I love seeing all these power efficient PC's... looking forward to the posts to see who can use one to run a wallet, and then take it to the next level & power it with battery/solar panel only
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Oh, many people have been powering PCs with solar for quite a while. My workshop has a 225w panel that keeps 2x12vx120Ah (24v) batteries on-line. A small HP tablet (TC1100) (win XP) which originally took 18v from a mains power brick manages to get by nicely on the 26v off the batteries and draws <20w (<1 amp). Chugs away happily doing all manner of monitoring tasks around the house and runs my SLR wallet. Linked by WiFi to my domestic router. The biggest power drain is the HDD and I do need to put a SSD in there sooner rather than later, but half decent PATA / IDE 3.5 SSDs are like unicorn sh!t.... Yes it is that old
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The TC1100 will run 200+ hours off the battery pack alone, but the 225W panel keeps that pack fully charged and plenty to spare to run the bilge pump that drives the waterfall in the garden feature too. I love DC
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You can use one of these fancy little USB/HDMI plugs, but an old baby laptop is way cheaper (mostly free) and once you dump the internal battery and get a solid state drive into them, they work very well off a battery supply. 12v is tricky and needs a up-voltage booster to a minimum of 18v, and these are quite inefficient. But 24v is golden. The regulator in the PC/laptop can handle that extra 6v easily.
I have so much solar off the shed 'mini grid' that I am thinking of putting a couple of ASIC miners back on-line - but to mine what is the better question.
Checkout Paladin.nz for the latest creation. Or as my wife says - 'for 40 years you have been dicking around in the shed and at last you have made something that other people actually need.' Actually it works extremely well and we have a modular design so loads other than the hot water element can be managed.
I have the J1772 EV charging protocol sorted and my house PV (4.2KW) happily charges the Leaf whenever it is plugged in and there is any spare solar over the minimum accept for the car's charger (1.5KWh). Now that is cheap motoring at about 7km/KW, since our marginal FIT is now NZ$0.08c. So giving power back to the grid is just rewarding the rogues and thieves that control it. Hence Paladin's purpose and creation.
Now that the Paladin production line is out of my shed and into commercial production here in NZ, I have a source of surplus mother & daughter boards that don't require hours of soldering and fiddly work that hurts my back and eyes. I am considering putting a basic 'kit form' Paladin together for home assembly. If and when I do I will only be selling it for SLR. The market will be small, and my margins are high - so I will not need to repatriate the SLR to FIAT in those circumstances. The interesting thing is how to price it.
So I will throw this question open to the group here : If I put together a comprehensive, plug and play Paladin kit that will have to sell for approximately US$200 all inclusive to be viable, what SLR value should I put on it? Right now SLR is pretty stable so I could presumably just do a simple conversion and make it around 16K SLR. It would be interesting to see what selling a few of these without recovering FIAT would do to the SLR market. Thoughts?
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