Termyn8or
Posts: 18681
Joined: 11/12/2005 Status: offline
|
FR Ken, that was a big oops. Draw 18 watts for an hour you have consumed 18 watt hours. Anyway, for a minimalist existence I think a deep freeze would come in handy. If you pedal your Gilliganmobile into town and get a side of beef, or if you prefer go slay a moose or something, you'll need a way to store it. Not so bad in the winter, but most places do have a "summer". (OK, I'm northernhemispherocentic, shoot me) It's probably not easy to find a gas deepfreeze. That would be nice because all you would need is heat, and maybe enough electricity to run a small fan in it. However the majority of them are electric. Now the older ones pull more current, but do not run as long while the newer one pull les but run longer. Say an older one runs 25% of the time and pulls 7 amps. A newer one may only pull 4 amps but will run maybe 40% of the time. Which is more suited depends on your power source. The newer one will save a few watt hours of course, but it's not a drastic saving. Now this really doesn't matter much if you really like smoked and salt cured meat. That's how they did it in the old days. If you want some eletronic goodies, take my laptop for instance. A 17" wide screen (full keyboard too) and via the internet you can watch a whole lot of media. It needs 19 volts to charge. Of course that screws me in a car as I would have to build a DC to DC convertor, but with solar it's just a matter of a couple more cells. For good sound there is the option of headphones but there is another point. Of course my stereozilla causes a brownout on the eastern seaboard, but it doesn't have to be that way. To get twice as loud you need ten times the power. Bad for folks like me who are trying to crack the foundation of the house, but the reverse effect of this logarythmic response can be good for the watt pincher. With decent speakers, 3 watts per channel might be enough. In fact you would be surprised at just how loud 1 watt per channel is. For many years almost evey car stereo out there was actually about 2¾ watts per channel, with the "high power" units delivering 8.9 watts per channel into 8 ohms. Forget what the box says, as well as the salesman. Those are the numbers. Everything almost doubles when run into 4 ohms. Then a broadband modem and router are not going to run you more than 30 watts I would say. However you're not really off the grid if you have a landline phone (DSL/ASDL) or cable. That leaves satellite/cell. Last time I heard anything about it, it was about fifty bucks a month. I'm sure it's less now, but my buddy had it a few years ago. The tranciever plugged into his laptop and it was purported to work just about anywhere. However it must use cell towers because I just can't see a satellite uplink running off a PCMCIA slot. I could be wrong though because they come up with new things all the time. I remember this thing they built for overweight people. It was an exercycle connected to a generator which ran a TV. Want to watch TV ? Pedal ! Something like that might be worth a shot. Between you and my electric bill, I'm thinking just how far can this go ? Maybe someone should just start a thread called "Beyond Gilligan's Island". T^T
< Message edited by Termyn8or -- 5/9/2011 2:29:13 PM >
|