Please don’t increase your energy consumption just because you are generating an excess. As a world, we need to lower our energy use (as I’m sure you are well aware). I’d urge you to consider those extra watts as a much needed contribution to the cause.
It makes a bit of sense. If you use all energy, you a) generate heat b) increase your energy consumption habits. The alternative is of course to reflect the sunlight. Not that this one case would make a difference, but still makes sense as a mindset.
Instead of consuming the extra energy, OP could also provide it to another customer through the grid, by selling it back to the utility company. This would reduce the total amount of energy that needs to be generated from non-renewable sources. If OP increases their own consumption instead, those non-renewable kWh are still being generated and causing environmental impact somewhere.
This is being mounted on an RV, which is explicitly off-grid, and would only be intermittently connected at best. In my municipality they only do power buy-back from larger generators.
Also most of it isn't going through an inverter, I'm using direct DC-DC, which is much more power efficient for what I'm doing. So that means more cost for inverters, which I'd consider paying even if at the scale I'm working at it would take years for the equipment to pay for itself, but...
You can't simply tie an inverter into the grid and sell back to the power company, as that could mean that during repairs lines they thought had no power were energized by some residential customer. You need special hardware that the power company can shut down remotely, and that's only available for larger customers.
Also I'm not sure if the price I'd be getting for that power would actually offset the monthly connection fee, making connecting to the grid and selling back extra power very likely cost more than just wasting the power, which is unfortunate.
So unfortunately grid-buyback that isn't really an option for me.
Which is why I'm looking at other options. I like the wood pellet one, in an ideal world I'd be able to do some kind of carbon capture or something, but I'm not seeing any good power-to-gas tech right now.
Assuming the panels are connected to the grid, then the power will be consumed by neighbors - not wasted.
EDIT: I see it was right there in the first line of the post that the plan is to unplug from the grid. I would reconsider this decision. If you stay connected, you can share your excess capacity - if not then you use it or lose it. Why put yourself in that position?
Creating and maintaining a electric grid requires scale, it's one of the main reasons municipalities grant exclusive monopolies to power companies, because competition doesn't really work in the space. At certain low thresholds the system can absorb people going "off the grid", but too many and it becomes economically unstable. Forcing a rise in rates and a cascade effect. By requiring people to remain attached to the grid and sell off their unused power the benefit to all is clear.
A variant of this idea that would be more useful to me personally would be some measure of how actively maintained my dependencies are. It would be nice to know if my long-lived project depends on something that has been abandoned.
Details might be tricky, given that some very useful packages simply don't need frequent updates.
I like the drift metric more, because some libraries are simply stable and don't need much updates anymore, this doesn't mean they are bad for your system.
The idea that pouring time into customizing your keyboard just so will boost productivity is madness. Is typing speed really the bottleneck for anyone?
It's not (just?) the typing speed though - for many it's the ability to limit hand and arm movement, and alleviate the effects of many types of RSI. I just ordered one, and as I type this through noticeable pain in my right wrist, I eagerly anticipate this keyboard helping me continue a healthy career.
> Why would you want so many tabs open in the first place?
Some reasons:
- Ctrl-clicking to open tabs since I can then load them in the background (because I'm impatient, and because I don't want to get distracted by clicking into all the references in the main tab while reading.
- using tab tree extension I can then easily see what path lead to some interesting page I found
- by default, if you type ab address you already have open in another tab, Firefox will jump to that tab.
> Is this really a common way to use a browser?
Yep. Bot extremely common but I do it and a number of other HN-ers as well. Mozilla seems to be aware of it and seems to have it in their performance tests or something.
My workflow is the same. I'll usually have 100 tabs open on a particular device, going up to nearly 1000 tabs across my phone, laptop, and desktop in rare instances.
This is a quick write-up of my project as an Insight Data Science Fellow, which was a navigation app that adjusts routes to keep you in the shade (or sun).
I suggest you look into the Software Carpentry foundation - they are making a great effort to improve scientific programming through short workshops: https://software-carpentry.org/
https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/who-wants-to-play-the-...