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Laptop vs. Small Desktop: Best Bang Per Watt?
Deagol writes "Tomorrow I take possession of a remote, wooded lot with a cabin. 15 miles to the nearest utility pole, my electricity options are limited to those I can generate myself, solar being my primary goal. I'm sitting here staring at my power meter, seeing my desktop & monitor draw about 250W -- a non-trivial amount to generate over a 8-to-12 hour workday. I'd be happy with equivalent computing horsepower (1.4GHz T-Bird, 512M RAM, though more is always better). Should I get a small PC with an LCD monitor, or should I get a laptop? Will laptops draw less power (in general), and if so, will losing the modularity and lower cost of commodity PC parts be worth it? I'd love opinions from those who have been in a similar situation."
Duder, if yr headed that far out into the boonies, you might as well pawn the damn computers and buy an axe and a box of matches. Seriously.
sig not found
I feel that my laptop gives me more bang for my buck. It draws much less power, and I can take it around with me. I like it much more than the cheap pc's we have at work (which would be a low power desktop) but LCD monitors are nice, but the quality of the lcd's on a laptop are just as good.
And I didn't know Ted Kaczynski was even eligible for early release...
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Live somewhere there is power.
I read homepower magazine and they deal with issues such as this regullarly. Most people living off the grid seem tom use laptops.. Look into apple, they seem to use the least power.
(ac becauser I cannot remember my username)
...that way you can always charge it up from someone elses sockets.
An infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of
are you going to do out in the middle of nowhere with a laptop? Leave the fucking computer at home and spend time actually being outdoors hiking or fishing. Read a book, spend time with your man or woman, anything but a computer.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Hey Ted, buy a generator.
I'd be willing to bet that the power savings from getting a laptop, as opposed to a desktop with a LCD, will be sufficient that you will more than make up the price difference by being able to buy slightly fewer solar panels and batteries.
Solar power is not cheap.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
Over heat big time when doing real grunt. RIP 2 sagers.
Generator anyone? Or it sounds like it would be fun to string 15 mi of electric lines ;)
All i have to say is I just ditched a Sony 19" CRT for 2 17" Sony LCDs, and the combined wattage for both LCDs is -half- of that what the 19" was pulling! I can expect a little drop in my power bill I think..
The batteries in a laptop will give you the flexibility to work independently (for an obviously limited time) of your home's power source. This might come in handy if you have a solar system that has intermittent output or oyou have other high-draw electrical needs.
My power adapter for my dell 8200 / 15 UXGA LCD / 2.0 Ghz / 1 gig ram / 40 gig HD is rated at 90 Watts... I don't have the equpiment to see what it actually pulls, I can tell you that it gets extremely hot sometimes, but that's only when I'm gaming (Halo, Unreal Tournament, etc..) AND charging the batteries at the same time...
hopefully that helps
The big problem you'll face on solar is the ol' "It don't work when the sun ain't around." That means you're better off getting a laptop for a few reasons. 3 or more hours of battery life can be very handy and you can march around with it, meaning you could leave lights off at your desk and stroll over to the kitchen with your laptop, saving electricity in two ways, the lights and that stored in the batteries.
Another option is get a UPS for your desktop. You can run the machine off of that when the power goes out, night, etc. and they are relatively cheap...if you get a 4 hour one... and can power other devices. The laptop and the UPC will trickle charge while juice is flowing, so you can be pretty sure that when the sun does set, you won't miss a beat with your tech.
Now... how exactly are you going to get on the net? Satellite? Pigeon?
"Life's funny sometimes." "And sometimes it isn't." --Cat's Cradle
It should be obvious that there are more low power options in laptops than PCs.
However, be aware that some laptops are really just mobile desktops, in that they're fast, hot, and hungry.
There are plenty of good low power laptops out there. Just start by looking at battery life.
"Small PCs" are not necessarily better for power consumption than big boxes. It all comes down to the CPU and graphics cards, mostly. OTOH, I can attest that a lovely little Shuttle XPC with a big fat P4 will probably be enough to heat your cabin thru the coldest winter. Mine was like a hairdryer permanently on.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
if your trying to go with low power (watt wise) but reasonably decent high power (cpu wise), the intel pentium-m notebooks are a worthy option. Pair it up with a decent video card and you can even do some reasonable gaming on it.
Here is a good sample machine for you, customize it as desired.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
There are many different alternatives. Yes, using a laptop is much more power-efficient, and you can get yourself power-adapters to convert DC to DC current to charge your laptop from a 12v battery car.
However, there is also a Mini-ITX form-factor system, to which you can find cases with built-in DC switching power supplies.
I think the solution is to stay native to DC current, and then convert as you see fit. So, all you need to have is a set of car batteries, connected to solar panels (for charging purposes), and you set-up some sort of power distribution & management system.
If you are considering the mini, have you considered using a mini-ITX board? I'm currently using one in my computer which i have built into a modded Game Boy Advance gaming case. It's quite small, in fact, it's sitting on my bookshelf in my bedroom. Just an idea.
I'd love opinions from those who have been in a similar situation.
Error: division by zero
Try looking at what they have here: solarpc.
They even have a complete turn-key squeak system (it's at the bottom of the page): here.
You might as well get a laptop. Most of your time will be spent elsewhere than the cabin. In a multi floor house, you will benefit of the true portability of a laptop.
I don't know weather you are going to be out there full time or not, but the laptop has the advantage of recharing while you aren't using it and you can run of the battery for probably 4 hours a day on a decent machine...
Mind you, I don't know what the power draw of it or a small desktop would be so you might be able to easily generate that kind of power...
MG
Randomly distributing Karma whenever possible.
I thought you unabomber types sworn off technology. Get yourself a good old IBM manual typewriter and write your manifesto.
If you're just running 3-4 PCs, what's the point? Get a Belkin (cheaper) or APC (better Linux support) unit and get the same digits.
The person asking the question states that their desktop is sucking down 250W for PC plus monitor. My laptop (Fujitsu C2220 running Linux 2.4Ghz P4 and 512Mb) has a power supply rated at 100W and draws around 90W. Previously I've had Dell laptops that draw 60W. If you go get an Apple iBook instead then they draw only 45W.
Laptops make perfectly good computers, except as very high-end workstations/gaming machines. I have not owned a desktop machine for at least the last ten years. The small amount you are behind in terms of graphics processor or CPU is more than made up for by the ability to take the thing with you.
John.
Seriously: http://www.hondapowerequipment.com/eu1000.htm.
Still ugly, or plain at best.
Can't you download pictures of hot chicks, or does your mom run down the basement stairs to check on you?
We'll work on getting you to move out later, baby steps for now.
Google has some ideas...
The laptop has power conserving options and its own battery source. The laptop will give you more flexibility. Plus, you can take it on business trips to meet with other hill billies in the co-op. Imagine the waste of powering the desktop on and off.
Plus, Thoreau, you can take a bag of batteries over to your moms there and charge them up.
What will you use the computer for out there? Reply.
not sure how much sun exposure you have avaliable, but a laptop plugged into one of these has to last a fair while.
:-)
might even come in handy in new york next time the power goes out.
A Pentium M laptop with long battery life would be a good choice for its low-power consumption.
hmm, seems like I do need text, so I lied about that [n/t] bit.
Come on now, a true nerd would build a steam engine to run his generator. You clearly have some wood around. Sure the conversion efficiency is only 5%, but think of the nerd points you'd get for posting pictures of your steam-powered computer! ;) And, if you are really nerdy, you could even try for a Stirling engine, which could also be run in reverse to cool your CPU.
- can take it with you
- can pre-charge the batter elsewhere when possible
- has built-in "UPS"
- is specifically designed to use as little power as possible
- if you later get a generator for the rainy day, the battery gives you time to start the generator without hibernate/shutdown
- if you want the comfort of separate keyboard, bigger LCD, real mouse etc, you can still get them for laptop too (and getting that 2nd LCD may give you dual screen as a bonus) and still use less power
Whilst I can't say much about power usage I can say that a few months ago, I decided that my big old XP1600+ beast had to go and that a quieter, more bedroom friendly solution was required.
:)
I chose a laptop over a small, quiet PC mostly so I could take it to Tafe, Uni, LANs, etc on public transport, which doesn't sound like it will effect you much.
The point is, that it is quite possible to get a laptop to replace your desktop, especially since your computing power requirements seem to be similar to my own.
Personally, I managed to find a nice looking (Mac design clone) laptop with plenty of power for my needs. I was set back $2,600 Australian dollars for a Pentium M 1.5ghz, 512mb RAM, 40gb HDD, Geforce FX5200 Go and a 15.2" widescreen LCD (just as wide onscreen as my 17" CRT, slightly less tall.) Expansion wise, there is the one PCMCIA card and the internal MiniPCI slot which came with an 802.11b card inside.
My needs were also based around portability, and being a thin and light, this notebook weighs 2.7kgs. However, since you'll not likely be walking to the nearest LAN party from that location, I do think a laptop designed for good battery life will obviously use less power. Between the slower hard disk, powersaving, speedstepping CPU and powersaving motherboard, you could be using far less power than all but the best designed MiniPC. Another advantage to the laptop is that you get a few hours battery life in case your power dies or runs out of juice. Perhaps you could even take it out roaming your property if you're into that kind of thing.
Think I've rambled on a bit, but hope it's been helpful.
Don't read any books labeled, "Necronomicon." Even more importantly, if you find any tape recorded notes left behind by a researcher who has mysteriously vanished, don't play them, BURN THEM. (And keep your boomstick handy just in case...)
http://www.mytypewriter.com/generic81.html Just out of curiosity....where about in the boonies will you be moving to? And is this going to be your primary residence? Good luck. -- anthony
Seems you'd just need to stop by Home Depot and pick up about about 792 100' extension cords...
Diesel. Generator.
Real nerds(tm) use microwave power transmission! How could any real nerd pass up an opportunity like that? You might even get a slashdot category named after you.
best is pen and paper... then a palm PDA... then those intel-compatible via epia CPUs that are so low-wattage that they don't require a fan...
I think its the least power sucking laptop from a well known maker on the market. I think the g3 in the 800mhz 12" draws like 7 watts or something obscenely low like that.
Sleep is for the weak.
Consider: 1700$ for a really nice laptop (Such as an IBM Thinkpad X31) which has good battery life (5ish hours) and meets your requirements, has APM/ACPI support, has the ability to down-clock the processor per your need, and draws -much- less power than a small system/LCD combination even without any real management, and no/few power cells needed (depending on how frequently you plan to join civilization, and how much you plan to use the computer).
Or: 600$ for the desktop/LCD combo, with no APM/ACPI, with minimal/no real power management, vs. a compact and portable laptop that can have function outside of the woods in real life in addition to its getaway use, and a shitload of solar panels (or just a few and a large number of car batteries to store the power over time - still a large expense).
I'd personally suggest, that, given your desires and requirements, that you go with a low-power laptop (such as a Fujitsu or IBM thinkpad X31 - I love my X30) and one or two solar power cells: however many it would take to continually charge a 12V car battery or two. That way it can charge while you're gone, and you'll slowly wear down the charge while you're there over a period of a weekend or so. If you go there less frequently, but for longer periods, just get one or two cells, and half a 12V batteries - it'll provide power for a desktop for a day or so, your laptop will be set (especially if you come with a 5hr charged battery at the onset, and you run off the batteries after the laptop battery is used).
Personally, though, I think you're bloody nuts. You've got a nice cabin out in the woods, away from modernization and electronics - what in the world are you thinking, bringing a laptop with you to compute while there? What about spending the time to let your soul relax, to do something different? Why not go out back and chop wood for relaxation? Why not read a book by the fireplace at night? Why not go hiking with a sack lunch, with no descriminate plans for the day?
To behave in such a way as you're considering, in such an environment, is a shame. It's no small wonder that our rainforests are being destroyed, the environment is being poluted, and people still don't give a damn.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Get yourself an IBM Thinkpad X30 from the authorizes IBM Ebay store. These are heavily discounted (overstock) NEW laptops with a full warranty.I recommend these for several reasons:
Very durable, small -- won't take up that much space in your cabin
12" screen, more than adequate for general purpose computing, plus the smaller backlight mean considerable power savings in the long run.
Get yourself a couple of deep cycle marine batteries. 1 to use, the other being charged.
Do you want to build your own windmill? Looks like fun project.
P.S. I don't know how remote your cabin is, but if you get yourself a Proxim/Orinoco WiFi card (these have external antenna jacks) and build/buy from a ebay a hi gain 2.4 Ghz yagi antenna, you might be able to hit someone's WiFi AP. It's worth a shot/ fun to try.
If you do by any chance get WiFI with this setup, update your journal and let us. It would be cool to know how you accomplished it.
--
3-5 hr battery life depending on usage.
Are you out of your fricken skull? She's got a six pack! And she looks what real girls look like, not the Hilton twins...
The OSDN Personal's redhead is far better looking.
Solar power is generated and stored as direct current. In order to use a desktop system, you will need to convert to AC, so that the computer's power supply can convert it back down to the proper DC voltages. This is a wasteful process.
If you start with a laptop, preferably one whose input voltage is the same, or lower, than the voltage of your storage cells, you will make a more efficient use of your power system.
-Chris
-- This sig is only a test. If this were a real sig it would say something witty. --
I use a Hush PC (www.hushtechnologies.com) and it works perfectly for what I need. It's a desktop. I don't even live in the boonies! But rather, in a very small Honolulu apartment. Since the apartment is small, I needed a computer that I could put in the bedroom without annoying my girlfriend (or me). And, since I'm a Gentoo geek, it's constantly doing something, so I didn't just want to turn it off. My 19 inch LCD monitor and Hush together take less than 100 watts, combined, maximum (that's the maximum ability of the two power supplies. It's a modern computer -- 120GB HD, 512MB RAM in my configuration. Slightly on the slow side, but hey, the advantages, you can listen to the birds and forest sounds without the din of a loud computer, and it fits within your power requirements.
Erik
http://www.fuelcellstore.com/
n .h tml
Take a look at the AirGen.
http://fuelcellstore.com/products/coleman/airge
http://fuelcellstore.com/item/393
The website says that only the industrial version is available. I contacted them and the commercial version has been available for several months. The residential version may be available now as well, I would suggest contacting them if you are interested.
The cost of the AirGen is $5995.00, which may be too high for a 1KW fuel cell. The AirGen is very similiar to a UPS in terms of features. The fuelcellstore.com website has other UPSes with varying feature sets. I wanted to post to make sure that people know that this technology exists, whether the need is for home or business.
