amps through a 16 amp breaker without opening the breaker?

And what's drawing the 10 amps?

@ifixcoinops The concern is that you could have one wall socket that's got wires rated for 16A loads drawing much more than that because only some of the power comes through the 16A breaker. It's also directly connected to the inverter that's on the same side of the breaker, so it can take power from that too. That gets the wires to the wall plug hotter than you'd like.

Definitely not a thing that's going to immediately burn your house down and it can be done safely if there's enough give, but I still worry about these plug things and whether people know the risks involved.