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Just doing a heckin' science to figure out my solar system requirements... How much battery capacity do I really need? (No, really -- I'm asking!) (thelemmy.club)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/solardiy@lemmy.world
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I'm planning to cut my grid connection and go full off-grid. Which raises the question of how much capacity I really need. And what you see here is me trying to answer that question based on ~51,000 5-minute data points of usage data my power company provided to me, complete with custom-made python script to parse all that data and pretty charts! (Yes, I have 6 monitors. And this kind of shows why.)

And what I'm really torn about now is how much battery capacity I need. Should I get enough to cover the absolute worst case scenario (~66kwh) or is something closer to my average overnight usage (~20kwh) acceptable?

Not the absolute end of the world if the batteries run dry and I need to temporarily supplement with generator backup, I suppose. Nobody is life-or-death depending on any electrical appliances here, and even on the coldest days, waiting a few minutes to go start a generator isn't a huge deal.

But definitely would like a word from the wise about how much battery capacity I really need. And also how much solar panel wattage I need, I suppose.

screenshot of data processing for solar system design
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[–] [S] 0 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Does 6 monitors helps to cut time for ur tasks so far?

I'm a writer, and it's often helpful to have notes, outlines, and reference material open on other screens, so it can be referred to at a glance without having to stop typing in the main document.

Like, which HW are you running?

That's possibly the most insane part.

Two monitors are connected to a cheap old AMD card. Four monitors are connected to an nvidia 3090.

Somehow, this actually works ... under Ubuntu. Every other distro I've tried so far doesn't work with it, and would only output through one GPU at a time, no matter how much I tried to tweak things. Also, the two different GPUs of different brands seems to be important. When I tried two AMD cards, it didn't work. When I tried a 1070 along with the 3090, it didn't work. Only this weird mix-and-match setup works.

Honestly, though, I'm looking to migrate away from it once I can afford an upgrade.

I'm planning to go down to 4 screens: three 4k screens in vertical orientation along the bottom, and then a single ultrawide on top. That will ultimately be more resolution and more screen real estate to work with, but with only 4 outputs total, I'll be able to run it from a single GPU, and then I can migrate away from Ubuntu -- probably using Debian next.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 month ago* (1 child)

    @OwOarchist Ok, wasn't expecting it would be challenge (journey) for you to make 6 monitors work seamlessly.
    About 1070 and 3090, are you on 580 and below series of drivers? Open kernel drivers for Nvidia dropped 10XX series of GPUs entirely, this is one of obstacles for cards to be usable.

    KDE Plasma 6.8 (not released yet) drops new DMABUF v6 thing, I don't know if it would help for you, try out later on.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 month ago

    are you on 580 and below series of drivers?

    535, actually ... lol.

    Yeah, I haven't updated it in a long time. (I had a separate issue where every video driver update would leave my PC unbootable, so I just used sudo apt hold *nvidia* to stop that from happening.) And at this point, I'm not looking to change anything as long as it's still working. Not until I do that 4-screen upgrade, anyway.

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