I have a Mini-ITX system (1ghz VIA C3), and it works like a charm for my homebrew tivo. Even with a dvd drive and 3.5" hd, it draws less than 50 watts, lower than many laptop PSUs are rated. If you really want to minimize power consumption, consider a low end (500mhz) VIA mobo/cpu combination with a compact flash boot disk and a laptop cd drive. iTuner sells CF to IDE card, and Case Outlet sells beautiful Mini-ITX form factor cases.
Yawn.
My recomendation would be to go with the laptop, but to be sure that you get a laptop up to today's standards. Way too many laptops still only have USB 1.1, for example. Be sure that any laptop you get has USB 2.0. Firewire is also another nice thing to look for. While these things can be added by PC cards (A.K.A. PCMCIA), many notebooks only have a single card slot, that's something to pay attention to also. And if you have anything that needs old ports (parallel port printer or serial port device) make sure that those ports are there too. Buying a notebook wisely will likely give you your greatest options at reasonable power consumption without "losing the modularity" of a PC, unless you plan on doing things that need an add-in card (like making the PC into a PVR). Also, you sound like the computer will generally be powered up for lomg periods of time. If that's the case and power is the prime concern than I expect a notebook will be the best bet, but you might want to keep that desktop handy for special cases where you need to add that card and feed it power for an hour or two.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Laptops definitely use less power than their desktop counterparts. Consider they're powering an LCD and logic components off a fraction ofthe power your PC and monitor are using. They're also got a built-in UPS in the form of their battery. Running a laptop off its internal battery rather than the house batteries in a solar installation just means that much more you can have connected at night.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
...due to going from 120VAC->12VDC that both computers actually use. If you get a desktop, the power supply does it, if you get a laptop the power adapter does it. Maybe the laptop will use less energy because there's no fan on the power supply but either way you are still going to lose a big chunk of energy due to the conversion. I can barely hold my laptop power adapter it gets so warm...that's got to be more than a few watts.
What you should do is get yourself a computer with a 12VDC power input. They sell power supplies that take in 12VDC and have standard motherboard power connectors (although the last time I shopped for one it was using AT connectors). They work well for computers used in cars and boats. A little more expensive, but they basically take the power in and put it right to the motherboard and components.
Speaking of cars, will you have one? Why not use that as the power source? Get a laptop with a ton of extra batteries and keep three or four charging from car adapters wired into the car's trunk or something. If you get a laptop with a mobile processor that sips power, you should have well more than enough power. I work with a Dell Inspiron 600m and I ususually get 3-4 hours per battery. I have two spares I can hot swap so it is easy for me to go an entire 9 hour day running off of batteries.
Also, how much storage do you need? Why not go completely solid state? You could boot from say a CD, load everything into RAM and then power down the CD drive. At that point all you need is a USB key or other flashram to keep your data safe and that should be it. No hard drive, no CD-ROM should mean a lot less power right? Those are both big draws on my laptop.
Those are just a couple thoughts I had...
- JoeShmoe
.
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
If you start looking for low power CPU's, such as ARM's you can drop your power by a large factor.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I then give the 3-yr-old system to a family member, earning many kudos ('sides, that's when the warranty runs out).
They also have sensational battery life. My old g3 pizmo w/ 2 batteries would last 8 continuous hours of word processing. And would do a week business trip of casual use without recharging. My TiBook and iBook get about 3 hours of casual use (w/ airport).
If you have no religious preferences about computing then the Apple will give better power performance. The G3 iBooks are coming in cheap now. Especially, refurbed. Then you can save money for the solar setup that is going to hurt more.
I'd love opinions from those who have been in a similar situation.
Theodore Kaczynski would probably recommend a typewriter for your situation.
Eric
Consider a lot of the same factors for desktop or laptop.
If you can sacrifice a little performance, you will find that a system that uses a Transmeta Crusoe or a VIA Eden CPU will consume far less power than anything from Intel or AMD. There are a few nice Transmeta based laptops.
Both provide good x86 instructions and run XP or linux fine.
As well, going with a small (15"-17") LCD will be a big power saver for a desktop over a traditional CRT.
Use a lower RPM disk, or a laptop drive in your desktop.
On a laptop, if you can live with dual scan it uses less power than active matrix. If you can find an "organic" LCD like the one in the Gameboy Advance, they use the least power of any acceptable display technology I've seen.
Also don't forget to optimize those energy savings times to get the components to "sleep" after just a short idle time.
Cheers!
~8^]
title says it all
Uh, yeah. Cause she was hired to be good looking. After the modeling shoot was done, they sent her home. Then they used her picture in who knows how many ads.
I'm not sure if this will produce better power savings than a decent laptop, but it should save some 30% on power if you are going to use a PC.
I assume that you use solar power to charge up 12v batteries. Running that power through an inverter only for it to eventually get converted back to DC is hugely wasteful for a variety of reasons(A horrible power factor being one of them).
I just googled around, and found this page with a variety of DC/DC PC Power supplies, with a variety of supported voltages.
Now that I think about it, if you have the capability to supply the power supply more than 12 volts(ie: 24 or 48 volts), then that will probably improve your wattage even more(as well as improve your stability if your power is "dirty").
Pair this with a small, power-saving bare-bones PC, and I would imagine you would have a setup that would be comparable in wattage to a laptop. Perhaps even better, considering that you are still using gobs of power from the DC->AC->DC conversion when charging the laptop batteries.
Finding a DC LCD Monitor may be a bit harder, but I'm sure they are out there somewhere. If you are feeling adventurous, you could even modify a monitor for DC...
— darco
A bit off topic, but inste4ad of solar, you could always use a diesel generator running biodiesel. it is loud, but at least it owuld be enviromentally friendly.
You didn't mention if you'll be living in this cabin or just up there now and again. Around here cabins that aren't always occupied get broken into 2-3 times a year on average, so if thats possible down there get the laptop and take it home with you. As well the power drain is lower, the built in battery helps a lot when you're running on a flakey power grid similar to what you intend to build, and It's more useful overall then a PC. the only issue is cost, but it'll help cut down on your power requirements and probably make up the difference on solar panels.
A notebook with Centrino will save you lots of power.
You can also make a really cool looking case Check it out!
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
For the past couple of years I too lived like my hero Teddy K. and can confirm that the laptop is the way to go. Solar with inverters or generators are unreliable so the UPS action is as valuable as running on 100W. If you really want to go Unabomber make your own bicylce powered generator out of an old tape drive motor for the cloudy days:(http://users.erols.com/mshaver/bikegen.htm) The real limiting factor is the lack of the net to glean the bombmaking finery.
Get one of those.
A laptop will give you the best power economy, but the quick fix is the LCD monitor + good power management. Dropping the standard monitor will save you about 100 Watts (give or take, based on your exact size of monitor). So, you are down to 150 watts without buying anything else. So the extra $1000 you save will buy you another solar panel that is useful for all appliances, and useful when you replace your computer for a newer model.
... or the same money and have another 250 Watts of power generation and a 17inch LCD.
So you can spend your $1500 just a laptop which gets you down to 60-80 Watts
Remember those bikes in the 80's Cafe from Back to the Future II? :-)
Actually, do you have a spring or a stream nearby? Those run 24 hours generally, but I don't know how much power you could pull from a water-wheel / dam contraption.
Get one of those "kill a watt" meters from P3. I picked one up for $40.something delivered and it's great. I can tell exactly how much power any device (or combination of devices, using a power strip) draws. My 17" CRT is about 67 watts. It's label says 2 amps (which would be about 240 watts). My XP2600+ PC draws around 185 watts (under full load, not including the monitor). My 800Mhz G3 ibook draws 17-18 watts under full load. Low 20s when the CD spins up. The power adapter may be rated for 60 watts but it doesn't need anywhere near that amount during normal use. (Charging the battery while using the ibook is another matter.)
I just built a mini-ITX system. Temporarily using a standard mATX power supply, it draws about 53-55 watts under full load (compiling the kernel). That doesn't include the monitor. Even if I were to use an LCD, I'd still be using over 4 times the power needed by a small laptop.
Also, physical size of the desktop PC is not how you judge the amount of power it takes. You can put a 3Ghz P4 in a case the size of a shoebox and it will draw just as much power as a 3Ghz P4 in a case the size of a filing cabinet.
Intel is currently shipping two similarly named but totally different low-power CPUs, the Pentium M (really an optimized P-III with more cache) and the Pentium IV-M (a mobilized P-4). The P-M seems to get as much or more throughput than the P-IV-M for far less power - look for it in Centrino-branded laptops.
Larger screens use more power for the backlights, so you might consider a system with a 12.2in screen (typically 1024x768) instead of a larger (14.4in or more) screen that has sex (and pixel) appeal but sucks down the juice. Many popular vendors have ultra-mobile form factor systems that put rarely used I/O devices like CD-R/DVDs in a "media slice" or other external packages.
Other advantages of laptops of off-grid use are that you can get a 12VDC adapter and run/charge it off a cigarette socket (including a car) eliminating inverter inefficiency, you can charge during the day when there's juice available and use it up at night, and you can use them while covered in blankets in bed during the cold of winter, a popular position for some of my off-grid friends.
ellbee
You can't fight in here - this is the war room!
Your should go with a low power desktop unit, and use the difference in money to add additional solar panels. Remember that solar panels are rated for 15+ years or so. So any decision must be made using that time value of money frame. In addition, you will get extra power that you can use with anything for the life of the solar panels.
Your computer, whatever you buy or build will be junk in 5 years....while the solar panels keep on going. Computers are very expense when you consider there short life and associated expenses. (and Laptops are even more enourmously expensive!)
If you look around you can get power supplies for standard PC's that are highly efficiency for not much more money, additionally you can underclock. I would look at sites such as www.silentpcreview.com and some of the underclockers site. Since silent pc's strategies often are orientated to lowering power consumption, you will find alot of work has already been done for you.
How efficient are laptop batteries though? (How much power do you have to put in per power you get out?)
A word about laptops. Most of them have two modes they operate in. While running off internal power, they run in a low power mode. This many times slows the CPU down and dims the display. Also while in battery mode the fan will run on various speeds on demand.
When they are plugged in they speed the CPU back up and brighten the display - consuming more power since it is available. I think I would probably recommend a laptop, and a few spare batteries. Then you can charge on someone else's power and bring it back home with you.
Since your laptop will use less power when running off battery you should always use your laptop on battery power. Then when you shut it off you should charge the batteries. Make sure you get a laptop with two bays.
If you go with a PC get a variable speed CPU fan with a sensor. Then it can slow down when it is not needed, saving you some juice. Since I am assuming you would be building your own system then evaluate the watt consumption of each component, and add it up getting a good quality (expensive) power supply that meets your needs without exceeding them astronomically. When possible use one component instead of two (Optical drives, hard drives, memory modules, etc.) Two will consume more juice then one (obviously) when you can get a single hard drive that is big enough to do the job.
Display brightness has a huge impact on battery life. Whatever you go with make sure your display is as dim as possible. Put your computer in a dark room.
Also, don't run SETI@Home, GIMPS or one of those other background processing systems. Those really increase your machines power consumption, as do games!
Another must have would be a good UPS with a power conditioner. Brown outs are very damaging to your computer hardware. Not that I doubt your ability to build your own power grid, but wouldn't you hate to loose your PC because of a brown out?
"Anything is possible with enough programmers, time and pizza." (Substitute caffeine for time as needed.)
Laptop Pros:
1) A very small form factor that is easily portable, and easily stored out of the way. My experiences with cabins say that this is good.
2) The built in battery is a very effective UPS which is good when you are dealing with unreliable power sources (solar, etc).
Laptop Cons:
However, laptops are designed to be power efficient when running on battery, not when plugged into the wall. Depending on exactly how the battery charging works, they could be very inefficient when running on external power (like some UPS's are).
For example, I know the external power supplies draw some power whenever they are plugged in, not just when they are connected to a laptop.
plus-good, double-plus-good
Someone brought in a current meter in my computer hardware class. A p-133 PC with HD, Nic, vga, CD, and floppy drew 40 watts. Throw in a 14" crt monitor and it drew nearly 175 watts. So a normal PC wouldn't be that bad, just go to a LCD display.
If this is a cabin, you're probably only going to be there on the occasional weekend. In which case get yourself a laptop and a gasoline generator. You can probably get by with one of the dinky little Honda EU1000's. Whisper quiet, stingy on gas and should run your laptop, charge your cell phone battery, a couple lights, maybe a portable TV and small frig (maybe not all at the same time). It won't run a full size frig or electric heater, but it's easy to carry. Around 800 dollars. If you need more power, a Generac 4,000 watt is quiet, produces clean power and should run most of the weekend on 5-8 gallons of gas (depending on usage). Lot cheaper than Honda's for the same amount of power and that will run a full size refrigerator, heater, TV, satellite receiver, whatever you want. Home Despot, around $750.00. It weighs about 150 lbs (on wheels), so you'll need a pickup or small trailer to haul it back and forth.
With any generator you have to look at the sustained wattage and surge wattage. Honda tends to advertise their surge wattage, which a generator can't maintain very long.
If you ever decide to live up there permanently, you'll want to look at either a big solar or combo solar/wind system. Figure on 15 to 20 thousand depending on the wattage you need. If you have a stream or spring, you're golden. Hydro electric is the cheapest and best, until the creek runs dry.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
If you really need a computer in the middle of nowhere, buy an Apple LapTop (iBook or PowerBook, first needs less power).
...)
Anyway, I'd suggest doing anything but use a computer.
Man, enjoy nature! (wildness, mountains, girls,
Tend to post comments only when drunk
get a laptop with an Intel Centrino chip. Clock speed will be radically lower, heat produced will be radically lower, power consumption will be radically lower.
a definite winner. Compact Flash built in works great with many cameras, too for all those wildlife scenes. Very long battery life.
Dude, are you a giant? How else would you call 2.7kg is thin and light?
What have you been smocking? That's a heavy laptop. And with a 15.2" whalebook like this, you probably have issues finding room for it in the backpack.
For your info, to qualify as thing and light laptops generally have to weight around 2.7lb, not kg!!!
Checkout Panasonic R1, the little Fujistus, sharp actius or even the old school sony vaio sr* laptops. Those are thing and light, yours is a monster. Admit it!
ps. Some manufacturer needs to start adding pullout handles + little wheels to their whalebook lines of laptops. That way people wouldn't have to strain their backs.
Another option would be to add 4 retractable feet to the laptop, so you be useful as a desk too.
