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

Now, this isn't what I expected from adding a third panel to the series. When you put panels in series the volts add up, the amps stay the same, and since everything's gotta flow through Every Panel, if one panel gets some shade you're buggered. I meant to put three in parallel (put the third one out yesterday) but I couldn't make the leads quite reach, so I put them in series for now and ordered some more adapters etc.

I thought I'd be getting more like 600 watts for a little bit of the day and then partial shade on one panel would screw me, but there must be some kinda quirk of circumstance I didn't account for 'cause the opposite has happened - two panels in series didn't start producing much until about half eleven or noonish, but three in series started producing earlier in the day, enough earlier that the battery started charging much sooner than it has been off two panels.

I've got the battery set up so that it won't go below 20% or above 80% charge until I tell it Yo Emergency Time, just for the sake of the cells' longevity. But I've also got it set so that if it goes below 40% it pulls from the grid at 400 watts. The rack draws 30ish watts and it looks like it's mostly passing that straight through from the mains and occasionally taking a short 400 watt burst as it charges up enough to meet its own demand for the computery doodads wot makes it go.

The headscratcher here is in the two-panel days, the time period before the sun actually hit the panels, when it was light outside but not Direct Sun kinda thing, I'd get watts in the low 20's until like noon, and now I'm getting like 50 watts during that same time. Adding one extra panel shouldn't go from 20 to 50 - I'm not gonna complain, that's the difference between the battery discharging and it charging for several hours, but I am gonna say that the moral of the story is that messing around with maths and theory will only take you so far, you've gotta plug things in and fiddle with it physically before you know what to expect!

Also if you're wondering why it's passing 30w of power from the mains straight through to my load while it's also drinking 400 watts from the sun, while I was writing that last post the battery percentage crossed 45% and then it cut off the mains, so right now my rack is battery powered and the battery's still charging and the smart plug it's plugged into is at zero amps.

I expected 600 watts instead of 400 but it looks like I'm getting more, like, 450 watts but for much longer in the day and bonus trickle-charging in the morning

Have we talked costs yet, have we added all this up yet

I don't think we have, not properly anyway, right. Two grand for the battery. That's the big "Oof" chunk but honestly, if I didn't have refrigerated meds to worry about, if I just wanted to Play With Solar And Save Money, I could've done it for way less. Here's my notes from when I was comparing the different all-in-one batteries (next post)

---this is taken STRAIGHT from my notes file in my personal wiki (it's dokuwiki-powered!) and I'm sure other people have done better comparisons, also this is only looking at fairly-big batteries, you can get smaller ones for WAY less money, so take this as it comes---

Growatt Infinity 2000:
* $650 for 2 kWh, so $325/kWh
* 2.4kW output
* 1200W solar charging: 12v to 150v
* 20ms UPS
* Inverter losses: 34 watt
* server fuckery, see https://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2023-11/03-growatt_and_home_assistant

Ecoflow Delta Pro 3:
* $2300 for 4kWh, so $575/kWh
* 4kW output
* 2600W solar charging via two ports: 30-150v to 15A (1600W), 11-60V to 20A (1000W)
* 10ms UPS
* Can do 240v
* Can be controlled locally via BLE: https://github.com/rabits/ha-ef-ble
* Inverter losses: 50 watt

Oupes Mega 2:
* $760 for 2kWh, so $380/kWh
* 2.5kW output
* 2100W solar input, 18-140V to 15A (manual suggests 6 240W panels at 148V OCV in series)

Oupes Guardian 6000:
* $1700 for 4.6kWh, so $369/kWh
* Can do 240V
* 3.6kW output
* 2100W solar charging at 18-130V/15A

Jackery Explorer 2000 V2:
* $800 for 2kWh, so $400/kWh
* 2.2kW output
* Only 400 watts solar input? Fuck off

Pecron E3600LFP
* $1050 for 3kWh, so $350/kWh
* 3.6kW output
* 2400W solar charging via 2 ports, both 32-150V to 20A
* 20ms UPS
* Inverter losses: 46W
* BUT: for $2200, nearly same price as the Delta Pro, get two of these and run 240v and have 6kWh of storage.
* BUT: quite loud!

Bluetti Elite 300
* $1100 for 3kWh, so $366/kWh
* 2.4kW output
* 1200W solar input, 12-60V panels
* 10ms UPS

Anker Solix F3800
* $2000 for 3.8kWh, so $526/kWh
* 6kW output
* Can do 240V

Anker Solix F3000
* $1400 for 3kWh, $466/kWh
* 2400W solar charging via two ports, high and low like on the Ecoflow: 11-165V@17A for 1600W and 11-60V@17A for 800W

And the panels were $45 each off Facebook marketplace, I bought 16 of them 'cause I was figuring they'd be WAY more degraded than they are, but the whole solar-panels-degrading-a-lot thing turned out to be a another BIG FAT SMELLY LIE to go on the PILE of BIG FAT SMELLY LIES THAT PEOPLE TELL ABOUT SOLAR PANELS. $720. But dude threw in a bunch of 8-gauge wire as well.

