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Comment by Syonyk | Hacker News Reader

There's been some conversation about this at the previous link, back when it was over at syonyk.blogspot.com (I moved off that because Google ruined their new Blogger interface).

Five years later... still the best place I've ever worked from. Nothing to say, really. Power is reliable, I have more of it than I really need with how much solar I've got, the generator works fine in the winter, my speakers rock, and I don't have a commute. I cannot recommend such a thing highly enough.

//EDIT: Oh, I suppose I also have Starlink out here, but Dishy is so power hungry it lives on the house and I run connections out it over the property area network if my primary rural WISP connection (on the office) is acting up.

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Do you have any measured stats on your Dishy's power consumption? I've read it's 90-100W nominal, which seems reasonable if you switch it off at night when not in use. Like other commenters, I've been also been thinking about off-grid home requirements.

https://www.sevarg.net/2021/06/20/so-starlink/

It's around 85W continuous on the white hardware, I understand some of the newer generations are a bit more power efficient. Power use while transmitting goes up higher.

I just run it on the grid. :/ Yes, it's 2kWh/day.

Seems reasonable until you realise an LTE router draws 1-2W. I live off grid, as do a number of friends. They all rushed out and got starlink as they were making do with bad LTE installs - and now can’t use it as it’s way outside of their energy budget. I won’t consider moving to it until we have hydropower and wind. It’s just too much power for a damn internet connection.

FYI TFA is just a blank dark scrollable page without js here on FF w/noscript.

Interesting. Indeed it is, I just tried with JS disabled. That certainly wasn't the intent, I'll have to figure out what it's doing. However, it shouldn't be setting any cookies...

Web dev is no longer my strong suit... never really was, but I used to know a lot more about it than I do now.

It's the fade-in animation on page load. Everything is blank until Javascript adds the "is-in" class to <body>

Thanks, I'll see if I can resolve that. Sorry, it's been quite some years since I've messed with CSS much (just bought this template), so I'll try to resolve this. I didn't realize it was quite so JS dependent. :/

I'm curious how your batteries are holding up? I know effectively nothing about lead acid battery lifespans, but I saw a question asked on your blog concerning the heat the batteries would be subjected too. Did you ever hook up a AC system for the batteries?

They're fine, about halfway through the expected service life. I haven't bothered heating or cooling them, they're just boring old lead acid, floating away out back.

im not op but im an offgrid farmer i use lead carbon batteries they have held up well. on a 5k inverter i run a 70 inch tv, stand alone freezer and a fridge/freezer. my home lab has been reduced to a few pis a unfi usg plus a couple of access points. i have an lte 4g ptp connection. i use gas for hot water and cooking (kinda cheating) woodfire in winter and i currently cook in summer but am working on a daytime solution with some extra panels and a second inverter -> reverse cycle. these batteries are 5 years old still going strong. only thing i dont run is stuff with an element like electric kettle. other than that no huge difference in quality of life.

I didn't expect Starlink equipment to be very power hungry. That's unfortunate. Really damages my rural off-grid small home fantasy.

Well, it's talking to satellites 400 kms away.

2kWHr/day is about 500 watts of solar panels (just for starlink, similar math for the rest of the stuff). So that's about $750 plus brackets, wires and stuff. You'll need a battery bank and you will trade off the size of the battery bank against the size of the solar array to survive partly cloudy days, but there will always a cloudy period longer than your batteries will provide, so get a small generator running on whatever fuel is convenient (you want to charge using at least 1/4 the capacity of your generator to keep the efficiency up, so small generator unless you have vast batteries). Then you don't need such a big battery bank or solar array.

In the cost of a small home, the solar/battery/generator is minor. $1500 panels, $1000 inverter charger, $1000 lead acid batteries (5 years, then lithium will make sense), $2000 generator, $2000 more because I underestimate… $7500 all in.

Fantasy is still a go!

It's about as power hungry as your laptop. Less so than a desktop. It's totally reasonable if you're installing a solar system to add a little more capacity to handle that much load. You can also turn it off when you aren't using it(or have your access point turn it on only when a wireless device connects to it, or something like that).

Why not? It’s a phased array, and the bandwidth is high, so you need a decent amount of RF power. The amplifiers aren’t very efficient at the kind of frequencies it operates at so that makes it worse!

For reference, a company I worked at produced a Ka-band (27.5-31GHz) block upconverter that produced 25W (this was used for geostationary mostly, usually with a 1m dish), and it could draw something like 200 W or more when saturated.

Same here, thought Starlink would be low power. Still, 100W is acceptable I suppose

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