Just look at the power ratings printed on the back of the devices you are considering. If you need a 200 watt power supply for your components, keep in mind that the supply will need to draw more than that to compensate for the AC-DC conversion.
I think you would be much better off with a laptop. The things are built for power effeciency! If you are skilled enough with electronics, you could replace the AC adaptor with a voltage regulator connected to your house's batteries. DC-DC conversion is MUCH more effecient than AC-DC.
Why convert from DC (batteries/solar panel) to AC (computer power supply) BACK to DC (computer's internals)?
Install Ubuntu in Android
A word about laptops. Most of them have two modes they operate in. While running off internal power, they run in a low power mode. This many times slows the CPU down and dims the display. Also while in battery mode the fan will run on various speeds on demand.
When they are plugged in they speed the CPU back up and brighten the display - consuming more power since it is available. I think I would probably recommend a laptop, and a few spare batteries. Then you can charge on someone else's power and bring it back home with you.
Since your laptop will use less power when running off battery you should always use your laptop on battery power. Then when you shut it off you should charge the batteries. Make sure you get a laptop with two bays.
If you go with a PC get a variable speed CPU fan with a sensor. Then it can slow down when it is not needed, saving you some juice. Since I am assuming you would be building your own system then evaluate the watt consumption of each component, and add it up getting a good quality (expensive) power supply that meets your needs without exceeding them astronomically. When possible use one component instead of two (Optical drives, hard drives, memory modules, etc.) Two will consume more juice then one (obviously) when you can get a single hard drive that is big enough to do the job.
Display brightness has a huge impact on battery life. Whatever you go with make sure your display is as dim as possible. Put your computer in a dark room.
Also, don't run SETI@Home, GIMPS or one of those other background processing systems. Those really increase your machines power consumption, as do games!
Another must have would be a good UPS with a power conditioner. Brown outs are very damaging to your computer hardware. Not that I doubt your ability to build your own power grid, but wouldn't you hate to loose your PC because of a brown out?
"Anything is possible with enough programmers, time and pizza." (Substitute caffeine for time as needed.)
Another more serious option would be a windmill powering a generator. Or even a small watermill.
I guess your laptop will most be usefull during the evening or when it's rainy or snowy. So, no much advantage with solar power.
Achille Talon
Hop!
But none of the desktop replacement units.
I was in a similar situation (although I was more concerned by the noise than the power consumption). I ended up with a ThinkPad T40p, for various reasons: very robust, 6 hours on a single battery (with a dimmed display and reduced CPU clock rate), pretty good GNU/Linux support (even if you run free software only), and the academic discount almost makes it affordable.
Ben!
Buy one of those stationary bikes that has a generator built in, that companies were selling parents that were worried that their kids were going to grow up to be couch potatoes. It was designed to be hooked up to the TV so that the kids could only watch TV/play Nintendo while they were pedaling. Of course, I'm sure you could easily Google the plans to build your own from parts available at a scrapyard.
http://www.explan.co.uk/hardware/solo.shtml
'can be used indefinitely away from sources of mains electricity.'
No utilities probably means no internet, because the power budget of a satellite internet setup will eat you alive.
Suggest you invest in some pens and paper.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
I've always found one of these handy when I have power constraints.
Others are saying that laptops are designed for lower power consumption, which is true. But further, laptops use DC, not AC, so if you're going to use solar power or some other homebrew power generation you won't have to include an inverter (with its attendant expense and power losses) in the setup.
Solar only works in the daytime but you could charge several laptop batteries in parallel and switch them in as needed after sundown. Depending on your laptop, you may not even need to shut down to do so.
And in the worst case you can power a laptop off your car's cigarette lighter. Terrible conversion efficiency, but in a pinch, it works and is easy to do.
I have never had the opportunity to do what you're doing, but have often imagined it -- haven't we all?
I chose laptop, even though I do 3D rendering. Everybody here has told you they use less power, yadda yadda yadda. One of the main reasons I went laptop is in consideration of a few things.
1.) I move about once a year. I'm sick of lugging my desktop around. When it goes extinct, that's it for desktops to me.
2.) I wanted an LCD that'd do 1600 by 1200, and the cheapest I've found those is $1,000. My laptop was only $700 on top of that. (Yay for Dell.)
3.) When it's time to replace my laptop, this one will still be useful. I have 4 towers at home that'll never see the light of day again, but the laptop I bought back in 99 is still finding use as a web terminal. (plus, selling them is easy.)
4.) I'm no longer sold on the upgradability factor. By the time mid-range processors are 4x what I currently have, I've saved up enough for a new laptop. I'm not the type to drop $500 in a vid card for a few extra FPS. (Lately I've been gaming on my Game Cube anyway.)
5.) Extra desk space. Need I say more?
My current desktop has been promoted to 'server', and I send it rendering jobs to do once in a while. Eventually I'm just going to hide it in a dark corner somewhere.
"Derp de derp."
You can buy a PC with a DC power supply. It has worked well in off the grid locations in Central America. I think a laptop would be a better solution, since you'll probably be returning to urbanity at some point.
I'm much funnier now that I'm a subscriber.
Anyway, for what it's worth, personally I have a notebook, and plan to soon buy a Shuttle to use as a home computer / entertainment centre.
"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that ones work is terribly important." -BRussell
Now... how exactly are you going to get on the net? Satellite? Pigeon?
He should prolly stick to the tried-and-true bongo drum method. They've got better range than wireless, low power consumption (well, other than mechanized sticks, but he could just operate them manually on cloudy days), and complement the decor marvelously!
Don't forget to mention how this is accomplished. You will need what is called a DC-DC converter. They sell universal ones at retail outlets where you just pick which connector your laptop uses. It is ment to be powered off 12V DC (like a car or marine battery or alternator) and basically cleans up the source, and splits it into 12v,5v, and 3.3v rails.
If you use solar pannels with the standard laptop power supply, you are seriously wasting lots of electricity in the form of heat.
Also watch out. if you are going to go all DC (ie, no power inverters for AC) then you will want to make sure to keep your power cables from the pannel to the house short and thick. low voltage DC current isn't like high volt AC. Longer and thinner cables won't carry your electricity very well and will greatly reduce the wattage your solar pannels will provide to you.
Two infinite things: your stupidity and mine. But I'm not sure about the latter. If my sig offends you, I'm sorry.
According to the insurance industry, 50% of all laptops get stolen.
According to the naturalists I know, grizzly bears are extremely smart, and damn near unstoppable when they want something.
When the grizzlies look in through that window and see that shiny new glowy-apple Powerbook, you *know* they're gonna want it.
Just be careful out there, is all...
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
Ahh, sounds about like where I live, in a camper trailer in the middle of the woods. There are a few differences, the nearest power pole being about 30 meters away and the DSL connection (which I'm still marvelling at being available).
Go with the laptop. IMO, there is no question as to the value of upgradability. Given the current state of hardware development, the return from the modularity a desktop will give you will be wildly overridden by the two major advantages of the laptop: mobility and power consumption. Get a Dell, Linux installs on them much less painfully then other brands in my experience.
Laptops draw noticably less power, and with everything available as a 1394 or USB plug-n-pray I don't see expandability as an issue.
If you're a gamer, then a small PC is obviously the better choice.
Also, bear in mind that you don't gotta generate that 250W an hour for very hour your machine is one anyway; 250W at 120V is just over 2A, and getting a 300A/h battery is easy.
With my 360A/h battery I powered a small, efficient refrigerator for three days in 80F weather and still had juice for some lights and the laptop.
A laptop, if you can sacrifice graphics (and even that isn't as bad as it used to be) saves a lot of power--"everything" in them is designed to suck less juice.
Dave
I've been trying to minimize my power usage for some time and have measured several different systems using a watts up meter. (Unfortunately filtered through my memory)
I think the newer eden boards are a little bit better than the C3 in a ordinary mother board.
I think my G4 powerbook averages about ~15 watts as well. (Charging is closer to 30 watts.)
The important note is that the laptops include the LCD monitor whereas I was running the desktops headless.
Also to cut down on energy lossage with either the small desktop or the laptop try to get a DC to DC power supply. From what I've read an inverter will sap another 10 watts.
Chances are, of that 250W of power your PC is eating, at least 150 and possibly 200W of that is the monitor. If you're on a budget then a simple switch to an LCD monitor while using your current system would be a good way to go.
Also if there's already some sort of battery or capacitor in the solar power setup don't even run teh laptop with the battery in - why waste any power charging batteries - just put them in every week or so to top off.
Same goes for anything else, anything that runs on DC power you should hardwire to avoid the redundant conversions.
A friend has a place far from anything. Has phone, but no power.
6 solar panels -> a number of truck batteries (and charger) give him loads of power. 19" TV from the 80's works, usually, til midnight.
Gas for stove/fridge.
A couple of the panels are from the 70s. 80% of their orig efficiency.
His best investment of late was a new inverter. THOSE have gotten LOTS better in the last few years.
LCD absolutely.
Laptop has a UPS :)
Laptop can easily be rigged to take DC (48V or 24V solar is common). So why go from DC->AC->DC?
Also, you may not WANT the computing power of a full desktop.
Ideally, you could have an ARM computer or perhaps Intel/Apple might offer slower/lower power boxes. That said, are ibooks lowerpower than Intel boxes? The chips generally are.
With expandability, unless you have a specific expansion in mind, it may not be an issue. Memory on small form PC is often not more expandable than on a laptop. Often on an efficient PC there may only be one or two available slots, one bay, and the video card is integrated. Also, with USB and Firewire, one can get very efficient external connections to various devices. These devices can be easily removed from the main computer to conserve power.
You didn't mention if you were planning to keep this computer in one place, or move it around. Or if the computer is going to be a good climate controlled environment. In my experience a good portable is much more tolerant of movement and environment. This may or may not be a factor
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
My first suggestion would be to decide whether you prefer a laptop or desktop. It is your choice. If I were working for extended periods of time, I'd prefer a real desktop.
Power: An inverter off a battery is a good choice for periodic usage, but regular usage will require a generator. Since you won't want to use the generator all the time, keep a battery, and inverter around for when its not convenient to run the generator.. The EU3000 will keep your desktop running all the time on less than 4 gallons of gas.
Solar power doesn't make sense. You'll be waiting days for it to charge your batteries. Or if you have enough panels, it will just burn a hole in your pocket.
The Generator: They've improved dramatically. The newwest inverter based models are very quiet. See Honda's EU3000
If you've sworn off a generator, and they work great for running small coffee makers and Direct TV receivers, then consider a laptop, extra battery, and if necessary inverter + battery combination and just live with the results.
I would suggest starting with a rough power budget and working from both that and the monetary budget to figure the best trade off. Firstly do you really need a 1.4GHz athlon worth of power - no laptop today that is low power really has that.
For the VIA EPIA type desktop systems with the right LCD displays you can get the power down to about 55W including monitor (thats a real configuration EPIA M6000, Keycorp K57H + 12.1" TFT display, 256Mb, and a disk)
Laptops take you a little bit lower and you get the benefit of the battery being pre-fitted of course. That means looking for real low power laptops - crusoe, anataur, maybe PIII-M as well as making sure they have good power control in your favourite OS and preferably suspend to disk so you can kill the drain entirely when its off.
The CPU is critical, you can get "micro" P4 boxes but they still burn the same power, just in a smaller space. Large boxes can actually use less power because you need less fans!
My Athlon PC took 170W at idle and blew hot air all the time. My 3.0GHz P4 (you know, the one with the bad rep for power usage) uses 90W at idle. And it's mostly the same parts as the Athlon.
But besides that, a laptop will be at least 5X more efficient. It won't take over 30W, including the display. The one I'm using right now is using 24W, according to my Kill-A-Watt.
Wi-Fi, keyboard PDA. What else do you need? You can type word documents, access Wireless internet, record when the sun came up. Vibrate to remind you when to feed the chickens, or for when there's not a girl around.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
Just a friendly pointer on home power issues. First, get a subscription to Home Power magazine. You need it. You want it. You gotta have it bad. Secondly, check out their web site: http://www.homepower.org You can live light without sitting in the dark. I'd recommend a notebook, but do the math and find the leanest solution. My experience with remote homes is that you'll use more electricity pumping water than you will for your computer. (Please do keep bathing.) Propane is a wonderful fuel. No risk of spills and very flexible. Stove, refrigerator (yes, the refrigerator), water heater, and lights if you want to go that way in the winter (too much heat in the summer). Drop a line if you need some leads. Best of luck otherwise. Al Yelvington
I think that in the environment described in the article the main question is not "bang for watt" or "bang for buck", but the general safety. There are many things that can go wrong in your experiment - your power generator might not work at all or not work as good as you planned or cease to work after some time etc. I think you should go for the failsafe option, being obviously a laptop. If your power generator will go down, laptop will quietly start to work on his battery - while a desktop PC would require external UPS, that will never be as much integrated with your machine as a laptop and its battery. For example, you can tell your laptop to preserve power while working on battery (reduce CPU cycling, turn off some eye-candy etc.), and usually it's not THAT simple with an external UPS and a desktop PC. Also, a laptop can quite easily get the power from alternative sources like the car lighter socket in your vehicle (you won't be in this wilderness without a car, will you?). In the worst possible scenario, you can just drive with your laptop to the nearest gas station, order a cup of coffee and plug it into their power socket ;-). It won't be THAT easy with a desktop.
What! Are you trying to tell me that my dreams of a redhead geek babe are dashed! :( Must go away now.
You have got to be kidding a off the shelf UPS is a horid idea generating DC then inverting to go into the UPS possible going back to DC then to AC again then to swithc back to DC is just wastfull. There are ways to hook a UPS driecty to a solar cell for charging but he would be much better off with a normal solar setup with much cheaper and more reliable batteries (marine deap dischage come to mind) assuming he sets things up for a 12 volt rail and thats common enough he could just use a dc to dc power supply like the one in APC's laptop case to run a laptop a cell phone to make said laptop usefull and another device. This way your only converting once avoinding all the other waste.
About the laptop look at there rated runtimes vs there battery capacity there are plenty of 7+ hour laptops out there. A bigger keyboard and mouse would seem apropriate and faily frugal on power (USB versions would max out a 5 volts 500ma so 2.5 watts and most dont seem to use anything near that also a reminder that USB and Firewire devices are nice and will tell you how much power they need)
No sir I dont like it.
For the most part laptops are made to be power misers. They have to be, the intention is that they run on a battery.
