evasive_chimpanzee
@evasive_chimpanzee@lemmy.world
- Comment on Slrpnk.net outage 3 weeks ago:
Seriously, I think a big part of solarpunk ethos is combating the notion that everything has to always be available 24/7. Society pays a lot to deliver every convenience like fruit out of season from the other side of the world.
- Comment on Getting serious now 3 weeks ago:
Generally, when you want to heat the beer is after fermentation has peaked. Higher temps means faster fermentation (obviously to a point), and fermentation generates heat (positive feedback loop), which is why you need to cool beer through the initial stages of fermentation). After peak though, the temperature drops and causes a positive feedback loop downwards. This means that your beer really crawls to the finish line. Your beer might be 90% done after 3 days, but then take a couple weeks for that last 10%.
Another benefit is if you are bottling the beer, you need to know how much sugar to add. Calculators ask for the beer temperature post fermentation to determine residual CO2. With a dropping temperature, it’s hard to say what that point is, and if fermentation is just stalled, not complete, you could have residual fermentation sugar. Bumping the temperature up at the end solves both problems.
I also second adding a fan. No need for anything crazy, just something little to move the air. I used a old computer case fan wired to a random DC charger from the “miscellaneous chargers” bin at the thrift store: just make sure the voltage works with the fan.
Moisture can be an issue when you are keeping a fridge above the designed set temperature, but below ambient. I just keep a long sock filled with silica beads in mine. To recharge, I can just pop it in a low oven. They sell devices to do this (evadry is the brand name), but you might get literally 20x less silica for the convenience of a case and built in heating element.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
The last paragraph is a good catch. Someone from outside the US is not going to catch the difference between “a Wisconsin state senator” and “a senator from Wisconsin”.
- Comment on AI model collapse is not what we paid for 4 weeks ago:
It’s such an easy thing to predict happening, too. If you did it perfectly, it would, at best, maintain an unstable equilibrium and just keep the same output quality.
- Comment on Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week? 5 weeks ago:
Total War: Empire. I’ve previously played Rome 1/2, Medieval 1/2, and Atilla. For anyone who’s played other total war games, there are a couple of game mechanics that are new in Empire.
There are actual naval battles, where you put ships into a battle line, and you can board enemy ships. It’s cool but hard (for me) to control. Also many of the buildings in a territory aren’t located in the capital because it’s meant to represent colonial holdings, so you can have a sugar plantation or something outside the protection of a city, and a lot of the warfare ends up being small skirmishes sacking outlying buildings.
- Comment on Weekly Recommendations Thread: What are you playing this week? 5 weeks ago:
The new campaign missions seem a lot longer than what I remembered of the original campaigns. I like that they tutorials now give you some strategy, too.
- Comment on I fixed my air conditioner! 5 weeks ago:
One of my friends had their water hookups backwards, too, and they had no clue until I checked after they complained to me about how all their clothes were shrinking despite only ever washing on cold and hang drying. Sounds like a nice feature to have a sensor in there.
- Comment on I fixed my air conditioner! 5 weeks ago:
I’ve definitely got a soft spot for any electromechanical appliances. Computers have gotten so cheap that every appliance built now runs on them, but it’s much hard (for me, at least) to do anything about it when one stops working.
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My chest freezer stopped working, and i was able to put in a new relay for $2. The circuit diagram made it easy to diagnose with a multimeter. Oddly enough, i had to buy a 10 pack, so i likewise have a bunch of spares I’ll never need.
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My dishwasher stopped working, and the manual specifically showed which wires to connect to to test resistance of each component to see if anything needed to be replaced. It turned out that the float was gunked up, so it read as having enough water even though it didn’t.
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My fridge ice maker stopped working, and I just had to stick in a jumper wire to put it through a test cycle that immediately made it clear what was going wrong (a short), and i was able to fix it.
This is all in contrast to my clothes washer that runs on a computer, and it gives me an error message that basically just means “it’s not draining right”, and there’s like 8 potential causes, and I’ve tried to address them all, but it’s still get the error message.
