In New Zealand we're very much natural disaster prone. I run a SaaS working out of home - we wired the house for generator backup and have a starlink unit that sits in a box exactly for this reason, even if the proverbial hits the fan for a week I can still keep on top of the business.
Every couple of months the geny gets sparked up and everything tested. For a very small investment it's very comforting to know we've always got power/internet, regardless of what happens.
If I fully decked my roof out I can generate a good 20kWp
I'm assuming OP isn't actually serving out of home (starlink won't help with it's CG-Nat), so it's not like they're running 5kW of servers. 10kWh a day seems perfectly reasonable amount to keep going.
Given just running a generator it going to eat 20 litres a day on lowest load, over 3 weeks that's 400 litres you'd need to store.
With a battery setup even if you had to charge from a generator you'd be able to run it more efficiently for a shorter period.
So having spend 10 minutes I reckon the answer is "yes, OP should certainly get a solar/battery system set up"
That's crazy. There are huge differences is costs and use cases.A generator is $500, and mine can run for 24hrs on 5 gallons of gas. A 5kw solar system is about $25k to 35k in my area before batteries.
Solar is far cheaper than that in my location - especially if you put the panels up yourself, and storing 100 gallons of gas (400 litres) to run for 3 weeks is far more expensive.
I realize this isn't the case for everyone, but I already have a large propane tank that supplies the house. My generator is tied in to that. So I'm not storing fuel specifically for the generator, but if it came down to it I could probably power the house for a couple months at least. And our geography and flora are pretty unfavorable for solar. So as with most things, it just depends.
> A 5kW solar system is about $25k to 35k in my area before batteries.
Do you live on the moon?
Earlier this year I installed a 7.8kW system in Canada for $13k CAD all in, inc the inverter and labor. (Then I got a $5k subsidy to bring it to $8k out of pocket.)
> California - the moon might be cheaper. The whole system here is corrupt due to regulatory capture
I'm always amazed at how for regular life things it seems you guys has less "freedom" than we do.
It's my house, so I got up on the roof and installed the panels myself (with a friend). I did pay for a licensed electrician to wire the inverter into the main house breaker and double check everything, and he did get a permit for that work (which was $150, IIRC). Then I emailed the electric company, three days later they came out and installed a bi-directional meter for $32 and I'm good to go.
Depends on the price of batteries, which are rapidly declining. Within the next few years the numbers will change in favor of batteries. Though it also depends on the load and having enough space/sunlight for the solar array
I can buy a used diesel/propane/gas/pick your fuel generator today for a few hundred bucks that could power most of the essentials in my house. I bought a brand new one during an extended power outage due to storms last year for $500 CAD. That and 80L of gas (~$120 CAD) can run my sump pumps, fridge, freezer, the electronic side of my furnace, my homelab server rack (including 6 PoE access points), my workstation, and key lighting - for 5 days. If I cut that back to essentials, closer to 3 weeks. That’s roughly 200kWh for $120, plus $500 up front.
Currently, the absolute cheapest I can find lithium batteries (I am planning a solar+grid load-balancing setup) is about $160CAD/kwh. To prepare for the worst case (i.e. minimal solar generation during and following the storm - say, middle of winter/happens to be cloudy/panels are damaged/etc) I’d need to spend over $30,000 in batteries alone to have the same capacity as $120 of gas. Not to mention the sheer amount of space that would take. And the cost of solar panels (10kW actual generation capacity, minimum, to keep essentials running), at roughly $1/W in Canada, adds another $10,000 to that estimate. And that’s not including the cost of installation, which based on what I’ve heard, probably adds another $10-20k.
While there are some interesting advances being made, I do not believe that battery capacity costs will decrease by 3-4 orders of magnitude “within the next few years,” unless you anticipate gasoline/diesel/etc prices to go parabolic. It’s very obvious why people would much rather have a generator and some Jerry cans for a few hundred bucks than a solar + battery setup that costs more than their car.
> I do not believe that battery capacity costs will decrease by 3-4 orders of magnitude “within the next few years,”
Fair call for lithium chemistries, which will probably drop closer to one order of magnitude within 2-3 years (if the trend from the last year-to-date holds). But if we're talking about sodium ion, I wouldn't be surprised if that did drop by a couple of orders of magnitude, which is already sitting about ~140USD/kwh for consumer packs (but before shipping from China). It has a weird discharge voltage curve and needs a more capable inverter to handle it though, but at the prices I'm seeing, overcapacity is plenty affordable.
The solar and batteries have much lower emissions, and can be used as all times (not just during power outages) to lower the cost of electricity. Anyway it doesn't have to be generator or solar + batteries... Why not both? Have the solar, reduce emissions and utility bills. Have the generator as a backup if power is out and batteries are empty.