Get a laptop that runs on 12v DC. Your solar power should actually be used to charge a bank of batteries, which you'll hook up to directly to power your laptop. If you have AC appliances you'll need an inverter.
Forget the desktop system, for the most part they aren't made to be efficient as far as power goes. They don't pack in as nice as a laptop either.
Oh yeah, get a stinky noisy generator just in case 'eh.
You know you're a geek if you've ever replied to a tagline.
I can't believe a fucking troll has a 4, Insightful moderation that's lasting so long. Bravo, Sir!
;-) If the guy wants to use his freakin computer while he's taking a sabbatical in the boonies, big freakin deal!
Perhaps you should open your eyes and notice that not all of us sign up to your conformist 'everyone must be in a couple' bullshit
(And fishing is boring as hell anyway)
mogorific carpentry experiments
but not an athalon or pIV,those things are power hungry beasts, get the pentium III maybe w/ a centrino chipset in it.
BTW, just in case this isn't on your radar screen already, iSun makes some really kewl portable solar cells which, on a sunny day, could power your notebook even while you're away from your cabin. This way, you could rely on some more reliable power generator for your cabin needs, and use the portable power cell to truly enjoy the surroundings.
"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that ones work is terribly important." -BRussell
Listen,
Both a notebook and a desktop system suffer from the same thing: They both run on 110AC. Inverting your DC solar power to that will cost you 30-40% of your power. Converting back to DC (for your notebook/desktop) will cost you a second round of 30-40%. This is bad.
Find a method that can keep you at DC power, ideally as close to the voltages you need. Many of the mini-itx boards will have an option for 'dc power'. These will run on 12-15 volts, and will cost you more like 10-15% TOTAL. Plus, many of the mini-itx boards will consume far less power - - some of them as little as 15-20watts. You won't quite have the speed mentioned (1.7ghz), but close to it (900-1200mhz).
You could use a notebook & build a native DC supply for it - - but many of todays notebooks, regardless of size, draw MASSIVE amounts of power. My dell notebook draws 3.5amps@20 volts [70watts]. That's at 1.2ghz/512megs of ram/15" screen.
As others have pointed out, you'll need power storage. This can be calculated based on your consumption & number of panels used. You can lookup the typical number of solar hours per day for your region.
Solar panels cost around $1USD per watt. The charge controller & storage will also be somewhat costly - - do some reasearch, and purchase a few books on the subject before spending to much...
He's trying to escape the BSA.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
As noted in an earlier Slashdot story, AnandTech reviewed 4 laptops and the battery life on a Centrino is impressive... 6 solid hours from the winner of the roundup.
For general purpose PC computing, a laptop is the obvious way to go. It should be easy to find a decent one that will run with as little as 15-20 watts. You said 1.4Ghz. Again, why ? Re-evaluate exactly what you plan to do with it and why you need 1.4Ghz. You can run MS Office or Linux perfectly well with 300-500Mhz and find such laptops for Choose a laptop that is easy to feed from multiple power sources, even those that you may cobble together or build yourself. Bigger Toshiba Portege's (7020CT, $250, for example) use a power connector and 15volts that is easy to supply, while smaller Toshiba's use a more difficult to get power connector. Same with IBM Thinkpads (a Thinkpad 600E or 570 are good $200-300 choices). Remember that every additional step of power conversion costs efficiency. So for example,
Solar->12V lead acid->12V inverter->120VAC->laptop AC adaptor->15-16V laptop supply
is much less efficient than
Solar->15V laptop supply
But the original point is that you first have to more clearly identify the computing tasks you want to do. These days you can do quite a lot with a decent PDA whose power requirements are a fraction of that of a laptop. Depending again on your needs, you may wish to consider a WinCE machine. For example, if all you are going to do is writing, working on MS Word or Excel, you can find a full sized WinCE machine for $100-200. It has the power consumption of perhaps 3-5watts instead of 15-20 watts, and still has a decent keyboard and okay display.
Communications is the other question (are you planning to do email ? websurfing ?)
So... need more info on what are the computing tasks before better advice can be given on solutions and power needs... For example, if you don't need much storage, flash disk is much less power hungry than a hard disk.
What's a girl that young doing with beer?
And "real" doesn't necessarily mean ugly. There are attractive women out there.
If you don't like Ceren, there is always this other geek babe.
Not the fastest, but reasonable performance. I don't know how much electricity it uses, can't be much, makes little noise and barely even gets warm.
HenryJamesFeltus.com
I'm in the process of building (year #5, woo-hoo!) a totally off-grid home in (almost) the middle of nowhere. I've gone through this already.
The short answer is if power is all you care about, a notebook is better. My Sony TR1A consumes 13 watts of AC when plugged in at full-tilt according to my power meter, and display-off sucks just 5 watts. However, I care about more than power, like uptime/durability, ability to use off-the-shelf components, and being able to support some modest external hardware, so the actual system that stays on 24/7 is a VIA Epia 533 MHz box. It takes about 11-12 watts but can peak around 24 watts or so, plus a 15-inch LCD monitor which is pretty much never on, but consumes 16 watts when it is; so you're looking at about 30 watts with one of the lowest power desktop configurations possible.
Other odds and ends consume power as well. Inkjet printers are great (Epson C82 sucks 1 watt in standby, about 5 when printing.) Larger ethernet hub-like things are about 5 watts as well. (That'd be hubs, terminal adapters, wireless routers. nearly everything in my 3com officeconnect stack at my real house is 5W per unit.)
As far as power budgets go, it's the time the devices on that really gets you. An 18W average setup running 24 hours a day is 432 watt-hours, almost half a kilowatt hour. While I have a pretty substantial solar array (1 KW at the moment) during the winter I'm going to see maybe 4Kw-hours per day, so I'm burning nearly 10% of my capacity on just one PC.
So.... you can use your kick-ass system if you want, and if you limit it to one hour a day v. 24 hours a day, you'd be ahead.
BTW, my losses on the total system aren't bad at all. Inverters and batteries are pretty efficient these days. I'd gladly accept a 50% loss on storage and conversion, however, if I got 50% efficiency out of the panels instead of the sub-20% that's typical of solar today.
http://www.techempower.net/0/editorial.asp?aff_id= 0&this_cat=service&obj_id=910&action=p age
How about a laptop and a large UPS. That way both could be charged remotely if need be, and the UPS could charge and/or run the laptop plus other devices.
I suggest that you build a Mini-ITX Based computer. These little 17x17 cm boards are incredible when it comes to power usage, and with a price of around $150 for a 1GHZ board (CPU attached), it might aswell be worth it. The normal usage of such a machine is around 55w.
Just don't build in any cd rom drives, you'll probably do fine with nothing but the board, a power supply, 256 or 512 megs of RAM, and a IDE or laptop harddisk.
As with most things marine, the 'marine' classification doubles the price instantly. Better look for traktion batteries that are used in golfcarts and forklifts etc.
As always with batteries, you pay for better quality, and just because lead ain't cheap either.
You are not supposed to run these dry too, discharging till 50% gives a much longer lifetime.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
1. Use a laptop. A real one. The cheap desktop replacement with p4 and everything suck well over 100W. Get a light weigth laptop. You should be able to get something with p3-m that draws an average of less then 50W. I personnaly love my Thinkpad X20.
2. Use deep-cycle battery (used in boats and some RVs) they last 2-5x longer (both in number of months you can use them and in how long you can suck power from them before they're fully discharged) then car batteries so you won't need to replace them every 3-6 months.
3. Get a good marine-grade charger while you're at it. And, also, marine wind generator might be an option, especially if you're on top of a hill or on the shore or if there's a strong dominant wind. When a good wind is blowing they generate a lot more then a solar panel.
4. Try and find a AC/DC power adapter such as the IBM 22P9010 Thinkpad 72W AC/DC Combo Adapter. This will get rid of the huge inefficiency of running the power through an inverter to make AC to then have a transformer turn it back into DC. Note that the watt rating is because this adapter is good with ALL thinkpads.
5. Your lighting will suck more power then your computer anyways, invest in the most power saving DC lighting you can get, see a marine or RV dealer.
6. Pumps (say, for pressurized water) will drain your battery really fast. Air contitioner/heater, electric pipe heater (ie: you use a well that is not under the house and the pipe is not buried deep enough or pump from a lake and you're in a cold climate) will require a genset.
That's what I can think of, on top of my head. Basically, the Marine electricity folks have the most experience with clean DC electrical system, mostly from cruising sailing boats. RVs are also ok but they rely heavily on genset so they get away with 1+ kW/h of consumptions.
Also, when you switch to DC power, what you really want is an amp meter on the main circuit to know just how much you're drawing and a volt-meter on each battery bank(s) to know the charge level.
A marine deep cycle usually provides 90 Amps/Hr. @ ~14VDC nominal for 1 Hr. Full discharge is about 11.5VDC (this would kill a car battery in a few cycles) and full charge is around 15VDC. A 48W constant DC draw @ 12V is 4 Amps/Hr.
Get a laptop with an extra battery. Buy a power invertor for your car....That way when your 2 batteries die...You can start your car...and charge them back up.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
...don't know what they use, but they have the answer!
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
you might want to look at a mini-itx system. These units draw stupidly small amounts of power, but also aren't high horsepower machines.
7. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
If you have a stream that runs all year, water power can be fairly efficient and the energy would otherwise just be going to waste.
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I've been in similar situations doing fieldwork where any power we used had to be generated. Laptops are definitely the way to go. You can buy extra batteries and charge up several at a time if your access to power in not reliable. You can also set laptops to automatically consume less power, even with hot burning processors. LCD backlights, the biggest consumer of juice, can be dimmed. Just avoid things like playing CDs, since those drives have moving parts. Also, a laptop can make good use of ACPI, which will kill the moving parts on your hardrive and lower the temp on the processor to keep your battery power for only when you really need it. You may need the 'other' os for that, since Linux hasn't quite got down acpi (not a troll, just the truth: Linux not designed with laptops in mind). Intel has also released new chips called Pentium Ms that are able to produce higher speeds at lower power. Using laptops for all except our server, we had our own LAN set up off of a generator: our only toilet was a hole in the ground, but at least we could email each other from our tents (instead of just shouting at each other, which would be way too lo-tech).
The trouble with that is the a Transmeta runs about 1/5th the speed of the equivalent Intel, and the newer Intel processors use less power.
Transmeta is complete crapola.
250 W @ 120(110?) V is indeed ~2 A.
But to compare this to a 3000Ah battery @ _12_ volts is only for the dumb. at 12 Volt that 250 Watt eqals ~ 20 Amps + ~ 15% for the inverter you'd have to run it off.
You could run this off a 360 Ah for less then 10 hours before you'd damage the battery.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
One way or another you're going to end up with LCD. CRT just draws too much power. Laptops are generally engineered to draw a miserly amount of power also, and come with options to power-cycle the processor etc to further stretch a battery. My tibook draws 18 watts when idling with no power saving features on, HD spun up, and battery not charging. It can kick it up to 37 watts if I'm in the middle of a graphical game and am charging the battery. You'd be hard-pressed to find a monitor that doesn't draw at least that much power by itself.
It will still be a bit expensive to get enough solar to make 37 watts, but not impossible. Don't try to use an inverter to make your power for your computer - go straight off the battery at the proper voltage, bypassing the computer's power pack. Too much power will be lost by the inverter if you try to use one.
Finally, don't blindly believe that computers or monitors that are in "power save" or "sleep" mode are really drawing less power. My blue & white g3 draws almost as much power when it's asleep as when it's awake. I use a "kill-a-watt" power meter to measure watts drawn on my equipment - just plug the unit into the wall and plug the gizmo into it, and it gives real-time measurements.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
A few other people have mentioned getting an ATX DC power supply for your desktop to further reduct your power consumption, this might make sense, but the same sort of reduction can be gained with a laptop. If you get a car adapter for your laptop (12V DC) you will not lose power to the inverter/transformer combo necessary for most setups. I can't speak for anyone other laptop, but my thinkpad auto/air adapter is rated for 72watts, but in my experience my thinkpad T21 doesn't draw that much. Ever. Even when the system is at full tilt with the screen brightness up all the way charging a battery, with the cd/hard drive spinning away. So if you decide to get a laptop, make sure you get a DC adapter too.
Id say use an Apple laptop with a G3 processor (read iBook) it will give you a good power/horsepower ratio. If you feel it drains too much, or you want x86 compatibility then get a transmeta powered laptop. Whatever you get, get a laptop. If your power goes out, you can bring the laptop somewhere else and work.
Choosing the lesser of two evils is a choice for evil.
A bunch of solar panels, a few voltage rectifiers, an array of deep cycle marine batteries and most importantly a DC to DC power conditioner. (This will stablize your DC out from your battery array.
Get a laptop with a known good DC input voltage. (12-16 volts DC) and plan your system accordingly. (Say, running 24 VDC out from the battery arrays, conditioned down to whatever you need.)
Invest in some superbright white LEDs, a power bus and some other goodies and you have light with your computer.
Just don't plan to run any heavy appliances off the system.
You should design the system to cover all these angles by a factor or four, depending how reliable you want it. (Multiple factors for cloudy days, taking into account how many batteries there are to charge. Multiple factors for how many days you would want to be able to run laptop/lights for without recharging, etc.)
of a home in the woods using wind and solar power,to charge submarine batteies, in order to run lights, laptop and stereo. This guy has it sorted! Appologies if the URL below posts as plain text. Just copy and paste the URL. There is a reason but it escapes me for now http://www.channel4.co.uk/life/microsites/0-9/4hom es/grand_designs/sussex.html
My vote is for laptop. Its easier to lock away out of site and if theres a fire you can take it out of the propery quickly.
Cheers and seasons greetings.
My hyperlinks aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
You say it's wooded, but you don't say much else. I keep telling people, that in order to get the right answers, you have to ask the right questions. You're not doing that.
For best performance, solar has to be in direct sunlight. Can you place enough panels in the right place to get the power you need?
For wind power the wind should be consistantly above, like 5 MPH.
You can combine these two, and should.
Also, batteries and a multifuel generator are good.
Have you ever heard the phrase "Use it or lose it"? Solar and wind power are like this, unless you have batteries, deep drain preferred. You also need to keep an eye on the recharge cycle of the batteries. How long does it take? Can they be fully charged in the time your not using you computer?
This is where the generator kicks in. You can use it when the weather conditions don't provide enough solar or wind power. It's a backup. Multifuel (usually gasoline, kerosine, propane) will let you pick whatever fuel is cheaper/easier to handle and store.
Depending on what you're using your PC for when you're at the cabin, a Commodore 64 could be cheaper. powerwise.