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- Comment on 1 month ago:
What kind of workshop are you running? I’ve been intrigued by direct solar applications since learning about this place on this low tech mag article.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
1st thing to do is to figure out what you need to power. Solar panels are way cheaper than charging and storage. Try to decide how much on-demand power during the dark part of the day you really need. If you can do most of what you need during the sunny part of the day, you can directly power stuff with no need for batteries. It may be that for your use case, you are better off buying 4 times as many solar panels, but no batteries.
Batteries account for 80-90% of total costs and energy invested in an off-grid solar system
- Comment on 1 month ago:
Yeah, i would definitely look at LIFEPO4. People just have the name recognition of “lithium” so they don’t really understand the differences between that and lithium ion, and so from what I saw last time I checked, the price was not really different, even though LIFEPO4 lasts longer and is safer.
- Comment on It would require about 31 hectares of corn ethanol to produce the same amount of energy generate 1 month ago:
From wikipedia:
Figures compiled in a 2007 report by National Geographic[70] point to modest results for corn ethanol produced in the US: one unit of fossil-fuel energy is required to create 1.3 energy units from the resulting ethanol
Add on top of that the environmental impact and opportunity cost of the land use, and corn based ethanol becomes a non-viable solution.
- Comment on It would require about 31 hectares of corn ethanol to produce the same amount of energy generate 1 month ago:
Yeah, I dont think we’ll ever be in a place where we don’t want to be producing some combustible fuel. We can electrify a whole lot of things, but it’s hard to beat the energy density of stuff you can burn.
- Comment on Balcony solar is all the rage in Germany. Why not in the US? 1 month ago:
To summarize for anyone not reading the article:
German balcony solar panels are connected directly to their home power through a smart inverter that will kill power if the grid power goes down, so lines don’t stay live when you’d think they are dead. Those devices are designed for the voltage and frequency of the German grid, and can’t be used in America. Companies won’t makes devices if they aren’t legal to use, but one state has legalized it, so hopefully we get there soon.
The other issue is that a circuit breaker essentially monitors the amount of current going into your home’s circuit from the grid as a way of preventing your wires from being overloaded. Since the micro inverter is on the other side of the circuit breaker, you could overload the circuit without tripping the breaker, and that is why they are limited to 800 W.
- Comment on Unpopular popular opinion - fiat 2 months ago:
Reject bartering, embrace gift economy
- Comment on Starlink is now accessible across the White House campus, which was already served by fiber cable, after service was “donated”, as some cite security concerns. 3 months ago:
Plenty of federal facilities have garbage reception. I think it’s probably due to the bureaucracy involved in telecoms installing their hardware on sensitive property. The White House in particular probably has lots of thick walls/armor attenuating signals, too.
- Comment on No, renewables don't need expensive backup power on today's grids 3 months ago:
The story here doesn’t really seem to line up. Generally, for a fossil fuel based system, coal is cheap, but slow to start (nuclear is similar in that regard), so it is used to generate the base level of electricity needed. When demand starts to go up, generation is added by natural gas plants that can start and stop more easily. Whether natural gas is cheap or not, the fact that these plants aren’t always on means that the energy they produce will cost more.
Solar/wind are predictable enough that they can be used to reduce the baseline demand, supplied by coal. Peak demands still end up getting addressed by natural gas.
If renewables were putting the expensive natural gas generation out of business, we’d see those plants closing while coal stays level, but we see coal going down and natural gas going up.
Using the Texas example from the article, you can see their coal plants closing or converting to gas while more gas plants open. …wikipedia.org/…/List_of_power_stations_in_Texas
- Comment on YSK: Gas stoves cause cancer 3 months ago:
Yeah, I want one of those, too. I think it fits different needs, though. Stove vs grill.
- Comment on YSK: Gas stoves cause cancer 3 months ago:
I think there are some municipalities with that in code, but it’s definitely not universal in the US.
codes.iccsafe.org/…/chapter-5-chimneys-and-vents
I live in a house with a gas stove that vents into my kitchen.
I definitely hear you about the coffee roasting. I assumed when they said that it smokes that it would just be like thin wisps, and I definitely smoked out my house. I’m not going to do it inside again.
