
A website that runs on a solar-powered server in Barcelona - peey
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/power.html
======
duxup
When I was unemployed a while back i went to sign up for unemployment.

You could only do things on the site during government business hours.

On the surface it was frustrating, but it also made the site feel 'alive' in a
way that I hadn't felt since the days when even professional company sites had
an about page that the 'webmaster' created with maybe a pic of the server, or
his cat.

I have an idea in my head for a sort of "banking" (not a real bank and I
wouldn't use that word) app and that it would be amusing to have it recognize
bank holidays and typical bank hours.

~~~
colechristensen
bhphotovideo.com observes the sabbath

~~~
gowld
[https://www.holyclock.com/](https://www.holyclock.com/) """ HolyClock is a
free service for closing websites on Shabbat and Holidays. The closing occurs
before Shabbat enters, for each visitor individually, based on their physical
location in the world at the given time.

With HolyClock you can prevent desecration of Shabbat by visitors of your
website. A visitor who is located where Shabbat has begun, is redirected to a
temporary closing page until Shabbat ends. """

~~~
fredsted
I'm really interested to know how many have bought the $9/month Premium plan.
Doesn't seem that expensive considering you can enroll as many as 3 whole
websites! ;-)

~~~
Scoundreller
Looks like you need the premium plan if they aren’t your host.

------
philshem
Wouldn’t an old Android phone make pretty efficient web server? (24+ hours
battery life, WiFi and cellular data, DC charging, low-power built-in display)

Here’s a http server: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6329468/how-to-
create-a-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6329468/how-to-create-a-
http-server-in-android#6329508)

~~~
LeifCarrotson
The display is the worst part of the phone, in terms of efficiency as a web
server. There's no need at all for a display; visitors and developers alike
connect to web servers from a remote machine. The display hardware and
graphics processor on the SOC consume a significant amount of power.

~~~
oarsinsync
Would the effect of the display hardware on battery life not be mitigated by
simply keeping the display turned off?

Not sure how much that would help the power draw of the graphics processor,
but it would remain idle at the very least.

~~~
philshem
Yes, the idea was to keep the display off. I didn’t think about the graphics
card.

~~~
jschwartzi
Just gate the clocks.

------
rntksi
Presumably to optimise this website would mean different things? For example
would it be better to read from the flash drive or cache things in RAM power-
output-wise? I think that's a question we never ask. We would for example
consider a memcache versus none for performance reasons but probably never for
power output reasons.

Very interesting!

~~~
jnty
Have we not been optimising for power usage for the last ten years at least?
It's really important for tablets, phones and laptops.

~~~
falcolas
The hardware side of things, yes. The software side of things (outside the
OS), not so much.

~~~
dahfizz
I would argue that's way outside the scope of software development.

First, you can't really know how various things are implemented in hardware.
Something that saves power on one machine will increase power usage on
another. This would be a big step backwards in terms of abstraction.

Second, and more important IMO, is that it's just not our job. Hardware people
should make efficient hardware, and software people should make efficient
software. The meaning of efficient depends on the context.

~~~
IggleSniggle
I think in context here, it’s about not making software that does more work
than necessary. Aka efficient software.

Much software doesn’t need to be efficient in design, just efficient in terms
of developer time. But if power consumption is a consideration, making the
software itself more efficient in its design (if not implementation details)
becomes more of a requirement.

And, finally, there’s always people writing embedded/firmware. The line
between software and hardware is blurry.

------
bdickason
Great idea to show viability of solar setups! I’ve installed a simple solar
panel / charge controller / battery solution in a van and was surprised how
simple it is to get up and running. The tech is really reliable and is super
affordable.

~~~
theNJR
Mind sharing a few details?

~~~
aaronax
I'll share details of what I installed a few months ago in my 37 foot
sailboat. It will be more of a counterpoint to "how simple it is to get up and
running." But it enables a great many luxuries in our live-aboard lifestyle.

-4x 100 Ah LiFePo4 batteries (BattleBorn brand)

-3000 watt charger/inverter unit (Victron MultiPlus)

-3x 360 watt solar panels (LG Neon R)

-Solar charge controller (Victon SmartSolar)

-System controller (Victron ColorControl GX)

-Battery monitor (Victron BMV)

-A lot of heavy wiring, ranging from 4 gauge to 4/0 gauge. Some segments are designed to handle 400 amps (12V DC, if my system was any larger I would have gone with a 24V or 48V design to keep wire sizes reasonable). Of course it has to be stranded and tinned wire for a marine environment, so think along the lines of $5/foot.