You just have to ask the right questions.
The Power Meter the guy mentions in the article is exactly the sort of thing I'd planned to build myself to figure out how much electricity my various electronics consume. I'd planned to do it with a Radio Shack multimeter (that includes current reading) that I'd splice into a little extension cord. But... It would be awesome if there was a relatively inexpensive product that'd do the same. Anyone seen one? The cheapest option from the company he mentions costs $150.
The shuttles are fine, but still have 150 to 200 watt pwr supplies. there are other options, check out: http://www.logisysus.com/cbox.htm for mobile systems. some of these are designed to run on batteries (12v pwr supply) and have 90 or 120 watt pwr supplies. I hjave no connection to these people and have not done bussiness with them. just discovered them looking for computers for a sailboat.
Back in the 1970's during the "Energy Crisis"
National, Geographic and others published
articles on plans to "beam down" microwave
energy from Equitorial Orbiting Solar Satellites.
Last I heard this was based on Rectennas (?)
basically diodes in a bridge configuration
designed to collect alternating cycles of the
Microwave energy and spit it out as direct current
into the global power grid.
In theory this should be just as feasible at much
smaller scales.. but look out for birds flying
through the path.. youch!
Lately, quite recently, I saw plans for beaming
using Lasers.. and other plans that have matured
using a form of Microwaves that doesn't
approximate a microwave oven.
Then there are more practical ideas at Lowes or
Home Depot.. propane powered generators.. even
a camping (Coleman) fuel cell generator.
Some Japanese firm I think had a fuel cell powered
laptop.. used some glucose enriched bateria that
looked like Odwalla with green algae in a bottle,
like the ones you get at 7-eleven.. or Stop n' Go
I believe Slishdot reported on it recently.. CEbit
or some such conference earlier this year.
And there's anchored floating underwater windmills
if there's a nearby stream.. or you might explore
a watermill generator.. or windmill generator..
Solar strikes me as inovative.. but as with the
Beagle.. variable and only a minor part of a
bigger solution.
- j willis
How do you plan to stay connected?
I would like to hear the reviews of other peoples experiances with Iridium or other satitlite phone/data.
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
These have been used for bike touring for some time. Ken Kifer on this. Regrettably Ken was recently hit by a vehicle and died.
- you have daylight
- the river is flowing
- there is a breeze
If all of the above fail, you have 2-8 hours of UPS power (depending on how big and how many UPSs you get), and 2-3 hours of battery in the laptop (make that 4-6 if you get a spare battery). You could make it through a frozen, long, dark, and still Alaskan night with that setup. You'll be set...and still nerdy/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
To minimize the loss of modularity with a laptop, I'd strongly advise going for a corporate model laptop (e.g., Dell Latitude line over Inspiron; other vendors have corresponding lines). These tend to have longer supported lifetimes, better availability of options that plug into bays, better support by 3rd parties at lower cost, etc. All very useful even if you only buy one for personal use. Other aspects of desktop-style modularity (e.g., ability to add cards) is almost unnecessary in these days of USB 2.0 and IEEE 1394.
this is what you want, if price isn't a big concern
That's a microATX pentium M board with an AGP slot and the usual onboard goodies. If you can find some place to buy one, that would be ideal. Boxed Pentium M's aren't hard to find, and putting one in a desktop would allow you to get very good performance while using very little power, without sacrificing the modularity of desktop platforms.
Most LCD screens that I seen use a power brick to bring down the voltage to 12v or so. What that means is your still drawing a good amount of current to get the LCD to work. - I know that laptops also have a powerbrick, but I would rather have one brick than two. Also some laptop manufacrues make two types of power brinks, I know that Thinkpads have a low power brick and a high power one to charge batteries faster. Just something to keep in mind if your looking to get the most power for the least gas.
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
I got AC power not long ago but lived thru a couple years of "self generation of household power." I am in the mountains of Colorado. This is a situation where nomenclature such as generators, power inverters, DC to DC converters, solar cells, storage batteries and stuff will soon become everyday terms.
I would suggest that for electronic devices, stay as close to DC as you can, meaning use electronic devices intended for battery power. It is far easier (and safer due to transients) to use solar cells to keep battery systems charged than using inverters powered by generators to power devices.
I suggest going the laptop route and find yourself a local electronic engineer who (like myself) has been this route before.
Enjoy the new place !
TG
altough not directly related to the original post. if you want to save on power, get rid of your hard drive!. these days they can be replaced (pretty cheaply) with flash memory which consume a lot less power.
sure you can't store your 80 gigs of porn/mp3, but you'll save a lot on power
also there's one guy on #linux on freenode that runs his house on solar power. (sorry i can't remember the name). you might want to ask there, there could be a few tricks to gain
UPS is probably not a good choice for this application. They are designed like helmets: more as an emergency backup system than as a regular power source. In addition, the cabin is already going to be wired with a full genset system so it would be much cheaper to just add a little capacity there than to invest in a UPS.
I have a dual 500MHz G4 with a 15" LCD screen. According to my Kill-A-Watt (not a referrer link), that machine pulls down 110-130W when on and actively doing stuff, and ~33W when sleeping. When I'm not using it, I hit the power button (which puts a Mac to sleep within 10 seconds and can wake up in less time than that). For any who are curious, with my usage profile (an hour in the morning, a few in the evening), that machine cost me 10 cents a day to use. Those figures also included a UPS trickle charging (or whatever they do when power is relatively clean.
If you have some time, I recommend visiting friends with setups similar to the computers you're considering, and plugging a Kill-A-Watt in to them and finding out how much power they'll use in your situation.
Clearly this is the Best Bang per Watt
If you decide to go the route of the desktop for this project (which is possible, but I still recommend a laptop with DC/DC power adapter) then here is what you need to get:
Start with an ATX or microATX case. If you choose microATX, make sure that it accepts a normal ATX power supply. You can buy DC-DC ATX power supplies online (but microATX ones are harder to find) As long as your microATX case takes the ATX PSU (i have one i bought for $30 online that does just this, I think enlight's microATX also does it) then purchase an ATX DC-DC power supply online. 180 or 200W should be enough. You may also want to consider a Shuttle Cube barebones with nForce2 motherboard. In this case you could probably still use the DC/DC power supply, but you would have to have it sitting external to the unit (in the back somewhere) Maybe paint it black so it doesn't look ugly, or put it in some sort of asthetically pleasing case of your choice.
- Don't go for the highest power CPU and video card. Select either AthlonXP (barton core only), Duron (latest core), Pentium3, or if you can get your hands on it, Pentium M processor. DO NOT buy a pentium 4 or P4 based Celeron you will seriously regret it. the newer AMD AthlonXP Barton cores have very good power saving features and if you don't overclock it, you will not be in so much hurt. In fact, it is possible with newer motherboards to underclock the chip and under volt it. I would definately consider doing this once you get your system up and running for the long run.
- Select a motherboard for your processor. if you are going with athlonXP or duron, I would recommend the nForce2 Ultra motherboard. Get the one with integrated video. You don't want a seperate video card taking up extra power. The integrated video is decent 3D with quality similar to Geforce MX series. NForce2 Ultra's dual channel memory controller should HELP make up for some slowdowns get for having a lower powered/underclocked CPU.
- With the nforce board (or other comparable board) you won't need addon cards like NIC or Sound. (hopefully your motherboard will be supported under linux with sound and NIC drivers) if you do need addon cards, use only your absolute minimum requirements.
- Buy LARGE 5400RPM hard drives. Don't go for 7200RPM, and don't buy small ones. If you want 160 gigs, don't go out and buy 4x 40GB drives. Just buy one. if a RAID array is required, then still try to stick with 5400RPM drives as large as possible. The larger your drive the fewer you will require in your system. Don't use a buncha extra drives you have laying around. Spend extra on this project and do it right with a single drive solution.
- This next step is a little harder to do with commodity equipment, but is possible. Buy fans that will adjust their speed depending on temperature. Most "temperature sensitive" fans are tuned so that in any real world circumstance, they are either full time full speed, or full time minimum speed. You won't find many fans that are tuned so they slow down when your PC sleeps and speed up when the temp rises due to CPU load. You need seperate logic to do such things. The simplest way to go is with a "fan bus" which has manual knobs on the front of the computer. You turn the fans down as low as they go when you get up and leave your PC idle. AVOID fans smaller than 80mm like the plague. Don't put active cooling on your motherboard chipset, insted opt for a larger heatsink on the northbridge, with quality mounting and quality heatsink grease. Also, opt for expensive but massive and large heatsinks for the CPU. Don't even bother with a 60mm heatsink, as it will cost you in the long run. I personally use 80x80mm alpha heatsinks (with copper inlay) with a 92mm fan that has a 92-> 80mm plastic fan "adapter" cone. This way you can buy LOW SPEED 92mm fan that uses negligable electricity rather than buying high powered high speed 60mm fans. Consider using a single 120MM case fan in the front of the PC running at 5 or 7 volts (you can do this by changing the wires on the MO
Two infinite things: your stupidity and mine. But I'm not sure about the latter. If my sig offends you, I'm sorry.
A small streem + Car alternator = power. The last one I purchaced with an internal regular was rated for 65amps... I'm not sure what rpm would = 65amps, but i'm thinking that you could probally generate a good 2-5amps with a paddle wheel of some sort of DC power with a minimal flow river.
My battery died at a rest area in oregon once, just a bit north of ashland, I fell asleep with the lines on. I was able dismount my alternator (internal rectifier), strap on some painting sticks with duct tape (one pair at two feet in lenth * 5 spokes), and with my jumper cables I plaed the thing by the local streem in in about 8 hours I had power, enough to start my car.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
When my wife and I were considering a property that was Off The Grid, I bought a great little product called a Watt's Up? It gives you both instantaneous and accumulated power use info. I started testing everything in the house. Very educational. Refrigerators and top-loading washing machines are power pigs.
One of the great surprises is how much energy is wasted by wall warts (AKA vampires, AKA external power transformers). They are always "on" and suck up an amazing amount of power.
If you have a source of running water on the property, you may be able to go micro-hydro (or pico-hydro). If you have any kind of flow down any kind of slope it can be a huge win. Flow (in gallons/minute) * Fall (in feet) / 12 = watts per hour. A small stream (20 gpm) coming down a moderate slope (say, 100 feet) = 20*100/12 = 166 watts per hour, 24/7. Thats 4kW a day. Hell, if it starts raining, you get even more power!
or get a notebook with mobile Athlon.
you need to set up a still and make some moonshine so that you can charge your ethanol fuel cell laptop.
of course you have to watchout for them thar revenuers!
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Gee, nobody mentioned software.. didn't I read on slashdot a cupple of years ago.. Linux draws less power than Windows.. a matter of 20% or more?.. I notice my Pentium 233 runs cooler with Linux than Windows.. Howabout FreeBSD, Solaris, different versions of Windows?.. Does old 386 DOS machine use less power than late model XP machine? Are there any Facts out there?
I guess I'll just have to stick to non-geek girls. Yeesh.
I'd go with a laptop. It would probably be better for power, but it also gives you the ability to hike out to your favorite hill/tree/lake and work from there when it is nice outside.
... PocketPC or Zaurus suit your needs? If not, could ya do some simplification for that?
"Derp de derp."
I have used these on boats for electrical power. They last a good month for light usage. I have lugged these fsckin' heavy batteries a mile into the woods for a summer cabin on an ATV. ATVs are your friends.
You could also get the sealed gel optima batteries to run stuff in the house because they don't leak any toxic gases. You can run your UPS on either of them. Just keep the deep cycle marine batteries outside.
One bypasses the chintzy batteries that came with the UPS and use the big batteries to power stuff. A friend used this solution for making sure his laptop computer, HAM setup for packet radio/internet, and emergency lights were working at all times.
Another option, I have not seen mentioned is using your car to charge your laptop batteries while you drive via one of those 12vDC --> 110AC power inverters for your car.
How are you going to get an internet connection out there?
Oh yeah, make sure you buy a handgun and a shotgun for protection and fun.
a slut did tulsa
Since we're on the topic, could someone tell me what is available out there to power my laptop off solar energy? I'm looking for something compact enough to fit in my laptop bag. I would also use it to charge my digital video recorder. I know they are pricey but I'm willing to spend up to $300 or $400 if it does everything I want it to.
I have a few notebooks (well, OK, 6. Five of them are Pentium III class).
For power conservation, I would consider your needs. Can you get by with a Pentium III class machine? You might have power / money savings right away. Perhaps you want more than one machine? One for e-mail and word processing (lower power and processing requirements), and another - for your more intense needs, and that can run less often. If you do this, having compabible families of notebooks would allow you to share batteries and other accessories. Also, you have desktop devices on desktop machines. With notebooks, the drives can automatically turn off after a (specified) amount of inactivity. You may be able to load mobile software drivers for your OS for a desktop. You could then get some of the notebook power management features on a desktop.
Another big issue is not just LCD Versus conventional tube monitors. I see the size being a critical issue.
My Fujitsu B-series notebooks have a small screen (perhaps around 11" diagonal). 15" screens (like my HP - I forget the model number) will draw much more power - keep in mind that the power consumption; my guess is that in keeping with the number of pixels, that energy will climb proportionately to the square of the diagonal dimension - 17" portable should draw some big juice off of your power supply.
You can get a small form-factor notebook, with a small screen. You can also get external keyboard, mouse, and LCD for when you want that experience and won't mind the extra power draw.
Consider an external drive with a USB (or firewire) enclosure. Do all your work locally, and use (and power up) the drive when needed.
Let slashdot know how your experience plays out.
Sam
There are car adaptors for laptops and even slashdot has a few stories about car based pc mods (some use inverters). What do they all have in common? They run on 12 volts.
I've been to a rural place where 12v was used in the home as a light duty power solution. The system can be simple: a single "home power" solar panel and a few car batteries. Using two car batteries you can have power 24/7 for a laptop, LED lights and a radio/cd player. The only time you would need to manage power is in the winter months. Another good thing about 12v is that you can do your own wiring - just don't let code inspectors know about it. Oh and be carefull with the car batteries they have lead and acid in them and can give off combustable gases during charging. And shorting them can cause a fire.
I too am very interested in having a solar-powered home, and have slowly accumulated much of the necessary equipment over the past few years (solar panels, large good quality near sine-wave inverter, batteries, charge controllers, etc.)