- Comment on YSK: Gas stoves cause cancer 3 months ago:
For a lot of these large scale, epidemiological findings, it’s important to remember that the effects are small enough that you pick them up on a population level over a lifetime. I’d say that if you can, find a way to properly vent your stove outside if you are doing some home improvement. If you are replacing your stove, consider induction instead, and in the meantime, having an air purifier is good. Opening a window is probably also good. Other than that, I wouldn’t be super alarmed. Obviously, if you have little kids or something, you might have a lower tolerance for potential pollution, but it’s good to think about these things in context. Alcohol causes cancer, but everyone still drinks.
- Comment on YSK: Gas stoves cause cancer 3 months ago:
I think the people who claim gas stoves are best likely grew up either not cooking much, or had a decent gas stove, so their first exposure to an electric stove was super cheap, crappy electric coil stoves in student housing, or wherever they first lived as a young adult. Then when they were able to afford better, they got a better gas stove.
I have a really crappy gas stove, and it makes me yearn for the cheap electric coil stoves of my youth.
People say that gas stoves are more powerful and responsive, when the truth is that more powerful stoves are more powerful, and “responsiveness” is a fake concern. My crappy gas stove takes forever to get a pot of water boiling, especially compared to coil stoves. Yeah, you can turn a gas stove to 100% quickly, but that’s only better if it can put out more power. It won’t heat up any faster than an electric stove if the electric stove takes double the time, but also has double the power. There’s also not many cases where “time to maximum heat” is what you care about, I can’t think of any.
Responsiveness the other way (hot to cool) doesn’t matter when you have a high thermal mass in the pan (or the pan itself has high mass), it only matters when the pan and contents are light, in which case, you just take the pan off the heat.
- Comment on YSK: Gas stoves cause cancer 3 months ago:
I’ve never seen a gas stove with temp control. I’m not even sure how that would work. Controlling the amount of gas, sure, but not the temperature. In an induction stove, you can set it to 150 degrees, and it will hold that.
- Comment on YSK: Gas stoves cause cancer 3 months ago:
Or they have a fan that just redirects the exhaust into the house
- Comment on YSK: Gas stoves cause cancer 3 months ago:
A $50 dual burner camp stove solves that (or even cheaper, a $12 single burner backpacking stove if you have less space).
- Comment on YSK: Gas stoves cause cancer 3 months ago:
Never seen something like this?
It’s a pain in the butt cause all it does is suck up any smoke and direct it towards your smoke detector.
- Comment on YSK: Gas stoves cause cancer 3 months ago:
Yeah, a coleman (or equivalent) 2 burner camp stove combined with the adapter to use a full size propane tank is super handy. Combine it with a cast iron griddle, and you can functionally replicate a Blackstone for much much cheaper. It’s also way better for high heat cooking if you don’t have a good stove fan that actually vents outside.
Also, sometimes when power goes out, gas does too (it’s still a grid that can fail).
- Comment on Japan cabinet approves 'emergency' urban bear shootings 3 months ago:
They have brown bears on Hokkaido and black bears on the other islands.
- Comment on Wall oven selection 4 months ago:
Not to try to oversell you or anything, but I wouldn’t write out ovens that have convection capability (often marketed these days as airfry). They cook faster, with more even temperature, and it’s literally just a fan to blow air around. It shouldn’t really have much effect on the price. I think it should theoretically make the temperature oscillation much lower, too. Personally, my dumb oven swings by like plus and minus 50 degrees F with a 25 degree offset. So if I want 350, it will bounce from 275 to 375. Newer, smarter ovens can have better control methods to maintain temp.
If your current oven heating element melted itself, I would suspect that there’s something wrong with the thermostat, so there may be additional parts that need replacing.
- Comment on Wall oven selection 4 months ago:
Sounds like a nickel sulfide inclusion.
- Comment on Solar farms are booming in the US and putting thousands of hungry sheep to work 5 months ago:
For ultimate effect, let’s figure out how to turn the ground under solar panels into peatlands.
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