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Comment by Syonyk | Hacker News Reader

> Starlink satellite dishes have a self-heating feature to melt snow...

No, they don't. They just run hot. There are a ton of little ASICs behind the flat plane running the various antenna bits required for the beam forming (directing the beam without physically moving the dish, once it finds a spot it mostly stays put), and they all put out some good heat. Plus, the high frequency RF involved isn't the most efficient in terms of antennas.

Yes, they're warm. No, it's not a dedicated heater mode.

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Yes, it is a dedicated “snow melt mode” deployed in December 2020: https://turtleherding.com/2020/12/starlink-update-2020-12-22...

yes, they do. they have a deicer.

Source? At least the first gen Dishys have nothing of the sort, though they will draw more power when covered with snow - presumably due to increased attenuation and the need for higher radiated power to maintain a link.

Mine idles around 85W, 100-105W when transmitting heavily. Basically all that heat goes into the flat surface of the dish, which is enough to melt off snow. But it's not a dedicated heating functionality, and I've not seen a teardown that demonstrates a dedicated heating device.

Though I imagine a cat attenuates the link a good bit and encourages heating.

Wow, that's a lot of power for a device running 24/7.

Yeah it's about half my baseline house power draw. And I'm a nerd with several 24/7 servers so it would be higher than someone who doesn't.

By baseline I mean nobody home, lights and appliances off but internet, WiFi, IoT stuff etc all running.

Wow, usually the refrigerator dominates.

Oh yeah I've taken this with the fridge not currently cooling.

However my fridge is less than 50W.. I don't have a huge one like they do in the states (we call those "American refridgerators" here and they're a luxury). It's on about one third of the time (half the time in summer) so it adds about 25W of baseline load.

I actually find it a bit too much. I'd be happier if I could bring it down to 100W. But it's hard to do so. All those little wall warts add up and I just love my home automation. I have 5 1gbit switches alone (8-ports), 3 WiFi APs and then of course all the smart gizmos.

Its actually the main thing holding me back. The power consumption alone is as expensive as the cheapest fiber connection I can get.

Why would you ever even consider Starlink if you have fiber availability?

Because here despite the finer, they still dare to sell 50, 100mbit connexions, 1Gbit max. I would like to liberate myself from this local oligarchy.

that is very confusing still, can you elaborate?

Unlike is some other countries where I've lived, where fibre is basically sold as whatever the line will carry (5,8 GB for instance), here providers still work under the assumption 1 Gbit is the fastest they'll ever have to provide (for a significant sum) and have a highly segmented lineup with speeds sometimes down to less then 50mbit, just to make people pay exorbitantly more (we have the most expensive internet in all of Europe). Three parties control the entire market and it is making them good money.

Starlink could be a way out of this market, but alas is not yet (well, they're actually price competitive, if you exclude the cost of Dishy and the power consumption).

Wow, one of these would double my electricity usage.

That implies your electricity usage is ~2.4 kWh/day. How do you get the low?

In the US, an idling desktop computer, an energy efficient refrigerator, and a fan for household air circulation would be enough to exceed that.

I just download usage details from my electric company for a bill from the middle of summer when my usage is lowest, which provides usage broken down by 15-minute intervals, and the lowest 15-minute interval I had was using electricity at a rate of 4.8 kWh/day.

(The highest was a rate of 193 kWh/day. Probably had a 15-minute interval where the water heater was on, at the same time as the electric clothes dryer, while I was cooking something using the electric oven/stove, and microwaving something, while the well pump was running, and the iMac was doing something CPU intensive, while the fridge happened to be running).

I think you mean ~1.2kWh/day (0,05kW*24h).

GP doesn’t claim its double their electricity use, but that it would double it, which means it’s about equal to their current electricity usage.

Still, 2.4kWh is very low. I think it, in the western world, even is hard to achieve for a single person household that doesn’t use any electricity for heating or cooking, has a gas-powered refrigerator and no, or a gas-powered, clothes drier.

My electricity use is 5kWh/day, which you're correct actually averages to 200W. My mistake. We have gas heat/hot water.

My household's _baseline_ power usage is 100W, which is probably mostly the refrigerator based on some energy meters.

So you're correct, my total power consumption would only go up by 50%, but one of these dishes would double my household's idling power use.

The source is linked in another comment below, but to clarify, there is no extra heater hardware, there's a software function that ramps up the dish power to make the chips run hotter to melt the snow.

it's in the article. whether it draws more power to heat a BUC or has a dedicated heater, it's a deicer.

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