That's what I'm currently in the planning phases for. Break-even is still the better part of a decade on parts alone, unless you get very creative (for instance, where I live, I can choose to have a special time-of-use electrical billing program where overnight electricity is ~60% cheaper than usual; you can make use of this to charge batteries overnight, rely on solar when it's sunny, and batteries during the more expensive times-of-use).
The overall point though, is that solar and/or batteries are not a viable alternative for emergency backup power, nor will they be "within the next few years." Within the next few decades, maybe.
My quick math came up short on batteries. But as you say, it's worth running those numbers every year. I can't imagine I'll be sitting here in 2030 saying "batteries aren't there yet".
> I can't imagine I'll be sitting here in 2030 saying "batteries aren't there yet".
Or if you're looking now at sodium ion. It's only just hitting the consumer market, but it's already cheap enough for energy storage at the scale GP is talking about. Might take a few years for cell quality, inverter, and charging technology to improve, but by 2030 it will be so dirt cheap to the point that it would be economically sensible for any household.
Last year, when I did the math, batteries still had a 15 year payoff time. I'm not going to be in this house in 15 years. If the state subsidized it more (it is kind of a public good imo), or I could easily roll it into house value, I'd do it.
I'm trying to move to a nicer house. When I do that, I'll almost certainly just go for it.
I'm not sure whether you read my comment, but I was specifically talking about sodium ion which are absurdly cheap even before efficiencies of scale enter the equation. I don't think many are doing the math on that because it's only just become available on Alibaba. BMSes and chargers don't really exist for it yet, but there are whole battery packs for sale.
No, I read your comment. I was just thinking about 2030.
Also, no offense, but I'm not trusting a brand new energy storage technology bolted to the wall of my house. I'll businesses trial it out first for a few years.
That's a high bar - in my experience (New Zealand) 1/3 of candidates can't even write any form of code to retrieve a random element from an array. 1/3 have to be nudged along and asked some leading questions, and 1/3 are "what the heck are you asking me that for, I can do that in my sleep, that better not be indicative of the quality of coders... "
There is just so much misrepresentation out there it's insane.
I hear these complaints a lot - and feel like the unspoken problem is your HR or recruiters are non-technical and shovel garbage candidates at devs to sort out. Whenever I've had (technical) engineering managers involved with reaching out and reviewing candidates, we rarely have misrepresentation or fakers.
The PT-P models (we've got and a lot of our clients use the PT-P900W) - it does a very nifty "half cut" on laminated tape labels that makes it super easy to peel and stick.
Love the API it has, aside from some quirks - we can control the printer from within our Android/iOS apps - literally can tell it to half cut the labels or not.
Wow so you work at CDK. I wouldn't wish the sh-t storm you guys must be going through on our worst enemy.
I was talking with one of your clients today (we're not competitors) and you just don't realise how far screwed some of these companies are right now.
It actually made an instant upsell today of 'here's our additional cloud sync' feature. No questions, no umming and ahhing, it's just 'yep done, add it, turn it on'. Heck we probably undersold it by 10x.
I hope you guys start getting some sense of normality soon and get systems back online.
Close to this market - ShopMonkey is doing it for general garage work, and we, GlobalWorkshop, are doing it for high end/custom vehicles (restoration/restomods/small motorsport teams).
I'm pretty sure one of our recent trialling companies have been using CDK and desperate to get away from it for their restoration work.
"It hasn't been updated in years" was the quote last week..
30+ years in the software industry. Everyone did this back in the day - then it changed for 3 reasons (1) completely unsustainable (2) people didn't upgrade, or being forced to upgrade and pay large prices got grumpy about it. (3) the money people figured out subscriptions were more profitable.
There's tonnes of companies that have legacy 'pay upfront' models, that hit the wall as they'd saturated their markets, then their revenue stream dropped off and all of a sudden saw the wall of transitioning to web/mobile needing to happen and didn't have the funds to pull it off.
I'd almost completely forgotten about it until I was challenged by a prospect in a meeting monday 'is this one of these new lease software systems, I want to own it!" had to educate him on the way the world worked now...
We just had ANZAC day in NZ [commemorating WWI/battle of gallipoli). A bunch of (I'm guessing younger people) are getting up in arms that it's glorification of war and whataboutism on other things going on the world "why don't we do x about y", "we shouldn't be celebrating it" etc etc.
They really missed the point that it's about not forgetting the brutality of war - to remember those who served and died under horrific circumstances. One of the key phrases is "lest we forget". However I fear we are, as each generation passes from WWI/WWII the horrors gradually get diluted.
While we don't have kids it's apparent the younger generations are not getting the stories of WWI/WWII passed down and their exposure to it is the glorification through Hollywood.
Thank you good HN'er for posting this up. It's always important to remember so we as a world don't go back there.
On the theme of Dan Carlin and generational dilution, the first episode ever was an interesting exploration of how Alexander and Hitler through that lens.
It's completely different to the current audiobook like format, but the early episodes are still well worth a look.
