This is really interesting to me from the angle of why do some species coexist with humans in suburbs, etc, but others are pushed aside by development. I'm sure there are many factors, but I think sound is a big one. I wonder if it's possible to teach a population of a skittish species to be comfortable with suburban life over a few generations.
I had a spare 50W panel and charge controller that I used similarly for camping. Had more or less the same thought as you: I should use this year round.
Ended up building a wooden box with a couple of old car batteries inside along with the controller. Kept it outside and ran a cable inside carrying 12v (make sure you put an inline fuse after the battery in case it short circuits along the way). Used the 12v from that and some old car chargers to set up a charging station for all my devices.
The car chargers were all random plug styles since they were from a box of stuff I've accumulated over the years, so I cut those off and spliced on USB-A female ports so they could charge any USB device. I eventually ran a second pair of 12v wires so I could run a small 100w inverter from the batteries.
Worked great, but the car batteries crapped out after about 3 years (in all fairness, they were junk to start with).
If I had to do it over again, I'd do it similarly but use 12v USB-C power-delivery adapters instead so I could charge bigger stuff like my laptop without having to use an inverter.
Awesome effort! If not done already, you may want to look into venting that outside box. I believe there are examples of the out gassing of enclosed lead-acid batteries causing corrosion of nearby metals. Hilarity ensued.
It doesn't exist anymore, but yeah, good call. I never replaced it once the batteries finally gave out, and I moved less than a year later.
It did have vents on the sides for airflow, but that was more of a consideration for heat build up and keeping the controller from cooking in the summer. It was also less a "box" and more like a small doghouse (including shingles lol). I atually gave it to a neighbor after I was done with it; they cut a hole in the door and used it as a cat house.
3 years seems pretty good for using a car battery outside of it's preferred use case. I guess that depends on how good/bad you were about deep cycling it.
Currently, the batteries I'm using are my power tool batteries, which are 18V so they charge through a dedicated (12V) charger, and I have a little USB A/C and low powered inverter that uses them. I probably wouldn't necessarily want to put my lithium batteries through every day cycling, though.
I've thought about generating hydrogen with it to use for experiments and such, but idk if I have the space for that.
3 years seems pretty good for using a car battery outside of it's preferred use case.
Better than that :) They were junk car batteries when I got them, and I still got 3 years out of them. But yeah, they didn't get deep cycled much or at all since there were 2 in parallel and the loads I had on them were very small (5-6 500 mAh cell phone chargers and occasionally some LED rope lights).
When I eventually hooked an inverter up to charge my laptop or run a lamp during power outages, they started to show their age with the extra current draw. I think that's what finally did them in.
Yeah, lithium batteries wouldn't like that kind of daily cycle without some kind of charge/discharge limiter to keep them in the 30-70% range. That's basically what hybrid and EV battery managers do to prolong their useful lifespan. I think LiFePO4 lithium batteries would tolerate that better (they're the ones typically used in e-bikes), but they're not cheap. I've also found it difficult / expensive to find solar chargers for them (to be fair, mine is 48v 20AH so finding any aftermarket charger for it has been a challenge lol).
One approach to this is lightweight construction: the thinner the ceilings of a multi-storey building, for example, the more space is left for extra floors.
Given the way these are suspended and that you can fill the empty space with noise dampening material, they might be significantly better than normal concrete floors regarding noise transmission.
We have a large window in our living room the cats love but got way too hot. Planted grape vines to cut down on the light back there so we can keep the curtains open but still let the cats see birds.
On the actual "tech" side we've been going the opposite of new things to reduce usage. Wax paper wraps, older wooden everything where possible (cutting boards, furniture, wicker laundry baskets) most of which we got used from my wife's family, those all will get recycled somehow when their time comes.
I'm hoping when our water heater finally goes we can get one of the new heat pump models. Reduce some AC needs and not need a humidifier in the basement (which I try to run as little as possible already).
Ah yeah, also keeping most things in the "format" of wood here haha, just feels like much better quality most of the time and lasts longer, thinking specifically about kitchen utensils.
Wow! Thanks for sharing! LOVE that logo you spray painted onto the laptop - a nice touch. Did you design the logo yourself too? It should totally be the logo for the Solarpunk Technology Community!
