Goodness! Over 8 hours off-grid today!

[DamonHD]

So, yes, a record day even though I was messing around with the system today.

What I also did today is make a separate high-State-Of-Charge detector (separate from the LVD though using the same MAX8212 chip) so that the laptop functions as a kind of early dump load when the battery is getting very full and being charged.

http://www.earth.org.uk/low-voltage-drop-out-circuit-design.html#SOC

You would still need a normal dump load for (say) a wind turbine, but this cuts in a bit earlier and gets the laptop to run faster and do extra (eg housekeeping) work to dump in this case as much as an extra 40W so tripling my normal load.

I didn't get it completed early enough today to catch the full sun and test it out, so I'll have to monitor it tomorrow over the Net while I'm at my client's.

BTW, I had a chat with the MD/CEO of a UK RE supplier that is just about to do a major expansion.  RE is really starting to move!

Rgds

Damon

[richhagen]

The solar electricity is probably more valuable to do stuff with than as heat, especially since it still ends up as heat anyway.  I figure my cnc milling machine is just a slightly more sophisticated heater in the winter as well when compared with the old toaster elements I dump to.  Rich

[DamonHD]

Well, I've got some complex problems that I would like to throw any amount of computing power at indefinitely, so this gets the sums done and protects the battery once full!

Rgds

Damon

[DamonHD]

It's been somewhat overcast the last couple of days, but if you look at:

http://www.earth.org.uk/off-grid-stats.html

you'll see that the '.' samples are (currently) for the servers being off-grid, and the ':' indicate off-grid and 'full-speed' mode which uses the extra energy productively rather than it being dumped or not used (eg PV disconnected from a full battery).

There are not many ':' samples, and won't be except on very sunny days the way things are set up.

Rgds

Damon

[Bruce S]

Damon;

   I hope you don't mind, but I am going to hijack you post, but only just a little :-D

This is with respect to your tweaking the Linux load you have.

My setup is as follows: I have a HP quad-processor system , it's OLD :-), these are 200MMX processors again there's 4 along with a 512k of processor memory and 1 gig of RAM. There's also a SCSI level-II CDrom and 4 ea 4gig hds & 8gig hd. I am wanting to pull into this system ALL the other computers that I have currently loaded with Mandrake 7.2, hey I beleive in if it works don't fix it :->

I am very interested in learning how to shut down processors and HDs if possible..

Thanks

Bruce S

 

[DamonHD]

Your (server) CPUs are almost certainly too old to save much or any power themselves when idle, but you can automagically turn off power to other things such as the CD-ROM and any USB connectors, etc, when not in use, under recentish Linux flavours as I understand things.

The usual mechanism to do a lot of this is "laptop-mode", but beware that desktop hard drives are not usually rated for lots of power- on/off cycles and may die.

If you can't/won't replace the system with a laptop then you might consider upgrading your machine's power-supply to a newer and more efficient one (eg you might go from 60% to 80% efficient on a better second-hand supply) which might match any other savings yo make.

Newer systems, especially laptops designed to eke out their batteries, have much better scope for power savings on idle, and are often much much faster than old machines too!

Rgds

Damon

[Bruce S]

Damon;

  Thanks for the reply. I was afraid you were going to say that. bummer.

Well, I've been wanting to make a small donation to the needy, this may be the kicker :-)

Cheers

Bruce S

[DamonHD]

Just remember that doing this once doesn't make me any sort of expert.

Have a look at the PowerTOP tool (linuxpowertop.org) for a bit more info.

Rgds

Damon

[ghurd]

I guess all that, translated into English: newer is more gooder, laptops are much betterly.

I don't even speak Windoze.  :-(

[DamonHD]

My doing-big-sums-on-the-laptop as early dump-load seems to be working well today (and yesterday).  See all the ':' entries:

http://www.earth.org.uk/off-grid-stats.html

This also means I'm getting useful extra work done while the sun shines!

Rgds

Damon

PS. If you look carefully you'll see the "NN samples indicate wind power available" bullet point, which is from monitoring my tiny turbine.