Wireless Internet In An Off-Grid House

matt20 writes "This is an interesting article of a family living off-grid using solar panels. In such a setting, every watt adds up. The typical home computer and monitor use almost 150 watts. What is the best computer arrangement in such a setting? Here is what worked best for them. Anyone know what percent of our national power is used on computers? Should we be thinking wireless on laptops?" Even on-grid, this article raises some good points about power consumption and convenience.

Comments

That was quick

[Clue4All]

Anyone know what percent of our national power is used on computers?

Judging by the unavailability of this site, I'd say not nearly enough.

Paradox of the Slashdot Effect?

[lamour]

ok, someone explain this to me. For a site to get slashdotted, slashdot readers would need to click through to read the articles...but as a long-time slashdot reader, I know that nobody here actually reads the articles, so...what's really taking down all these web servers?

Re:Paradox of the Slashdot Effect?

[boa13]

There are two kind of people on Slashdot:

• those who read the stories and follow the links;
• those who don't read the stories and comment on them.

The two population are of course completely disjoint. I remember CmdrTaco saying sometime around when Slashdot began offering a subscription that the first one accounts for 80% to 90% of the users of the site.

Laptop + Batteries

[xee]

Get a laptop and several batteries. plug the laptop in to power anywhere you can... hotels, friends houses, offices, wherever! charge up all your batteries and you're good to go. two batteries could be easily charged up throughout a day's use at the office and friend's houses. and one lasts for at least 3 hours. Weekends would be difficult, as would long programming runs.

Re:Home DC power

[flacco]

AC is much better for distributing power, thats why Edison lost.

I thought it was because that sadistic cunt electrocuted a circus elephant with AC power in order to scare the public into believing it was more dangerous than AC.

Rot in hell, Edison.

Apply media company logic to this

[lpontiac]

Approximately 1 in 10,000 households and businesses in the US get their power from people other than their local government-approved grid. Given a population of 260 million, and assuming that one household or business exists for every 2 people, that's 13000 establishments within the US that aren't giving us money!

Now, since if these people would probably chew through $10,000 per year in electricity. That's $130,000,000 that ends up in other people's pockets!

The sky is falling on this industry and we need laws to prevent this!