> Our electricity is unmetered and included in our rent. My unit has an individual circuit breaker box, but how would solar power be fed into such a system
I don't understand. These systems just plug into wall outlets. The big difference is that, instead of saving yourself money, you'd be saving your landlady money on the bill.
Agreed. It's just a sub panel off the main. Could be 10 sub panels deep and it wouldn't play havoc with anything. The inverter syncs with the line frequency then boosts its voltage just enough to see it push current into the grid which is a few hundred mV. I would even hazard a guess that the impedance between the panels is enough to say that the current is likely being pulled directly by the closest loads: the tenant's loads.
I'm thinking that the landlady's "NO!" is based on: (1) You can't save yourself any money by doing this, so why are you interested?, and (2) Complex stuff that she doesn't know or understand about electricity and her property's wiring and whatever you might end up doing might end with her property burned down.
> Complex stuff that she doesn't know or understand about electricity and her property's wiring and whatever you might end up doing might end with her property burned down.
What wiring? Literally connect the setup to the regular power outlet, no fuzzing with wires or otherwise, probably any human who've connected some electrical gadget/device to a socket before could get these solar setups going in a couple of minutes.
Can't there can be over-current issues if you are not using a dedicated wall outlet for backfeeding the solar?
Consider a situation where the plugged-in solar inverter is capable of providing 15 amps into the circuit, but so is the breaker feeding the circuit from the panel. If you plug in something that can consume 30 amps, it will be able to do so by pulling 15 amps from each source without tripping the breaker, so you can end up with 30 amps traveling in your building wiring that is only sized for 15.
At least that's how I understand it. I don't know if any of the grid-tied inverters that can plug into a wall have some way of detecting and compensating for this. Clearly other countries have been able to come to a decision to allow it. I vaguely remember someone explaining that the 230V systems in Europe somehow mitigate the issue but I don't remember how.
Yeah, so I guess when both the renter and the landlord doesn't understand the solution (or renter does understand, but didn't explain properly), it'll be a hard sell indeed.
If you've got normal residential power outlets, then you've got wiring inside the walls. Those wires are sized for the number of amps that the individual circuit's fuse or breaker allows, plus some limited safety margin.
Depending on hidden-in-the-wall details of how a circuit's wiring is run, and where you plug in panels and electrical loads, it might be quite easy to overload those wires - without blowing the fuse or tripping the breaker.
Overloaded wires can get very hot, and electrical fires starting inside walls really is a thing.
It's not as though people intentionally made these endangered because they have insufficient love for penguins. We have unintentionally done it because we have insufficient love (care) for them and many, many other things, creatures, people, etc.
It's because the people who get rich off of fossil fuels are in control, and they are willing to continue this damage as long as it adds to their personal fortunes.
We could "manhattan project" ourselves out of this mess if we wanted to. China, in a sense, is doing just that.
It's not a shallow dismissal; it's a dismissal for good reason. It's tangential to the topic, but not to HN overall. It's only curmudgeonly if you assume AI-written posts are the inevitable and good future (aka begging the question). I really don't know how it's "sneering", so I won't address that.
The fact that the whole thread has basically devolved into debates over if it is or isn't an LLM written article is proving well enough that it doesn't really matter one way or another
It is a witch hunt with no evidence whatsoever, all based on intuition. It is distraction from the main topic, a topic that enough people find interesting to stay on the top page. What was intellectually interesting has now become a bore fest of repeated back and forth. That’s disrespectful and inconsiderate. Write a new post about why do you think AI writing is dangerous. I don’t mind that. I’d upvote it.
The key line "I’m getting a similar sense for the recent US foreign interventions and wars. They all seem to work slightly better than they should."
There is no measurement of efficacy here. It feels like these things are working better because the US military is now doing big public things, but that is not necessarily a good change over not-doing-big-public-things.
Yeah, that was exactly where he lost me. The US military doesn't need a remarkable amount of luck for these operations to be tactical successes, tactical risk wasn't the reason previous administrations didn't do them. The element that was missing was a complete disregard for second order consequences, and Claude has nothing to do with that whatsoever.
I don't understand. These systems just plug into wall outlets. The big difference is that, instead of saving yourself money, you'd be saving your landlady money on the bill.
reply