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An often discussed issue on this forum is Carbon monoxide. Many solar enthusiasts also have backup generators and there are frequent recommendations to use carbon monoxide alarms when placing these generators in unconventional locations. Although most CO detectors on the market will alarm when...

One issue that concerns me is the fact that the power companies are reluctant to get onboard with home based renewable. They're Ok with renewables as long as they are the ones in control. Where I live the power company uses what they call net metering. They only credit you back about 1/5th of...

Without net metering, most of the newer electric meters used by the power companies will spin forward whether you import or export. The amount you are exporting gets added to your bill, just as the amount you import. So you may be paying them to give them power. If you get net metering, you'll...

I have an electric bike. I have three batteries for it. I rotate them so that one is fully charged at all times. One is on a solar charger and the other on the bike. The time to fully charge one is about 4 hours, so every morning I have at least two fully charged. On a long ride I can keep an...

Not too long ago I experimented with radiative cooling. The temperature of space is somewhere around -450 degrees F. The amount of heat radiated from the earth has to equal the amount of solar heating for the average temperature on the planet to remain reasonably constant. Most of the radiative...

New verse for the Electricians Bible: pvgirl 6:26-30: Look at the birds of the air; they do not pound in ground rods nor add add lightning rods to barns, and yet your heavenly Father protects them from dangerously high electrical shocks. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27 Can any...

117 is not watts. It is a code meaning that the charger is set to "manual mode", 2n means "disabled".

Trump supporters want to line people up and shoot them. Biden supporters want to line people up and give them money. Perhaps they could compromise. Line them up, give them money and then shoot them.

They really don't take up a hell of a lot of space. And almost everyone uses/needs hot water. Direct solar hot water panels will yeild about 2.5 times as many KWH as PV panels. To avoid "wasting" collector space, use a large tank. I have 120 gallon storage capacity. The cost of insulated water...

I experimentally locked my voc to under 60 volts using Zener diodes. I couldn't find a 60 volt Zener so I used two 30 volt zeners in series. They were only rated 10 watts so I was concerned that I may blow them but the scc took most of the current. My Vmp was 54 so they didn’t take much abuse...

Maybe so, but what if it takes you two days because your dragging a solar array with you. Two days of lost wages can be pretty expensive.

Some less expensive BMS's don't even try balancing until the float voltage is reached. If you don't keep a float voltage on them they never balance. Although the bms specs of any battery are a very important factor in battery charging and maintenance, very few manufacturers publish them.

Another thought FWIW: Some inexpensive multimeters do not correctly measure/report ac rms voltage when the ac is a modulation on an underlying dc voltage. ie; they could report 170 volts ac when it's just a one volt ac modulation on a 169 volt dc voltage.

Prospective buyers might want to keep an eye on the politics! The prices have been low and continuing to drop because the chinese got around the 30% tariffs by marketing through other asian countries. New tariffs, favored by a majority of house members, if enacted would expand the tariffs to...

I'd rather wait for you to find out the hard way

What the hell does Biden have to do with whether someone likes trump or not? Why does not supporting trump mean one is in favor of illegal immigration? Why does not supporting trump mean one is a homosexual? Why does accepting the rulings of 60+ judges, many appointed by trump, make one a party...

If they did they would be less likely to get reelected.

You guys are all suckers for phising attacks. You can't help but click on anything anti- Biden or pro trump. Do you ever notice the short delay? That's the time your ip is being recorded along with other details.

This fix does not in of itself shut down the charging. It simply tricks the existing high temp shutdown circuitry to do so. I would hope that existing high temp shutdown circuits are built to avoid the damage you are reffering to. I prefer your approach as well and am going to do something...

They should couple the signal through a capacitor and a diode/rectifier, but if they assume that the signal is pure ac, they might leave out the coupling capacitor. They just figure that if the user selects ac, the signal is pure ac. The diode/rectifier charges a capacitor to a dc value equal to...

NASA lost $125 million on unit confusion: The navigation team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) used the metric system of millimeters and meters in its calculations, while Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Denver, Colorado, which designed and built the spacecraft, provided crucial...

A couple of horses asses can install an A/C unit in 3 days.

The Impedance is the square root of (the sum of the square of the resistance plus square of the net reactance). The net reactance is the inductive reactance minus the capacitive reactance. See formulas below. As a rule, true power is a function of a circuit's dissipative elements, usually...

No one tried to cover it up. The predictions of global warming indicated that the warming would far outpace the cooling due to lower sunspot activity. If anything 2023 was strong evidence to that. Cycle 24 was the weakest cycle in 100 years. Cycle 24 started at the end of 12023. Solar Cycle 24...

Like the incandesant light bulb there'll be people saying; "They'll have to pry my lead acid battery out of my cold dead hands."

It could just be taking some time for the BMS's to do their job and balance all the cells. Although it never hurts to pray to the battery gods.

Good quality solar hot water panels are insulated and use low e glass. You definitely have to add freeze protection in the panel loop. Polypropylene glycol works great and most solar hot water tanks have a coil around the tank to isolate it from the glycol solution. There is also a small...

Here's a simple work around:

If you include the stems and the leaves of the oat plant, you can get the same millage per $2.00 bucket and the horse doesn't give a shit

The absorption process is driven by heat. The efficiency of electric heat is only about one third at best as the same electric running a heat pump. Your refrigerator is probably doing as well as it is supposed to using electric. Absorption refrigertors should only be used when there is no source...