.80 = 6.4KWH per day (effective)
One of the things that you'll pick-up along the way, if you're serious about solar, is the 'Brand' digital power meter. See model 4-1850 here: http://www.brandelectronics.com/meters.html#table This device will tell you instantaneous as well as accumulated power use for any AC-powered device in your home, and is an invaluable aid to determining what system capacity you will need. Highly recommended.
As far as laptops go, my experience is that they use dramatically less power than their desktop counterparts. My DELL Inspiron 8100, which is getting a bit old now but for the purpose of discussion, typically draws 20-40 watts, depending on if the system is running and/or the batteries are charging. Once the batteries are charged, the system will run and the batteries will stay topped-off with less than 25 watt draw.
So, if you assume a 10 hour work day, you have something like:
Laptop: 25W * 10H = 250WH/day
Desktop: 250W * 10H = 2500WH/day (2.5KWH/day)
Note: WH is a Watt-Hour
That's a very big difference when it comes to generating solar power. I don't know where you are located, so I can't tell how many 'solar hours' you average per day in your locality (how many equivalent full-sun-hours you receive per day). Where I live, near Los Angeles, we average something like 5.0 solar hours per day. So, two 100W solar panels will produce:
2 * 100W * 5.0H = 1,000WH
If you live on the east coast, the average number of solar hours you receive will be significantly less than 5.0. A map like this http://www.solarseller.com/solar_insolation_maps_a nd_chart.htm will give you a crude idea about your own locality (but local conditions can vary greatly, depending on cloud cover, trees, etc.)
By the time people go around their homes and add-up the total number of watt-hours their individual appliances use they usually end-up realizing that they need a system substantially larger than two 100 watt panels. Most systems generate approximately 1.5 to 2.5 KW of power (instantaneous), before system losses (such as conversion of DC power to AC in the inverter, cabling losses, losses in charging/discharging batteries, etc.). So, for example, if your system generates 2.0KW and you average 4.0 solar hours per day then you would average:
2.0KW * 4.0H = 8.0KWH (kilo-watt hours) per day
In reality many people estimate that only 80% of the theoretical power that can be generated by the solar (photovoltaic) panels will actually be useable, so:
8.0KWH *
This is a significant investment, and your 'sizing' decision should revolve around all of your needs (not just your PC) plus a little extra for growth. As you can see, 2.5KWH would probably be a substantial part of your energy 'diet' (compared to 250WH for a laptop).
Many, many web sites dealing with solar and other forms of alternative power have cropped-up over the past few years. I like the prices and service that I've received here: http://www.partsonsale.com/slrelecar.html#anchor42 999
Either way, solar is still probably much cheaper than having the electric company bring power out to you (even if they can). 15 miles of cable will be VERY expensive. If you don't already know, check around because many states offer rebates and or other incentives for installing solar power. There's a lot to learn, and there are many ways go about planning your own set-up to match your needs.
One of the best resources for information is the venerable 'Home Power Magazine' (http://www.homepower.com). These folks are fantastic, and have been publishing a magazine for people who want to set-up their own 'home power' systems at least as far back as
Go for a laptop (with a mobile processor). Far and away it's going to consume less power. I don't think the problem of expandability is that much of an issue anymore. You've got USB2 and firewire for future storage options...you can get virtually anything with a USB cable on it nowadays. Aside from the extra cost (surely offset by the power savings) all you're likely to lose out on is the graphics side...even then that's only likely to be an issue if you're gamer.
I've got an on-grid cabin up in the Sierra Nevada, and although I often get lots of work done there (no TV at all -- yet, as I've resisted the satellite dish urge), I've only had a long distance phone connection to the net.
Last time I checked, in 1999, it was absurdly expensive to go the cellular data route. But thanks to a highway nearby, we've always had good coverage from Sprint and Verizon.
A small system for powering a cabin can be had fairly cheaply - under $5000.00 for a decent system (a very decent system), if you install it yourself. Most of cost will be in the panels and batteries. You won't be able to run a washer/dryer or anything large like that, but if you set up LED lights or compact flourescents, you can have a nice solution for the cabin, to provide lighting, run a small TV or radio, maybe a few small RV/boat appliances (they make appliances specifically for RV's and boats that run off of 12 or 24 volts) - plus a laptop.
If you have steady wind, a small wind generator or two could be handy as well, as long as you are in a clearing or can get it above the treetop level (just make sure to ground it for lightening strikes).
If you just need some quick and cheap power for lighting, a small solar rig can be easily cobbled together from a small panel or two, one or two small old UPS batteries (like the small desktop UPSs use), a diode (for reverse current protection of the panel), and some wire plus a fuse. I built such a small rig to run a flourescent light in my tent at Burning Man this year - ran great at night, charged it during the day - didn't spend a dime on the batteries, the panel was from a yard sale (think I spent $10.00 on it or something).
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Most modern laptops will draw about 70-80 watts while plugged in.
My PC's CRT monitor draws about 150 watts on it's own.. PC about 140.. about 300 watts..
A VIA Epia Mini ITX desktop system with a 7200 rpm hard drive will draw about 40 watts average.. You will not get the performance of most modern laptops though..
If you are looking for performance, get a regular INTEL or AMD desktop system.. For power saving, get a Mini ITX.. If you want mobility, get a laptop
What you should do is get yourself a computer with a 12VDC power input.
Wouldn't any laptop satisfy this requirement since the AC-DC power adaptor is external?
The NEC PowerMate Eco is an environmentally friendly desktop PC. Principal among its features is its very low power consumption. This would give you some (though not all) of the advantages of a desktop computer with the power consumption of a laptop.
Or buy an Apple; they're relatively efficient as well.
one hundred twenty
is just enough characters
to write a haiku
Not a bad idea!
Lets see, you should ideally keep your voltage drop under 5%, and this 250 Watt computer will draw about 2 amps of current.
120V * 95% = 114V, so we need to keep it above 114V, therefore we cant drop more than 6 volts total on the extension cords themselves (or 3 volts per wire, since the current is bidirectional.)
Thats 3V drop per wire at 2 Amps, so resistance of each 79,200 feet of wire should be lower than:
3V / 2A = 1.5 ohms
OK then.. we need three wires, each 79,200 feet and with less than 1.5 ohms per wire. That's 18.9 milliohms per thousand feet. Well, they do make wire that big, but you cant buy it at any Home Depot. So, we'll make the extension cords from the biggest wire you can get at Home Depot. Aluminum 4/0 wire, typically used for 200 amp service entrance condutors.
Unfortunately, using a single cable of 4/0 would drop almost 9 volts in each direction across this long a run at 2 amperes, so we're going to have to use ALL the conductors in an entire four conductor 4/0 cables for EACH conductor of your power cord to get the resistance low enough for your application. That will get us right at the maximum 6 volt drop at 79,200 feet out.
So, we need two 79,200 foot long 4/0 Aluminum SE-R cables, one cable for hot and one for neutral and we'll assume you'll drive a ground bar yourself since you're 15 miles from the 120V receptacle.
I think that cable is about $2.90 a foot last time I looked, so we need $459,360 worth of cabling. Probably best to buy in 1000 foot spools, but then you'll need hundreds of split bolt connectors and miles of electrical tape. (The good kind, not the cheapo electrical tape.)
Anyway, it is doable. Pulling the cable could be a real bitch. And keep in mind you're not allowed to suspend cables from trees anymore according to 2002 NEC. But then, you cant really use SE-R cable as outdoor extension cords, I'm just trying to keep this affordable for you.
Regards
All you need is ...
Infinitely long piece of paper (infinitely thin would be nice, to control weight-related issues)
Read/Write head / mechanism (erasable pen)
Good imagination and sense for interpreting TM states.
Sam
I'm building a wearable computer and the applications I will use it for require constant power supply in all situations. So I've compiled a good list of places to purchase solar and wind power solutions: http://cypherpoet.com/projects/cat_wearable_comput er.html
I don't the exact nature of the environment you'll be living in, but wind power and solar make a good combination. A small wind turbine can be used to provide hot water/heating and charging battaries.
Solar power will help as well, being more consistant but restricted to daylight howers.
The two options together should adaquately supply your needs.
The biggest problem with all these options are hight start up costs and low running costs. A petrol/diesel generator is a low startup and high running costs.
During ARRL Field Day I use three laptops running on a 12 volt battery bank consisting of four golf cart batteries, supplemented with a pair of 30W solar panels. I use an inverter running the laptop power supplies.
One of the things I have noticed is that having the battery in the laptop increases the power consumption dramatically since you are charging.
Also, the power supplies themselves are pretty inefficient. The power supplies consume quite a bit of power even if a laptop isn't connected. That's why they get so hot. Using an air/car power supply would probably help since you won't have to run an inverter.
I would reccomend using a laptop due to the power saving features. Many of them allow you to adjust the power settings while running on external power.
I agree with many of the posts about keeping the display dim to conserve power, and obviously running things like cdrom drives increases power consumption.
Perhaps the professor can make a generator out of sticks and vines and if you get tired of pedaling, "Little Buddy", Lovie, or the skipper would be willing to help. That is if you invite them to the Quitillion, or bake a coconut creme pie.
If you build this fort in the woods I will steal some liquor from my parents house and you can get some of you dads playboy magazines too. We can smoke cigarettes, and have a secret password and handshake.
If your skin is somewhat moist and you slap a log of "dry ice" to it, it will hurt like a motherfucker.
Hope this helps.
Definitely laptop. Get one of those new Dell 15 in. models, very nice, and discounted heavily for the Christmas season. The screen's plenty big, and it has quite enough in all other departments. With a tuner card and Internet radio, you can turn the laptop into an improvised entertainment center.
cool here, but if he could find a way to dig a deep enough hole, he might be able to do geothermal?
because they quite often don't. A device in "power saving" mode can consume up 90% of the power as when it's fully operational. Even when a PC is switched "off" on the front panel, the power supply is charged (I've had them break down and burn up while turned "off"). A monitor in standby mode is still "hot". To really save power, shut off everything completely. Perhaps someone out there has the numbers as to how much power is used while a system sits there and does nothing as opposed to how much it takes to start it up, but my best SWAG is that even 10 minutes of powered up non-use takes more than shutting down and restarting 10 minutes later.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Hmmm, try it sometime... The wattage rating on a PV panel is based upon max. voltage, and does not accurately reflect what you can put into a storage battery (e.g., 65W panel = 16.5V @ 4A, or 48 watts to charge your 12V batery -in full sun!) If you draw power >the PV's generation, (say in late afternoon with shade on panels) cut your PV capacity figure in half again for battery inefficiency. Then there's the pesky AC inverter and its collusion with the 2nd law... I lived for a few years on a small PV system with a desktop/LCD and a laptop; I used the desktop on occasion in full sun in the summer and the laptop the other 95% of the time. Bottom line is lower demand is a far more efficient way to get the job done. Someone ought to clue-in President Idiot re: his oil wars. Merry Christmas!
LCD is a must for low power.
The new VIA Eden or C3 cpu's are pretty darn power conservative, as well as the Transmeta ones.
The VIA mini-itx systems have the eden or c3's in them. i'm not sure where to get a transmeta cpu other than in the ocassional laptop, or costly SBC type board.
as far as how those systems compare with laptop juice usage, i am uncertain.... a c3 system will draw less than 50w as i recall assuming you dont have multiples of hard drives, and peripherals.
additionally, depending on your budget, as i recall, flash hard drives are quite costly, but they will be quite friendly on your juice usage compared with a normal hard drive... the one thing to take care with the flash drives is to make sure and have the swap and tmp dir's stored in memory, else you'll probably stand a good change of wearing out some of the flash drive years ahead of time.
I live in Australia, and moved from a capital city to a place that was off the grid, uses gas cylinders for hot water, and water tanks & a dam for drinking.
I am a contract programmer.
Laptop is definately much less power hungry - a lot of effort goes into customising the system to be low power friendly. Also, your switch mode transformer and batteries will act like a power conditioner and UPS rolled into one - this is important.
With the solar system, it all depends on your budget - get the best you can afford. I have 1.8 Kw (nominal) of solar panels, and a series of 6 deep cycle batteries (6000 AmpHours). When building the system, it is important that you don't cycle the batteries too hard - day to day you should only be using 10% or so of your stored power. If you use much more, the lifespan of the batteries drop considerably. I also recommend a good inverter - I use Selectronics (a high quality local brand). For internet access, I use satellite down, and modem up (I have two phone lines, but I am too far away to get ADSL). In the states, DirecTV has similar systems - not sure of local pricing.
Just my 2c worth...
Use a 486 desktop PC with a 14 inch monitor, it easily runs off a 200W power supply and a Slackware Linux install... if you find you need more power after a sustained amount of use, find something else to do - easily done in the great outdoors...!
I've noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born - Ronald Reagan
solar PV is quite expensive per kW ... if you have all-year water then you might consider micro hydro as a lower cost, 24-hour alternative
Many electronic goodies are DC in their current-loving cores. If you have an LCD monitor around, I think you can find that the transformer on the power cord is converting 110AC->12VDC. I lived on photovoltaics for some time and chopped the AC adapters of gadgets to run them on 12V DC, (e.g., amplified computer speakers, NiCad charger). I was too much of a wuss to cut the cord on my new (warranteed) LCD even though the specs (and transformer) said it was 12V to the display. Merry Whatever!
centrino uses least power if intel
I have a picturebook C1VP that has a transmeta crusoe. It has the BP-54 high cap battery and goes a good 6 hours on a charge.
maybe you could combine an exercycle and a generator and "pedal" your laptop power...
Or pedal to charge a large car battery and then run the laptop off that...
You didn't just join a mointain militia, did you?
It would probably be cheaper for you to buy 15 miles of wire to connect your cabin to the grid than it would cost to make a solar array.
I lived for eight years without electricity and then about 6 months on an off-the-grid power system. The laptops are definitely better: 1) Yes they take less power which will make a BIG difference. The numbers may not seem like it now, but when you actually get it set up, you may end up going for a few days of rain, clouds, etc. and then your battery bank can bottom out if you have too much to run and heaven knows that the computer is a necessity. 2) For some desktop power supplies you may need a true-sine inverter. Regular inverters that convert from DC to AC make a simulated sine wave out of the electricity, but its really more of a blockish wave. Inverters like the Prosine 1000W are more efficient and will run your desktop if you have the battery juice left, but they cost significantly more. 3) You're going to need that laptop for the car-trip back to civilization.....
If you can't say something nice, make sure you have something heavy to throw.
Check out Ken Kifer's bicycle touring experience with a solar powered laptop.
-biff
Since your laptop will use less power when running off battery you should always use your laptop on battery power. Then when you shut it off you should charge the batteries. Make sure you get a laptop with two bays.
