I'm only half kidding. I'm a bit of a prepper and I have lots of powerbanks and devices that charge from USB but besides idling my truck I really had no other way to charge any of them in case of a long-term power outage which seemed a bit of an oversight on my part.

Not like this solves the issue. 30 watts (under ideal conditions) isn't much but it's a start.

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[–] IcedRaktajino@startrek.website 69 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

All of the labor has been DIY, and I've got about $9,000 invested in the system components.

Back of the napkin math, at current electric rates, puts my ROI at just under 9 years. If electric rates keep going up, it'll pay back even faster.

Edit: Depending on how you look at it, ROI could be in as few as 1.5 to 2 years. This system is in lieu of a whole house generator that would have cost us about $7,000. Had we gone with that instead, it would never have paid for itself (other than peace of mind) and we would have been perfectly content. So if I'm only considering the price difference between this and the generator, it'd only have to pay back $2,000.

[–] LincolnsDogFido@lemmy.zip 19 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Yeah, buying peace of mind when it comes to self sufficient power generation has no price tag. Decentralization of the grid is a good thing regardless of if you "pay it off" or not.

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 10 points 5 days ago (1 children)

buying peace of mind when it comes to self sufficient power generation has no price tag

$10,000? $100,000? 75% of your salary for the rest of your life?

It obviously does have a price tag at some point. If someone wanted true self-sufficiency they'd have to get a full solar setup plus a generator in case the grid went down at a time when solar power wasn't covering the needs. (That's likely if, for example, your power is knocked out due to wildfires, and the wildfire smoke is making the solar setup unable to produce power.)

And, you can't really consider yourself fully self-sufficient when it comes to electrical power unless you have a n+1 setup, so you have a backup generator in case the primary one fails and needs to be repaired.

[–] 0x0@infosec.pub 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Sure if you want to be hyperbolic about it, but in my experience with people that argue like that, they will also say dumb things such as government owned entities such as schools, public transport, postal service or water access needing to make profit or its just all bad ..