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My solar-powered and self-hosted website
- tonetegeatinst 2y agoShame the solar panels can't do "self-healing". I this this is cool, I know a couple folks who got homelabs on reddit who mainly use solar power due to the cost and want to go green.
- kjkjadksj 2y agoYou can get self healing solar power if you grow bamboo and use the resulting charcoal for fuel. Carbon neutral I guess.
- tonetegeatinst 2y agoI bet using bamboo for power generation might be more clean that coal, especially if we turn the bamboo into coke first. Granted I doubt you could "farm" bamboo like trees or other plant. Given how fast section species of bamboo can grow, which is a big benefit in this hypothetical, you would probably need a ton of water and no matter how nutrient rich the soil is you'd probably deplete the soil after a few harvests. Shame considering how fast growing and dense bamboo is.
- cwkoss 2y agoThe resulting ash would contain the vast majority of the extracted minerals. Throw in some kitchen scraps to replenish nitrogen and you'd probably be self sustaining at a reasonable hobbyist scale.
- tomfly 2y agothis is really neat.
- Scoundreller 2y agoThe solar-run site is at https://solar.dri.es/ https://solar.dri.es/ in case everyone wants to check it out all at once ;) Of course this got posted on a sunny, cool and breezy morning in Boston. Sneaky!
- Eumenes 2y agoPretty cool. I use one of these small panels as a battery tender for a generator. It only is about 30w, but keeps a small 12v battery from dying over the months. It also has a charge controller built in - https://www.amazon.com/OYMSAE-Portable-maintainer-Cigarette-Alligator/dp/B08N4SBDB3 https://www.amazon.com/OYMSAE-Portable-maintainer-Cigarette-...
- louwrentius 2y agoNicely done! Now, Low Tech Magazine also has instructions to convert a stationary exercise bike into a human powered generator, which you could build to add power during the winter :-)
- elintknower 2y agoThis is cool, but I mean... come on. This guy lives in a $2M apt in a big city. The amount of energy being "saved" yearly is wasted almost every second.
- tomcam 2y agoHow does it help the discourse to bring this up? Would you like it if someone inserted this kind of (irrelevant) and unsubstantiated information when commenting on an article you wrote?
- genter 2y agoI can't speak for his specific apartment, but apartments in general are more energy efficient that a suburban house. New York City is one of the lowest per capita CO2 emissions in the US.
- Scoundreller 2y agoI can believe it either way, but some of that is because carbon-intensive industry will be based out of the city and its products imported in. I doubt there’s a cement kiln, cattle farm or oil refinery within city limits.
- relaxing 2y agoThese figures are generally based on consumption rather than production for that reason. It’s not helpful to credit emissions to the people who largely aren’t driving the output. City living brings efficiencies from operating at scale - fewer miles by car, block of apartments instead of single family homes.
- rkwz 2y agoThe author clearly explains in the post: > When I started this solar-powered website project, I wasn't trying to revolutionize sustainable computing or drastically cut my electricity bill. I was driven by curiosity, a desire to have fun, and a hope that my journey might inspire others to explore local-first or solar-powered hosting. > The cost savings? Looking at our last electricity bill, we pay an average of $0.325 per kWh in Boston. This means the savings amount to $2.85 USD per year (8.76 kWh * $0.325/kWh = $2.85). Not exactly something to write home about.
- IncreasePosts 2y agoSolar powered sites are cool and fun, but I find it ultimately lacking because so much of the rest of the networking infrastructure is reliant on the grid. It would be more energy efficient to just host the static site on cloudflare or whatever, and use the solar panel to charge some batteries, or something you would normally use the grid for. I suspect overall energy usage would be even lower if the site was hosted on a CDN, due to the CDN operators keeping their machines near full utilization, and fewer network hops required for an average request.
- genter 2y agoYou don't like that the rest of the infrastructure is on the grid, so you're proposing moving the site to the grid too?
- ffsm8 2y agoHe's looking at it from a utilitarian point of view. From that perspective, you've got a finite amount of energy that's being consumed at any point of time and by that logic, you'd be better served to use the solar energy for something else in your household that would've needed the grid, because a cloud provider will almost certainly only need a fraction of the electricity you'd need to keep the static files served. So, by doing that you've effectively reduced your absolute energy footprint. But these projects aren't about reducing your energy footprint. They're about having a local webserver that's running on solar energy. Or in the authors words: At its heart, this project is about learning and contributing to a conversation on a greener, local-first future for the web
- ericd 2y agoYeah, it’s cool to just see what goes into it, and get a more intuitive understanding of the tradeoffs and what needs to be done to move more of this to green energy. It makes the (large) challenge of matching generation to consumption a whole lot more real. It’s obviously not meant to be a maximized carbon reduction in any way commensurate to the effort.