...at least with my Toshiba you can reduce everything on AC power. Replace the "Full power" profile (the *only* AC profile) with whatever you want. You get exactly the same options as your battery profiles, or maybe some related to battery charging in addition.
So no, if he has a generator (I think most people need *some* generator today), he can plug it in and have low power same as with a battery. YMMV if you have a different brand, I guess.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I remember the stories of my ex-boss, when he and his buddies went to mt. everest in march, and what's probably the highest cibercafe (at ~5300 meters above sea level), is powered by big 24v batteries, which are recharged by solar panels, and the service is offered by a few laptops, it seems pretty rudimentary in the pictures.
And here are the pics
(go easy on the bw, there's only 600 mb)
Even Teddy Kaczynski had a bicycle. You can build a bike powered generaor (don't laugh Gilligan, I actually did this... -Mine is better but my HD died and I didn't back up JPGs:) (http://users.erols.com/mshaver/bikegen.htm) More important than how to generate power is how to minimize consumption (so says 2nd law of thermodynamics) -but don't tell W I said so. Go laptop for a merry Christmas!
I think overall you will like a laptop better. I have some isolated land wo power but use a 12 volt lead/acid battery for my electronic addictions. You can use a marine battery for lots of juice or a smaller battery (deep cycle) for less. A big marine battery will power your place for a day or two and charge up from your car if you just haul it along wherever you go. An inverter to produce 120 vac is convenient.
... if you have to hike a long way in then I think you will still want a laptop but will need solar power to recahrge it. I have found small 12 volt generators w/ 2 cycle engines you might be able to use there to keep a bigger battery charged.
.02 worth
Now
As far as laptop vs desktop I would definitely go with the laptop. I use a 1.2G Celeron laptop and it is very efficient. I kind of like the fact that when the charger is on the screen is brighter so I run it with the charger and eat up the power (still a lot less than a desktop)
just my
At the end of the day, you can't just plug an alternative fuel source like solar or wind into a computer and expect it to work. Power like this comes in peaks and troughs and will quickly kill a PSU and will make damn short work of any laptop battery.
Now...this means you need a regulator for the power and a capacitor for storage. Batteries are a great addition as well so you can have the light on at night. At the end of the day you'll want something you can start up quickly, shut down quickly, charge quickly and run for a while.
This points at a laptop (although you might want to consider some of the older Jupiter-class Windows CE devices like the Vadem Clio - the instant-on of the PDA-type OSen means they don't waste cycles in booting.
Also, consider using a slower machine with an older OS. Their batteries didn't last as long but using an older processor and an older OS to go along with it you can get very respectable speeds. This is based on the two laptops I have here. One is a 1.25 GHz Powerbook G4 with all the features up the wazoo, the other is a 25 MHz Powerbook 170. The new Powerbook has a note in Mactracker of being 46 Watts. The Powerbook 170 uses 17 Watts - a third of the new Powerbook. Now that's just an example and you may decide to take the hit for a newer, faster machine.
As long as you remember that an extra hour of typing could mean an hour or two less cooking time, or less light, or reduced refrigeration...
Just put a jumper over that bad cell and it will still have plenty of capacity for a laptop.
And they are easy to recharge with a solar cell or just the next time you're in town.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Mobile cpus allow a much wider range of power consumption/speed modes than any cpu that the low power/quiet/little desktop designs incorporate.
[digression]I don't know why. I think rolling more such flexibility into workstation cpus would allow huge power and cooling savings in rack installations, among other things. You may say that rack systems stay loaded, but that's a crock. Loads are bursty. With good automagic operating system support for changing speeds quickly, you'd see huge changes in the power/air conditioning equation of many sites.[/digression]
2 conditions are among those which can trigger power saving: inactivity/decreased load, and AC disconnect. You could probably, on an open source OS most likely, trigger low power modes manually when you *want* to save power (damnit) but are using an app which is intense (but doesn't have to be as snappy for you as it would be at full cpu speed), or any other reason. Point is, you might hate the default power saving algorithm you get with your OS because it doesn't quite fit your predicament, but you can hopefully force your own.
Also, as has been said, the builtin battery of a laptop provides some added flexibility, without the hassle of getting a UPS.
Finally, laptops are really cheap nowadays. The price difference between them and quiet/low power/small desktops is too small to give up being able to take it around the cabin easily or using it to explore your surroundings with a good gps antenna and map cd, or whatever.
KLAATU, BORADA, NIh*ahem*
I have a "unabomber" shack out in the middle of nowhere, with no utilities to speak of. What you speak of is *very* doable with Solar power.
A few reflections on what I've learned.
* A PC, as you've learned, will usually consume in excess of 100W of power with the monitor on. Using aggressive settings on your power management software, a VIA EPIA motherboard, and a small LCD monitor you could probably get it around 50 watts. Such a machine is likely to feel slow.
* My Apple Powerbook is very solar-friendly. ~15W during heavy use.
* Try to get everything you need built-in. Things like PC Card devices or external storage really suck down power. The built in devices tend to be engineered for better power management profiles.
* If you find yourself needing to network, wire it. Wired networks suck less juice (at all points) than wireless. And it goes a lot faster.
* If you want to listen to music, budget that into your battery system. A laptop playing a huge MP3 playlist is never going to idle the processor down. Luckily batteries are relatively cheap, so adding just one more battery will add several hours to your runtime.
* If your situation is like mine and you will have a lot of little construction projects on your cabin while you're out there, my power use went WAAAY down when I switched from corded power tools to 18V Ryobi cordless tools. Charging the batteries did not appreciably diminish my reserves, the tools were almost as powerful as those they replaced, and they were much quieter and a joy to work with.
* Don't mess with car batteries. They are no good for this application. At the very least, look at RV/Marine Deep Cycle batteries (12V). Better yet, look at 6V Golf Cart batteries (which you pair up in series for 12V). The Golf Cart batteries will be the ones you want during those overcast weeks.
* Look into lighting, appliances, etc. that run directly off of 12VDC. There are many web sites out there that cater to hunting cabins, homesteaders, RV's, etc. You'll pay more for these appliances up front, but it is much more efficient to run most of your day to day stuff off 12VDC as you lose a lot in the inverter going up to 110VAC. The computer, however, should probably run off 110VAC if for no other reason to ensure that you're getting a steady clean feed from the inverter rather than from your PV panels & batteries, which may surge if the clouds suddenly part or what have you (the inverter will buffer this).
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Don't get "marine" batteries, and forget about bass boaters. They don't know jack about DC power. As the owner of a sailboat, I can tell you that golf cart batteries are cheaper and better than marine deep cycle batteries. If you really care, the AGM (a glass mat) or gel batteries are the best, but you would want to work out the cost per amp hour over the life of the battery and I think that the golf cart batteries might still be cheaper, since the gel's and AGMs are really picky about the charger used. They are also more resilient. You'll probably want to chuck the inverter and get one of the 12v lighter plug adapters (the adapters for airlines) for the laptop. Otherwise you'ld need an inverter from dc that would go through the laptop ac adapter that would take it back to ac. Not very efficient.
Then you can use solar/wind/diesel to charge the batteries. It works on sailboats, and you won't have the same space/weight constraints so you should be fine. (Also, get a centrino based laptop, I believe they are more power efficient...)
I live on a small boat - a 23 foot full keel pocket cruiser - and face similar issues. I would suggest looking at your overall "power budget" in terms of where its coming from and where its going, every day. What's the wattage? How long is it on? This includes stuff like lamps, satellite uplink, the electricity required for diesel heat blowers, sewage system pumps...its a long list, and an expensive one, to migrate to the woods or the water...and the 'puter is the least of it. Offhand, I'd suggest that if you are on land and have the space to dig a hole or build a relatively soundproof box for them, a genset is your most economical alternative. For what you'd spend on a laptop, you can buy a decent low power genset (1 or 2kw) and a couple month's fuel, which will not only let you run the computer, but a space heater on low.
:)
For reference, I don't have the genset option. I have a 12A alternator on the outboard, about 600 AH of 12volt power, two laptops, QRP ham rig, VHF/Radar, and very low current forced air heat. This results in a power budget giving me 3 to 4 days of layover before I have to start running the engine again.
Good luck
If you can find a laptop that draws 12V exactly, perhaps it would be possible to hook up some deep-cycle batteries to some sort of recharging system. If you have a gasoline vehicle and are going to drive it regularly, try adding a spot to hook up a spare battery. Solar, wind, etc may also work, depending on the location.
Disclaimer: I am not an Electrical Engineer (but don't worry, this is /., so if I screwed up horribly, an EE will probably point out any mistakes.
Whenever we have a hurricane in Charlotte, I look out at the parking lot and see scores of emergency generators sitting idly on four tires. Buy a lead-acid or NIMH battery pack and a charger that works from your automobile's lighter/aux jack. Running daily errands or idling for 10-30 minutes can charge a 10 amp/hour pack for daily use. Gasoline is still the cheapest energy storage available, considering the ownership of a vehicle and the one-time cost of the charger and battery packs.
You can turn wood into electrisity. I know of two ways: first is burn the wood in a boiler, and use steam to turn an engine/turbine, in turn running a generator. Very dangerious and not recomeneded, but essentially that is what a highly efficant coal power plant does. (except with coal not wood)
The second way is to heat the wood, without oxygen, and collect the gasses that are given off. Purify them a little and run them through a modified small engine that runs a generator. You also end up with a byproduct of charcoal (much better quality that store bought) which you can find uses for if you think a little. Much safer than using steam, but there are a lot of problems with this that you should research first.
Unfortunatly while both work, neither is good for small scale use, but if you have no better alternatives they might be worth considering.
blah - frigin IE bug when I have mod points it sucks up all the resources@!@$!@#
Mini-ITX Pros:
--PC-ish prices (mb & 1ghz cpu = $100)
--uses standard PC ram
--has standard PCI & AGP slots
--consumes less than 100w
Mini-ITX Cons:
--Can't go past 1ghz (currently), so if you absolutely must have 2ghz while talkin' to the trees you're gonna need a laptop
So basically it boils down to how much you want to spend?
Want to save a few hundred bucks and can live with 1ghz? Get Mini-ITX.
Absolutely must have 2ghz, a video card you can never upgrade, and have a grand or two burning a hole in your pocket? Get a laptop.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
My folks have a cabin in Maine with 100acres.
Solar Electric for lights.
Generator in summer to assist in refrigeration.
However - the big money question - Internet access. I suppose if you are being paid well enough you could use a CellPhone. You better check cell coverage in your area.
And I DONT mean by using their maps.
They are a bogus marketing tool and not acurate worth a damn. Get the phone you will be using and survey the property.
comment directly in my journal
Nice idea, but extention cords don't normally have insulation rated for high voltages. Standard house wire is 600 volts max. You always want some margin of safety though, and no knowing what is built into that rating by the manufactures I'd go with 300 volts. So you need to come up with a better plan than 50,000 volts, nice as it looks on paper.
However, 300 is very close to 240 volts, which you can get from most any service in the US. (there is still some 110 only houses left, but the power company will change them out if they find out about it, and it is rare) Most comptuer power supplies will run just fine on 240 volts (since in Europe they have 240 in all outlets and it is easier to not have to supply different power supplies). So plug your extention cord into a 240 volt outlet, and hope your power supply can deal with the voltage drop.
Mind you I don't recomend this plan.
I would get a laptop. Most of them come with a 75 Watt adapter. Go figure.. Also, if you're power goes down, at least you'll still have the battery. Many of the processors (like Pentium-M, Centrino), fans, etc. for laptops now days, are designed to conserve power.
http://www.palmzone.net
Have to agree I use an 1500watt intervertor and two 6volt golf cart batteries for the backup power for my lan. Batteries are going on 5years old and with a full charge can keep 4 servers and one monitor going for in excess of 6hrs off a full charge before I have to start powering equipment down. And even at that point they will still power a laptop for another 14hrs. Just remember to keep them charged,clean and the water levels up, and they should last seven to eleven years before they need replacement. Only ever use distilled water in them. As far as bang for the buck they can't be beat.
Great tools do only ONE thing, but do that ONE thing very, very well.
Go for a 14 inch iBook, two extra battaries and you're done! When the gnerator is running, charge those bad boys.... I assume your solar deal has a DC to AC convertor? Hook an extra charger to it....DON'T GET A SMALL PC... Bad idea. The iBooks have great battery life. The 12 is really nice...
Sure the ARM uses less power, but that isn't a factor. x86 CPUS designed for low power use exist (Transmetta on the extreem low power, but Intel, Via and AMD all have low power CPUs). Maybe not close to the ARM, but close enough compared to their full power brotheren. Unfortunatly the CPU isn't a particularrly big power consumer. LCDs take more, especcially if the backlight is on (and you can rarely work with it off). harddrives take a bit, and even more when starting so you should plan your disk accesses to all happen at once. Cd/DVD drives aren't particually good either.
A mechanical typewriter takes zero volts, zero amps, and thus zero watts.
(Its a joke, laugh!)
I generally agree with the advice in favor of laptops. However, if you are strapped for cash, look at the mini ITX form factor systems. I've just put one together around a Via Epia M mobo for about $400. It has a 60 watt power supply and will also run on 12V DC. See http://www.mini-itx.com/ for more information.
One thing you should probably think about, particularly considering your means of generating power (solar), is how you're going to jack this thing into your power system. You'll probably want a transformer to have some AC power in this cabin, but that's an extraordinarily inefficient way of using electricity.
If you go with a desktop computer, the power supply is going to expect AC input. The laptop, on the other hand, is going to have a power brick and a DC jack on the laptop.
For optimum power efficiency, you should get a laptop and then buy a 12V regulator, and a car-lighter type plug. The wattage is important, in terms of power consumption, but the voltage is equally so.
The HP/Compaq laptop we use onboard (its a ze1210, which is a basic consumer model of a year or so vintage -- runs Athlon with PowerNow). Using the DC adapter, the strain on the ship's battery is noticable, but not huge -- much less than the radar, for instance. When we run it off of one of our AC plugs (we only have one, and we almost *never* use it, the transformer usually stays disconnected), its a huge power drain -- more so than our radar array.
So, definately a laptop. Wire your cabin for DC. And consider looking at boating technology guides in general. They probably most closely approximate what you're trying to do.
-Shylock
Statistically speaking, there's a 99.998% chance that my IQ is higher than yours. Get over it.