I already had nice big crimpers that can do MC4's, but if you don't then maybe about $30 or $40. I've spent maybe a hundred bucks on this-and-that bits-and-bobs like connectors and conduit and drill bits and shit.

The next chunk of money will be in permanent mounting for these rather than leaning them jankily against the front wall of my house; some folk might buy pre-made racks but I plan to raccoon the fuck out of it with leftover chunks of timber that I've got lying around the place.

We're under three grand and it's Working, but you can absolutely start dipping your toes in for WELL under a grand if you don't currently have designs on doing The Whole Ass Entire House, and you know what, if you buy a tiny little battery and a single solar panel and just plug one thing into it then a) you're doing more than most folk and b) if you get Bit by the solar bug and change your mind about the whole-ass-entire-house thing, it's not like your one solar panel instantly becomes junk, you can incorporate it into whatever future plans

Two things to note about these all-in-one solar-generator doodads:

1. This is The Most Expensive Way to do it, because these boxes have charge controller, battery and inverter all in one convenient lump that you can lug around, go camping with, take to your friends when they've got a power outage, all that stuff. The true Way Of The Raccoon involves buying all those components separately and screwing them to a sheet of chipboard for like a third of the money.

2. If you look at the battery capacity you can get in, say, an Anker Solix C1000, they're $450 off Amazon, and you see only one kilowatt-hour and do Sad Face because that's half a grand and it won't even run a fridge for a full day, remember that you can also pull 600 watts into that battery from the sun as long as it's shining

Solar system update, wired my three panels in parallel now and plugged them into the low side and now it's going great.

The ecoflow's got two solar inputs (the exact specs are in that comparison post above) and on the low side it starts sniffing for power at a much lower voltage, which means I'm getting 50 watts at like 7:30! 30 watts is the tipping point where the battery starts charging a little bit rather than discharging so I'm happy with that. Understanding now that this is less about chasing the Peak Output High Score and more about how can I make power continuously throughout a big proportion of the day

Whenever I first get into a Thing I like posting my initial feelings because I know that a year from now I'll go "Huh, I was excited about 300 lousy little watts?" and everyone who's Into the Thing feels the same way because that initial Magic Feeling doesn't last, so IMPORTANT FEELINGS WRITTEN DOWN:

🦊 When it's cloudy it only does like 30 or 40 watts, grrr
🦝 WOW, I still get 30 or 40 watts when it's cloudy?! HONESTLY DID NOT EXPECT THAT, given that all the solar guys moan about cloudy days I figured I'd get zilch but 30 watts still runs two computers and my router all day long for free!

🦊 Hitting 600 watts peak isn't very much
🦝 Hell I was excited the first time I hit 100 watts, this is six times as exciting!

🦊 Those old panels are so inefficient for the space, only a couple hundred watts with like six by three feet, is it even worth bothering with
🦝 You know what generates even less power than that? A BLANK FUCKING WALL, which is what I had before I got these things

Got people from back home asking me

🦡 Dan why've you got a battery, why not just send the leccy back onto the grid and have a chippie tea and don't worry about it

And the answer is,

🦝 Here in America they don't bury the wires underground, they put them in the sky with all the trees and squirrels and that. When a tree falls on a wire, which happens approximately constantly, the wire goes down and we've no power until someone comes in the bucket lift truck and sorts it out -

🦡 We have power cuts in the UK as well,

🦝 No you don't. Not like this. You have power cuts like "Oh wow, is the power off?" and the Americans have power cuts like "🤷," it's Normal here, it's not a thing you remember happening unless it goes on for several days, you stop counting, if the wind gets up you go and shut down your computers etc because you EXPECT a power cut. Anyway last year we had big wind for 15 minutes and lost power for five days straight and do you know what the poor overworked bucket lift lads ran around doing?

🦝 With the wires?

🦝 You know where the company made them put the wires?

🦝 They put them BACK, in the SKY

Alright I've had two Actually Sunny days on my three (count 'em) old cheap secondhand solar panels that I raccooned off facebook marketplace and this coincided with hearing politicians argue about solar on the radio so I now have a Political Opinion About Solar Panels

It is this

Solar panels. Solar panels everywhere. Solar panels EVERYWHERE, on EVERY roof, Right The Fuck Now, every single doubt or worry I ever had about these things has been completely resolved just by holding panels in my hands and watching the power move silently into my battery to watch telly with tonight. House in cloudsville? Solar panels. House under the biggest densest tree in the world? Solar panels. Even in the shade they're still putting out power. Even fifteen years old they're still putting out power. Every worry I had was based on lies. My only regret is that I didn't start sooner. Solar panels everywhere right the fuck now.