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- emdanielsen 2y agoThis is so cool! I'm so surprised I've never heard of someone doing this before :)
- mrweasel 2y agoThere was a project a while back, sadly it seems to have gone offline, it was a kosher news aggregator. They had the most interesting rules, like only charging the batteries on Tuesday. It was such a weird and interesting projects. Archive of the website: http://web.archive.org/web/20200707101320/https://jewjewjew.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20200707101320/https://jewjewjew....
- mbrizic 2y agoI did something very similar a while back: https://mbrizic.com/blog/solarhosting/ https://mbrizic.com/blog/solarhosting/
- bantunes 2y agoWhat did you use to differentiate green from (I'm guessing) blue links when it's down?
- mbrizic 2y agoEach color is a different build running on a different server. And then a load balancer picks which server you'll end up on. Code-wise, the only difference between the builds is the CSS setting the link color.
- photochemsyn 2y agoCool project, but also a great all around tutorial - the appendix section is a nice idea and very helpful for many people I'm sure.
- anoth3rsmith 2y agoHow many more panels/bigger battery would your need to move the switch and other required home infra to run the site?
- kkfx 2y agoI suggest a different reasoning: what's about domestic p.v. with storage and racks in the basement with "free" A/C in terms of WFH and distributed "datacenters"? How many have realized how much stuff can be hosted at home with availability levels not really far from most common datacenters?
- sdepablos 2y agoHeavily inspired - I suppose - by the oldest (2018) solar-powered website, Low Tech Magazine https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website
- culi 2y agoObligatory post of the most well known solar website. Low Tech Magazine https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/ They do a lot of other sustainable web development[0] practices like letting you read offline, having incredibly small page sizes (always shown in the lower left corner), and dithering all their images[1] (which imo creates a cool effect) [0] https://sustainablewebdesign.org/ https://sustainablewebdesign.org/ [1] https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/#how https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/#h...
- pluto_modadic 2y agocontroversial take: but I think it's fine to host stuff on your own machines, rather than the massive big-data hyperscale datacenters. Yes, google/cloudflare/AWS might be more efficient per watt, but I don't like giving them more money to continue to violate privacy/TOS/labor... (AI, kiwifarms, &, well, everything amazon does). No, it won't be the most efficient, but it's yours.
- cortesoft 2y agoYou wouldn't be giving cloudflare any money to host it with them.
- vedmed 2y agoAm I missing the joke here? Clue me in. Cloudflare isn't a host to my understanding. You can't upload files to it and serve them. At least, not on the free tier.
- noman-land 2y agoYes you can.
- left-struck 2y agoIt’s hilarious because vedmed said “ You can't upload files to it and serve them. At least, not on the free tier.” but that is EXACTLY how cloudflare pages’ free tier works lol
- FlyingSnake 2y agoI think the joke was Cloudflare has a generous free tier that covers a lot of ground, sp your bill will be zero. Most hobbyists won’t hit the limit.
- rakoo 2y agoSo they'd violate your privacy and re-centralize the web for free ? That's not exactly a rebuttal
- imwillofficial 2y agoThis is such an incredibly cool site. Bravo.
- ekianjo 2y ago> In contrast, traditional hosting might cost around $20 USD a month Hosting that is vastly more powerful than a RPI in the first place. And there are much cheaper VPS that costs only a dozen dollars a year, too, and can do a lot more than this rpi. No matter how you look at it this is not saving any money.
- vicnaum 2y agoGreat job. I was thinking about it too, but stopped on the networking. Would be so cool, if networking could also be kinda "self-hosted" and "free", like mesh-networks, or satellites, or smth.
- mttch 2y agoCool project and I’d really like to try something similar with a 4G/5G connection so it doesn’t rely on site WiFi. I don’t think your cost comparison is fair between the rpi and hosting. I host my website on a £1/mo shared vps and for my energy costs that equivalent to running a low power server at home, ignoring all the other benefits of it being off-site.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rijoja 2y ago> Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP or LiFePO4) battery This should be "Lithium Ion Phosphate...", right?
- WesolyKubeczek 2y agoFe is for iron here
- snickerer 2y agoNo, they used a Lithium IRON battery. LiFePO₄ literally means Lithium Iron Phosphate. These batteries are safer, more thermally stable, and have a longer cycle life compared to typical Lithium-Ion (LiCoO₂) batteries. However, LiFePO₄ has a lower energy density, meaning less capacity for the same size and weight.