This is a no brainer. Go with a laptop. Laptops are designed to use minimal power. Mine only consumes 75W max from the wall. Much less if it's not charging a bettery, backlight turned down, not burning a CD, etc. Use a wired net connection since wireless cards use a lot of power. Don't forget if your power browns out or fails you're still golden if your battery is charged.
Another way to look at it, is to optimize power for the other electrical appliances/gadgets you'll be using as well. Energy saving fluoroscent lighting, washing machines, smaller TVs, etc can all free up up more juice for your laptop. Oh yeah....and I'd go with a laptop. Especially a Centrino based one. They have really good power utilization.....some laptops can run 6 hrs at a stretch.
Hmm... a Shuttle is a mini-desktop. It takes almost as much power, but is just a lot smaller. A laptop needs to be low power, not just (semi-)portable. The laptop's the way to go, and go Centrino or Pentium M (TravelMate 290XCi systems seem to be a good deal if you don't game much). Of course, if you're counting Mini-ITX into the game, how much emphasis do you place on upgradability? The Mini-ITX boards can't take anything AGP, and can't take a CPU upgrade (we're strictly talking VIA here), but a laptop probably won't take a CPU upgrade, won't have AGP (unless it's Alienware, and then it's a custom slot), RAM'll be more expensive, so will CPUs, etc., etc. Mini-ITX.com links to a power calculator that calculates draw of the board and how much power supply you'll need for any Mini-ITX board. It's unlikely that you'll need more than 60w, if you were wondering.
Depending on the quality of the electricity generated you could easily damage the power supply, especially if the power goes on and off erratically. Run it through a UPS/power filter if you're going to attempt it.
I actually happen to be in the market for a notebook. If possible, I'd like to avoid paying the Windows Tax (i.e. paying for a license of Windows that I'll never use). Are there any decent notebooks without it?
Some of the linux notebook vendors' prices are so high that I'm suspicious they're still paying it. Anyway, it also seems like most of the really nice notebooks aren't available through these guys (or are way more expensive than they should be).
One nice thing about a laptop is the battery. You can use it when there is no power. You can use outside the house, etc.
When remote camping in my RV, running my generator for about 30-60 minutes to use the microwave and charge my laptop worked fine.
Loved the parent's subject heading :) Thanks dude.
beware the jabberwock, my son! the jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
How can you program with just one PC. I need at least 5 running incredibuild just to keep my compile times to a minimum.
I would say that you would definitely go the laptop. One key thing to look at is battery wear and tear. Charging and discharging those batteries are going to greatly shorten their life.
You definitely want to look at using a battery array. Even when my G4 is running on A/C power...it can be tuned to run pretty effenciently. Im sure you could also just cut the wall wart off the end and wire it straigh to the batteries. Then it wouldnt make much difference.
Once in a while you can get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right. -Hunter/Garcia
For power, get a second hand alternator and a cooling fan from a stationary motor (better blades than a car fan). Use it to charge a car battery or two. Mount the alternator up on a post, with a vane to keep it pointed into the wind and leave some slack in the cable, so you can unwrap it once in a while after a twirly whirly storm caused the thing to spin around.
In most places, wind power will work far better than solar and the hardware is a whole lot cheaper and readily available at scrap yards.
wind power is much cheaper than solar. look at small wind turbnies.
Some numbers behind Kriston's post.
The "highly efficient" Luxeon star white led will produce a mighty 25lumens/watt.
A boring hardware store compact flourescent will produce 55lumens/watt or better.
A cabin in a remote wooded area? You're just ASKING to be possessed by evil spirits.
I would need a descent net connection to upload the code, ssh into the boxen, download the distros, and serve my data.
I would be more concerned about these options versus power options.
A amall diesel generator and some very good batteries and a sine wave inverter.
You would be surprised how cheap your electric costs will be. I am 100% off-grid.
Jamey Kirby
This is the way to go! There are internet cafe's in china that use bicycle powered generators!
If it's a real cabin with firewood/coal heating, then you can put a real lot of TE power sources everywhere in your chimney and the roof, where snow is supposed to be.
besides, since living in such a place is a one way to healthy lifestyle, you can do that even better with a bycycle type generator.
working hard, you can do up to 1kW (peak). 200 W is possible to sustain quite a bit of time.
I got ahold of a 100AH deep cycle battery, which, when trickle charged by a 10Amp 12V nominal DC Solar Trickle charging panel allowed me to run a laptop for 10+ hours per day for three weeks between charges of the deep cycle battery.
You could look into building a pedal powered generator for the cloudy days, it's easy to pedal more power than your laptop will consume. Unfortunately I don't know if these things exist at all commercially.
As an extra bonus your body will provide heat and you'll get an excellent cardiovascular workout.
You should buy solar cells :)
The lowest power PC that I've been able to find is the Via Technologies line of mini-itx computers. These may rival with Transmeta computer chips, but they are hardly available in the US unless you get a notebook.
The mini-itx boards run something like a max output of 10W. That puts your LCD monitor as the power hog of the system.
If you are running a 1.3GHz Celeron today, then something like this might be an excellent solution.
check out what the ljudmila crews did with the makrolab experiment. looks a bit like a moon module, made to survive in very hostile environments.
i've been living a whole 20 days into it, without getting out (was on Campalto island out of Venice, 100 meters of diameter). amazing to learn how much you consume with your geekiness, eh.
there are also some photos here.
the makrolab module is working with a windmill and 4 solar panels. i can tell you that 2 windmills in a stormy day would make as much as 4 BIG solar panels in a hot summer day - and i guess you would be pretty free to run lots of gear on top of that, as much as we had there.
computing in the wild is big phun, go for it.
Considered a transmeta laptop?
The Fujitsu Lifebook P runs 16 hrs. on batteries and is strong enough to watch DVDs with.
I don't know what CPU power you exactly need since I don't know how you work.
If you do lots of compiling it may be worth while having two cheap transmeta desknotes. One for compiling (when you need it) the other for working. Not the fastest, but for anything other than 3D developement and 3D gaming absolutely sufficient, imho.
I'd probably go for a transmeta and power that one with extra cells and/or a small solar panel setup.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
You may want to also wait for the first fuel cells for laptops to pop up next year....
Just another thought.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I actually own a Powermate ECO. They're all-in-one machines so they're quite compact. They also have no fan at all so they're relatively quiet. You can buy one for as little as $600 maybe less.
They're fantastic machines and you get the benefit of an adjustable screen and replacable keyboard. Ok, so they're not fast, but the screen is one of the best being from NEC and it does everything I want it to do. It'll even play modern turn based strategy games.
Linux runs on it quite nicely as well. I had a debian unstable install on it for a while before I switched back to Windows for a few common applications.
Log the place. sell the wood. buy a nice diesel generator and then steal grease from McDonalds to make all the electricity you need.
http://www.veggievan.org/
My advice is get a mini-ITX integrated mobo from VIA, like maybe this one that I have.
You can put a gig of RAM in it. It's small and quiet. It's not super fast but at 1GHz it's fast enough for most real work. It's got a PCI slot in case you need to add a modem.
If you add a 5400 RPM hard drive and a DVD+-RWCDRWblabla device and a low-power LCD monitor, you should be good to go for a proper desktop system with low power.
If I recall correctly the chip on that mobo draws something like 24W at full load.
You can even get an external power supply to help protect your wooded silence. Don't know much about electronics, but the external PS would probably be a good start if you want to hook it up to your alternative power source directly.
You can buy complete systems, or parts, or just learn a lot about the mini-ITX world and what people do with the computers, over at mini-itx.com.
I sometimes go live in a very small town in the mountains, not as remote as what you're talking about but still- noise is a much bigger factor when it's competing with the sound of the river than when it's competing with the sound of cars.
Good luck.
This Like That - fun with words!
The disadvantages of a laptop are the cruddy keyboard and the fact that you can't get a cutting edge, gamer-grade video controller. The advantages are lower power and less space occupied although you can get close with a desktop. You can get a 12 volt power supply for a desktop although they are rather expensive. You can get slightly better performance in a desktop but the better the performance, the higher the power drain. You can get any accessories you need in PC card or USB peripherals but they may be slightly more expensive than PCI. Pick your poison! Mike
www.homepower.com
How about human power?
Hook up a generator to a stationary bike.
Some rough calculations:
max instantneous human output = 0.1 horsepower = 75 Watts .026 horsepower
20 Watts needed to power laptop =
seems possible without too much exertion
energy calculations:
1 Watt hour per 0.85 calorie
1 slice pizza = 200 calories
therefore, 235 Watt hours per pizza slice
at 100% efficiency, 11.75 laptop operating hours per pizza slice
at practical efficiency (30%?), 3.5 laptop operating hours per pizza slice
Does this seem reasonable?
Some questions:
1: How long will you be in "the boonies"
2: Is Internet connectivity a necessity, or nicety?
2a: Is dial-up satisfactory?
3: Can battery or otherwise low-wattage/DC solutions do the job, or do you need AC power?
If you take into consideration that you'll be in an apparently stripped-down environment, you might be happier and more productive in the long run if you have a stripped-down computer to match. I lived in the country with a radically altered computer situation, with 28.8 the absolute BEST I could do, without springing for ISDN, and I found that a powerful PDA - as long as it had a typeable surface was enough to suit my needs. However, I didn't need to compile anything, host any databases, or do any kind of "9 to 5" (as you mention) thing with that setup.
Diesel (generator) is a great idea. Is it practical for your situation? Solar is also a worthy power factor to consider, but not starting in January :), nor February, and questionably March, as well. Pedal-power works in any light condition, and since you're in the country, your access to citified diversion is limited as well, so maybe a little treadmill or excercycle computing would probably benefit you. (As it would any geek!!
My suggestions:
8/16 Bit Wonder of your choice & TV (portable, handheld, console, whatever - can be modified to run on straight DC)
2nd/3rd Generation Palm/WinCE Device
Apple Newton 130 or eMate 300 at minimum,preferably 2100/2000U (WiFi/MP3/web server/etc. capability plus EXCELLENT power usage)
Psion or compatible device (Has keyboard and multi-tone display)
Modern, power-concious laptop (used Transmeta-powered devices are in the stream, now)
Standard, off the shelf laptop. IBM or Toshiba, if you're going to be out there for a while! (Maybe a Toughbook?)
I dunno.But all that equipment would be very expensive, and the poster was worried about cost.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
That should have been: " A very few take AC direct in,"
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
If you have any vertical and water on the property, look into an old Pelton wheel. I have friends who live off of one of these; an 8 inch pipe and 100 feet of vertical provides so much power they have to dump power (low tech setup, yeah) to the heater in the greenhouse; they run electric stoves, 3 freezers, a hot water tank, and many lights off of it. Oh, and a typical generic clone desktop with CRT. Too much power for the 4 buildings they inhabit; the only thing that can overdraw the system is all four burners and the oven simultaneously. Never got specific numbers from them. It's very low maintenance;
The whole system cost a couple thousand dollars (ok, they built the power shack from wood they milled themselves, and they didn't have to pay for the backhoe to dig the ditch). The turbine itself is military surplus (was cheap!), and is about 60 years old, the only things ever replaced were brushes, wiring, and a valve. Nice thing about creeks: so long as they don't dry up, they're always on, and so is the power.
Damn those pesky terrorists
I am using a Dell 5000e laptop with docking station right now. It's a PIII-700MHz, 512MB RAM, CD-ROM and floppy, no PC-Cards (I get eth0 from the dock), 15.1" LCD @ 1400-1050, RH Linux 7.3, external PS/2 keyboard and trackball. I'm running Folding@Home, so that is max CPU and fan at full roar. The hard drive never spins down, I think that is because I use ext3 with a 5 second commit so there is always a short write cycle.
I plugged in my Kill-O-Watt meter to find out how much juice this laptop pulls. It runs between 37 and 38 Watts. Killing Folding@Home drops it down to 25 or 26 Watts with the fan still running full speed since the CPU hasn't cooled down yet. (waiting for the fan to shut off...) That little fan is pretty efficient, only drops another Watt or so when it shut off.
I think the comments I read about DC->AC->DC are spot on, get a DC->DC setup if possible.
I'm not going to question your numbers for white ones, but how do more efficient, colored LEDs stack up? You can always mix LED colors to create white when using them in an array. Also, the solution to burning LEDs may be to increase the number of LEDs. It would be interesting to see some graphs of all this.
One advantage to LEDs is the ability to place little bits of light in a lot of selective places. I might not need full illumination in some places as long as well-placed LEDs make it easy to see.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
Hi There, You don't mention what kind of budget is at your disposal but I give the following. My parents used to live 17 miles from the nearest utility pole. Yet, there house had standard lights, standard refrigerator and microwave. Clock radio's etc. In other words you never would have known they were not on "The Grid". My Dad built the power system himself and it consisted of Solar, Wind, and generator with high quality inverters and batteries. Oh, by the way, this was about a 3000 Square foot house so there was lot's of power used. Anyway, if you are interested in talking with him about power generation just email me back and I'll be glad to give you his name and phone number. My dad is NOT affiliated with anyone or anything selling anything to do with power generation. He's just a great guy who would probably be glad to help you out. Good luck with the remote living! Matt Anderson
Matt Anderson John 8:32
I moved off grid about 8 months ago and have recently been working on cutting the power consumption of my computers (I've been supplementing the solar panels with alot of generator run-time lately). Laptops will give you the low power, but after three laptops, I decided they aren't worth it (not upgradeable, never have the design tradeoff choices I would have made). Prior to the move I was running a dual Duron system 1GHz, 1Gig of RAM and dual head with 21" monitor. With some careful optimization of my system setup, I have switched to a 933 MHz EPIA-M motherboard, 512MB of Ram, 2.5" IBM/Hitachi 40 Gig laptop drive, and most importantly a 12VDC ATX power supply (PW-70A that plugs straight into the motherboard), just the power supply change dropped the power consumption by over 20 watts, which results in an idle power consumption of less than 20 Watts (without running any special power management software), the 15" flat panel draws about 20 watts, but it's still running on 120 VAC (it does have a 12VDC power input, I just haven't switched over yet). Ultimately, I intend to pop the flat panel out of it's case and mount the works in an attache as a home brew laptop to use on the road as well (powered by an external laptop battery unit). The only time I really miss my old system is when I do Linux kernel builds, the rest of the time I hardly notice it (and I run multiple User Mode Linux VM's on this setup). I've been toying with the idea of setting up MOSIX and configuring to automatically boot the old dual Duron system to pickup some of the load whenever the system load stays maxed for to long, then have it automatically shutdown once the load goes away in order to save power.