-An assortment of bus bars and circuit breakers. 100A breaker for each battery, 400A fuse for the main connection, $120 bus bars, etc.

It was a very interesting project for me personally and really a lot of fun,
but solar can easily become a serious project as your scale beyond maybe 500
watt-hours per day. I haven't done a final cost summation of my project but
I'm sure it was over $10,000.

~~~
frosted-flakes
I've heard good stuff about Victron products, especially for boats. Is there a
particular reason you chose it?

Also, do you have a diesel or gas engine as well? I know larger sailboats
generally do; not sure about 37'. Presumably, solar and batteries would not be
sufficient to replace that with an electric motor, unless you only used it
sporadically. I can't imagine wanting to get stuck for days when it's both
cloudy and not windy.

~~~
aaronax
It seemed to be the most DIY-friendly product line with a complete selection
of things that I wanted. Plus very popular so lots of armchair experts out
there in the related Facebook groups. :)

We have a 36 HP Yanmar 3JH2E so that would be about 27,000 watts. Now say that
wanted to give up the ability to approach hull speed while motoring, maybe 1/2
of that would be OK. So call it 12,000 watts, or 1000 Ah in a 12V system to
motor for an hour. Our batteries were close enough to $1,000 for 100Ah so it
will cost you $10,000 to have enough batteries to motor for 1 hour.

The solar capacity to get you into the barest realm of running that motor or
charging a sufficient battery bank would be 3000 watts...minimum. The most I
have heard of on a 40-50 foot monohull is 2400 watts. A catamaran could get
you there, but you will give up looks and be spending $100,000+ on panels,
controllers, wiring, mounting, etc. And weight is crucial on a catamaran so
bust out more cash to make it lightweight.

All this means that realistically you will have 1 hour or less of electric
motor run time. I have only been sailing for 5 months so take this with a
grain of salt, but I usually have somewhere to get to before dark and I also
don't enjoy waiting days for favorable weather or inching along at 4 knots in
crappy wind. And I like traveling on the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway. I use
the engine to keep our speed above 6 knots. So if I was to go with electrical
propulsion I would put in a generator (probably a DC generator).

Sailing Uma has some YouTube videos about electric propulsion on their
sailboat. Their style of travel is much different than mine. They sail a lot
more!

~~~
frosted-flakes
If we're talking sailboating YouTube channels, check out Acorn to Arabella.
Two guys building a wooden sailboat from scratch. It's great fun.

------
rtkwe
Previously on Hacker News:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19407847](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19407847)

~~~
dx7tnt
I'm sure this has been posted here multiple times.

~~~
rtkwe
Oh yeah that was just the highest result on Algolia's HN search. It's
definitely one of the evergreen sites that gets posted pretty regularly.

------
z2
As the site mentions elsewhere, they have a relatively power-hungry fiber
router that needs a constant 10W, currently still running on the grid. In that
sense, the website isn't entirely solar-powered. This seems to be the state of
things going into the future--computation may get more efficient, but pushing
signals to far-away distances will always take more power!

~~~
nothal
Why are routers so energy intensive? I would think that with fiber the cost
would be that of producing light which seems to be low cost.

~~~
snazz
To add an anecdote, those Comcast modem/router combos get _really_ hot and are
constantly running their fans. They probably have some pretty poor software on
average and aren’t running power management daemons.

------
emiliobumachar
Very cool project. Will the traffic boost from HN first page throw electricity
consumption over an edge?

~~~
manmal
It seems to be a static site, so traffic surges should not lead to significant
CPU spikes. Maybe the RAM and network controllers pulling a bit more power?

~~~
anyfoo
There’s still a Webserver running, serving the site. It might not saturate the
CPU before the network is saturated, but I’d still expect a significant spike
in CPU usage.

------
KirinDave
One of the big finds for me when reading this was that it was my first
exposure to their vendor, Olimex.

------
iamleppert
You can technically run a full HTTP web server (with TCP/IP stack over SLIP)
on a PIC microcontroller, which would be far more efficient than this setup.

