Ok, so you're grid-tied with the ability to run your own power island if things go down off the batteries. My system is tied into a Sunny Boy 1800 for the grid which can be manually switched into a MPPT converter that can feed the battery bank in the event things go odd. Manual, but works. The batteries are in my work shed, which has about 320 watts of solar directly connected to it to keep the shed running and the batteries peaked.

I have thought about getting a Sunny Island or a Trace SW4024 so I can automatically switch between grid and solar, but another option would be to just break down and put the Matrix in the house and wire it up to a subpanel that runs the fridge and other stuff. I'll think about that, but a 700 watt inverter is enough to run the critical stuff including the microwave.

Solar panels *are* cheap these days, I bought mine at about $2 a watt used for the single crystal ones. Modern polycrystaline are a bit less efficient (take up more space and are *heavier*) but that's not too big of a deal. Will think about it.

For me it's like seeing "On the Beach" play out in real time. Yep, Oregon just went dark, party on!

That is *very* good data to have, thank you. So on an average day you get about 4 solar hours of light, with a peak of 6 solar hours of light. That matches my observed values here with a much smaller system (~1kw) on a grid-tie/battery reserve.

I've noticed the fridges are the big power pullers (aside from AC, which in a disaster I am not running) not because they pull a lot of juice but because they pretty much always pull it. I should put a Kill-a-watt on the fridge again and see just how much power it pulls in a day, in fact I think I'll do that after measuring the idle current of Antminers (for another thread).

How big is your battery array? Mine currently is 200ah*24v or 4.8kw total. My solar array is about 1.2kw total (single crystal panels so pretty efficient) and my inverter right now is a 700 watt UPS converted to run on external batteries with a Matrix/5000 that can be used if I needed a really high drain load.

If I'm running my house in emergency mode it's about 4kw a day of power used. Which is on the edge for my system: Given I can only generate about 4kw of power a day with the panels I can run for a day with no solar power and even then it would be difficult for me to "catch up" and charge the batteries to 100% with solar alone.

My secret weapon for that is the car: A 1kw 12v battery inverter attached to a car can charge the batteries to full in a couple of hours. Having a hybrid in this case is *really* cool, as you can charge off the hybrid battery and the engine only has to fire up to charge the hybrid pack (which it can do quickly and more efficiently than running 100% just to spin the alternator). A bonus is you have a 10-20 gallon rolling fuel tank that you can also drive (at 40mpg) somewhere to tank up on fuel if needed.

So as long as civilization doesn't completely puke I'm ok. Really. Interesting. Stuff.

True. For a house system weight and energy density aren't as big a problem as in a car (where you have to like move it). So L16 or T105 batteries can get you a lot of power for a reasonable price without the major fire problem of lithiums.

As for hydrogen I've never seen issues with lead, however I guy I knew did blow the bed off his battery powered truck with flooded NiCD batteries. Those last forever but really can gas hydrogen on charge. Oh well.

100ah AGM batteries are quite nice as well but a bit more pricey per AH. Any way you go, you need to figure out how much power you need per day, then build your solar panels to put that much power back in 1/2 day (factoring in cloudy days) with a battery capacity of at least 3-4 times your load for rainy days and the like. Thus if you want to run the fridge (200 watts*24=4.8kw) some lights (about 1kw a day) and a toaster (1,500 watts for an hour a day) you're at 7kw. Thus a 28kw battery pack and 14kw of solar will do it. Assuming 5 hours of sun per day (and you factored in the 2x oversize for solar) and you're talking a ~2kw array and if the batteries are 48v then a 500ah battery pack or 16 T105's.

Takes more power than you think.

Even a Tesla battery has a limit, and to be honest a rack of T015's would work as well. The trick is how much you suck down and how quickly your panel array can reload.

Used to, but apparently there is a new "feature" where DNS lookups are passed to the "cloud" rather than going through your local resolver.

Meantime it's fun to watch the stock markets implode. I wonder if Europe will do better/recover quicker as they are somewhat more intelligent than the current US leadership.

1,000 point stock market drop is a yawn when you have been HODLing bitcoin. Still I wonder when companies will start firing workers en masse.

Pair of them. Oddly enough I ran them on a Sun 386i back in the 1990's, think 25mhz 386 CPUs.

BIND is a bit of a pain to configure, but not really that bad once you start working on it.

Hm. I never thought of that. Thanks!

Wonder when the helicopters of money will start being dropped. My guess is it will only be on Red states, just prolonging the agony.

Pretty much. What saved me in 2008 was having a small metal box with some cheap shit silver coins, a couple of gold coins, and probably a K in cash. I ran my fingers through it and pretended to be a pirate. Thus I felt I had wealth and didn't sell my stocks and such.

Always have something you can draw down in a crisis so you don't have to panic sell everything. Looks like gold at the moment is holding at 1700 ish, so that's not too bad of a deal if you need some quick cash. Now, can the virus live on gold coins?

You will know it's bad (and this chart is accurate) when you hear Republicans suddenly clamoring for "early voting".

Welcome to 2008. I remember when Gold, stocks, and just about everything was going down. It was a fucked up time. And here we go again.

Centralized. FBI just goes to one source (Cloudflare) for all their shopping needs.

Also remember the golden dot.com rule: If you're not paying for the product, you are the product. CF isn't doing this for the love coming from their warm hearts.

Part of the problem is (in the US) *any* cloud service data can be demanded at any time without a warrant. This to me is annoying, but welcome to the warm delight that is the PATRIOT act. At least if you run your own DNS they will either have to hack it (pain to do), get a warrant (waah) or show up at your house with a battering ram.

Mileage may vary.

In which case Bitcoin will not go up. Fiat will simply go down.

In other news, watch out: Latest Mozilla update wants to route your DNS queries through cloudflare. Which since it's an internet provider means the Govt will be able to see all of your queries without a warrant.

(Run your own DNS servers ffs)

MULE is good, but Star Raiders was without a doubt revolutionary. An excellent game for the ages.

For better computers, the BIOS updates are usually signed with a key that is compared to the author list. Tougher to screw with by far.

Well looks like Pence will be the person who will run point on the virus outbreak.

We're screwed. But at least he will prey for us.

Yes. Antminers run the boards with a certain amount of power even when not mining. The clocks are on as well, meaning it's pretty easy to find bad chips, but you also can't leave a board out of an antimer with +12 connected for a length of time otherwise it will get very very warm (BTDT with an S7 board)

If anyone's bored I can check the values but I recall it being about 200 watts per board.

Dragonmints do NOT do this, which makes finding bad chips a real pain in the ass.

Water is a serious bitch, the stuff is heavy and takes up a *lot* of space. That said, 5 gallon jugs are not too expensive and every house has both a nice 40-50 gallon water tank, a couple of gallons in the pipes in the event things are really weird. I've tried rain barrels, but they fall apart after a few years and collect mosquitoes and odd things. Maybe a cistern.

If it rains where you live park your truck so water collects in the bed. Instant water for toilet flushing.

(Edit: That aquapod thing is a pretty good idea. I'll keep that in mind)