Thanks! I pulled it from one of the more popular solarpunk flags. Out of all the ones I've seen, many of which feature the sun-and-gear motif in some configuration, it's my favorite symbol for the movement; It's very simple and visually clear, and easy to render with one color.
Also; had never heard of Movim before, seems like quite the cool project - am also planning on startin my own blog so this might be the perfect solution for me :)
Movim is awesome! PoVoq put a bunch of work into getting it set up and linked with Lemmy so if you have an account here, you can just start using the microblogging platform too! I use WordPress for my art and writing and Movim for my making-and-fixing-type projects, and I mostly prefer Movim - the interface is nice, it's free, doesn't spatter everything I write with gross ads, and it's not corporate. I'd very much recommend it.
That's interesting, thanks for sharing that platform. I'm in the process of setting up a plot of herbs for folks at the local community garden and I'd like to have a simple website for people to go to get information on each of the herbs for harvest/storage/recipes/etc, and am hitting a wall on what platform to use for this.
For longform blogs we host Movim (which is also a nice federated chat app for Jabber/XMPP) and in addition we have a Dokuwiki where community moderators can make a dedicated wiki. Both are integrated with our Lemmy instance here, so you can just use your existing account user and password to log in.
This is one of those situations where I wish you were local so I could give you produce and pickles & jams in exchange to pick your brain on this :)
On first glance: So I could hypothetically make a community here, eg. 'the community herb plot,' and direct people to posts on French Tarragon et. al. via links/QR codes in that community (instance? Is that the right term?)...? If people wanted to post a question they'd have to sign up, though, I imagine...?
I don't think I need to have a long form blog on this; there's probably 74 different herb societies that would have a page for French Tarragon that I could possibly link to, but it'd be nice for folks to be able to ask questions, share additional information, etc in the post containing that link.
Feel free to poke holes in this...or tell me to bugger off...or say "yes, but..." or whatever 🙂
These permisions are automatic and you can create as many wiki pages as you like under the specific wiki namespace.
Edit: Let me see if there is a nice QR code externsion for Dokuwiki that I can add. Edit: Ah: if you click on the menu and select "Export as PDF" the resulting PDF also includes a QR code to the page already.
Edit2: after reading your post again: yes you can of course also just link to external already existing website in a new Lemmy community that you create here.
whoa, thanks a bunch, I think this might be the way forward....plus one can't underestimate the cool factor of having slrpnk.net/c/whatever I figure out to call it as a web address that a bunch of oldies are scanning/clicking on :D (semi /s implied - I might be able to breadpill a few)
Really appreciate your input ✊
Edit: behold, the initial beginnings: https://slrpnk.net/c/plot18
(I'm not overly creative when it comes to naming stuff)
No disagreement at all, but I genuinely think something like this is at least worth consideration. In low traffic or rural areas having a "cab" on standby would come at worst with no downsides as long as it doesn't conflict with normal tram traffic.
At best it would be the best selling point to populations that have become accustom to personal vehicles. Be it for privacy, safety, poor time management, or whatever other reasons. Its also technically a monorail bahn
E: Also this one could've been just fine being its own cab, or we could also include the GYROSCOPE because everyone likes monorails with gyroscopes!
My main issue with these is they don't have any benefit a regular train doesn't have for long distance and for shorter commutes in low traffic areas that aren't densley populated enough to warrent a proper train or tram... You'd probably just a bike.
I happen to know the approximate area where this is being trialed, and a bike (even an electric one) is really only an alternative for hard-core all-weather bikers that have no problem driving 60+ kilometres a day.
The distances are just too far, the weather too bad 80% of the year, and the shrinking, elderly population too low density for other means of public transport to work economically.
The options are really either cars, such kind of novel ideas, or abandoning these tiny villages all together.
I think the one and only benefit would be that they can have carts going both directions at the same time using the existing 2 rail system, without building a second pair of rails. I'd love to see some sort of bike add-on that would let me do this with a bicycle.
Imho hydrogen on trains is only a good idea, for long distance trains running on not electrified track. Hydrogen is more energy dense and easier to refill then a battery so a good idea for say US freight trains.
However Germany has all its mainlines electrified. In this case all three towns have electrified main stations. Battery trains are a good solution for that relativly short sections of unelectrified track, as long as charging can be done in stations. This would be the case here, as in most of Europe to be honest.
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