~~~
ip26
Would that meet the demand? How does a PIC uC serving static HTTP perform?

~~~
pmlnr
[http://tuxgraphics.org/electronics/200611/embedded-
webserver...](http://tuxgraphics.org/electronics/200611/embedded-
webserver.shtml)

------
jerkstate
They explain that they have two batteries (a Li-Ion and a Lead-Acid) but are
going to stop using the Li-Ion and buy a smaller third battery so the web
server can “shut down” rather than just using both batteries and letting the
web server run 4 days without sun.

Neat, but this seems like it’s engineered to shut down, not engineered to stay
up. I wonder if it’s on purpose.

~~~
Pryde
From
[https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about.html#offline](https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about.html#offline):

> Less than 100% reliability is essential for the sustainability of an off-
> the-grid solar system, because above a certain threshold the fossil fuel
> energy used for producing and replacing the batteries is higher than the
> fossil fuel energy saved by the solar panels.

Looks like it's a messaging thing, mostly to show that such a website can be
done. They discuss energy usage wrt environmental impact a lot on that page.

EDIT: that is to say, it's definitely engineered to shut down, rather than to
stay up

------
Jaruzel
I find it interesting that the pictures on the site are a) served as lossless
PNGs, and b) dithered.

Removing the dither, and switching to heavily compressed JPEGs, would reduce
the file size of the images by ~60% (I've just done it in Paint.NET), thus
reducing network usage per request, which in turn would shave a bit off the
power consumption.

------
meerita
I live in Barcelona, most of our days are sunny. I don't think they will have
that much outage, only in spring time (rain season) is more or less cloudy,
but in general you have really great weather.

------
tty2300
I tried something similar with a 40w panel, 9ah 12v lead acid battery and a
raspberry pi. Unfortunately the RPI would always drain the battery to empty
each night which I think trashed the lifespan of the battery. Now I just use
it to charge my phone.

~~~
jsilence
Possibly something like an ESP32 would suffice as a web server.

------
inflatableDodo
Would be interesting to see the spec required for doing the same thing, but
with 99.9% uptime.

~~~
tombert
I am wondering that too; I have a bunch of ESP32 chips that even have microSD
card support, and that peak out at around 1W of power (I think). It's
relatively easy to write an HTTP server for the ESP chips with Arduino or
uLisp, and it's also relatively easy to get 10,000 mAh batteries; I wonder if
I could get close to 99.9% uptime if I were to jury-rig something like that.

~~~
inflatableDodo
I also wonder which webstack would optimise best for power consumption. I
suspect that something like nginx with lua and redis might be a good starting
point, but that is only a very rough guess.

edit - thinking about it, I am a mile off. Will be something like compiling a
custom server and having no OS.

------
holoduke
I wonder how long a mini server powered by solar can survive. With the
assumption that the server is airsealed and the solar panel cleans itself. Are
we talking about 10 years. Or maybe 50 or more?

~~~
Tade0
There are known examples of solar panels still working at 70% of their
original power after 40 years.

All in all it's a rock that generates electricity when illuminated.

------
sengork
This reminded me of Spud, the potato powered server.

[https://totl.net/Spud/](https://totl.net/Spud/)

------
oh_sigh
Too bad it is only accessible from localhost. Otherwise you are using a bunch
of routers and other infrastructure which is not solar powered.

------
malchow
If you find this fascinating, as I do, I have a VP Eng job at a company of
ours that recently went public. Ping me.

------
punnerud
Duplicate - Posted the same +40 days ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19654446](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19654446)

~~~
detaro
individual submissions without upvotes and no comments do not count as
duplicates per
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

~~~
punnerud
If I find info/stories interesting and worth sharing I will share it on HN.
Now the point is that I should also try to make conscious decisions on when it
is most likely to get votes? (Different time zones/regions = different
preferences).

But I understand that no votes should maybe not count as dup.

~~~
detaro
The point is just that you shouldn't link empty discussions as "duplicates",
unless they got many votes but no comments (happens rarely), or something has
been submitted repeatedly (e.g. some people submit the same thing every two
days). Submissions don't get traction for whatever reasons all the time, no
need to fret over it.

