How I Gave Up Alternating Current

by ropiku • 11 years ago

122 137 11 years ago

javery• 11 years ago

I am curious about the custom clothes made in China, how much are they and how often does he have to buy them to never have to do laundry.

athenot• 11 years ago

I guess the author is also comfortable with wearing new clothes without washing them. Personally, I wash most clothes before wearing them (except for outerwear).

Also, the author clearly does not have a baby—or keeps his/her baby naked at all times… :)

fnordfnordfnord6• 11 years ago

You can get nearly anything custom tailored for cheap. If you ever go to Hong Kong, walk down Nathan Road. You'll be pitched to by about a hundred or more Bangladeshi immigrants to come and have a fitted suit and some shirts made. They'll measure you, you give them a day, then come in for a second fitting, pick your new duds up the third day. The price will be comparable to Marshall's or TJ Maxx or deeply discounted (like clearance priced) US retail, if you don't negotiate hard. If you're a good negotiator, you can do much better. Nathan Rd. in Hong Kong is the most well known; there is a shop named Sam's that is world famous, but the prices are much higher. Beijing also has a similar area or two where the quality is the same and the prices are even cheaper, one of them is near the pearl market. I've never been to Shanghai, but I'd bet anything they have the same kind of thing. The ones in Beijing are like any other Beijing market, hundreds of independent vendors in one complex. The tailors in HK are usually in little store-fronts adjacent to Nathan Rd. If you know your measurements, you can send them to one of these shops and they will mail you the clothes, assuming you can find a trustworthy one and not a scammer.

I had a wool suit made and it fits me well enough. I've never had a problem finding suits that would fit me off the rack though, so it's mostly a novelty. I also wasn't completely satisfied with the way the trousers fit, but I didn't have time to have them re-made. They are very well-constructed and durable though, and have lasted several years now. The best thing was the shirts, I bought a dozen at about $13 USD each, IIRC. I have long arms and I can rarely find shirts off the racks that have correct-length sleeves and aren't too big everywhere else. These shirts fit well, and are comfortable to wear, and look good. I've worn them a fair amount and they've lasted a few years. The only problem is that the buttons were ruined by the dry cleaners on a couple of the shirts. The buttons were apparently cheap, I chose them myself; but I apparently can't look at a button and judge whether it can withstand dry cleaning/pressing. This happens to some of my store-bought shirts too. I might order another dozen of these shirts, because they were cheaper and much better than anything I've ever bought retail. That is if I get brave enough to do an internet transaction since I have no plans to go to HK any time soon.

ForHackernews• 11 years ago

Is this a parody?

m_myers• 11 years ago

I got to the part about buying new clothes instead of washing before I wondered the same thing.

placeybordeaux• 11 years ago

First, I never cook. I am all for self reliance but repeating the same labor over and over for the sake of existence is the realm of robots.
I have not done laundry in years.

One can only hope.

munificent2• 11 years ago

I am all for self reliance but repeating the same labor over and over for the sake of existence is the realm of robots.

Don't forget the part where he describes his gaming PC for playing Kerbal Space Program and LoL in detail after that.

I also like how he says:

"My home is a place of peace. I don’t want to live with red hot heating elements and razor sharp knives. That sounds like a torture chamber."

But then seems to not find anything risky about having bare wires attached to a fully-charged car battery on his desk.

Killswitch• 11 years ago

Rob is the creator of Soylent and I like his enthusiasm of simplifying our diets, but this takes it to a whole new level of crazy.

seren• 11 years ago

This is from the founder of Soylent[0], so likely not.

While some ideas are delusional, it is refreshing to see someone taking nothing for granted.

I also suspect the timing of the post is there only to generate discussion at the time of Soylent 2.0 release. So it is basically a link bait trying to push people hot buttons. It works superbly.

Moreover, beyond Soylent, Rob's next startup is probably somewhere in there.

[0] https://www.soylent.com/

colinbartlett• 11 years ago

Okay that explains a lot, thank you.

The article mentioned Soylent 2.0 several times so I searched and found hours-old news articles about it, and become very skeptical that this whole thing wasn't just a big ad for Soylent 2.0.

munificent2• 11 years ago

I can only assume it's a work of sublime satire. Consider: "As I mature I find myself optimizing for peace instead of posturing, conservation over consumption. Opulence in asceticism."

In two short sentences, the author describes himself as:

* Mature

* Ecologically sensitive

* Peaceful

* Humble (!)

* Opulent

* Ascetic (!!)

I don't think I've seen a more brilliantly delineated, comically absurd character since A Confederacy of Dunces.

justinph• 11 years ago

Interesting, but it seems like a lot of the lifestyle choices are just pushing the carbon/climate impact to someone else where the author doesn't have to think about it.

Getting custom clothes made in china and shipped frequently is certainly far less environmentally friendly than simply re-using the clothes you already have.

Taking an uber still burns gasoline. A bike would be better.

fezz2• 11 years ago

Agreed on the shifting the consumption down the line. However, the primary energy advantage of Uber-like car services is that it reduces the high cost of energy to produce a car by reducing the pool of cars through optimizing their use (meaning, instead of a majority of cars sitting around doing nothing, using a pool of cars working most of the time would mean fewer cars needed overall). If all cars end up being full time service vehicles (through self driving?), one car would hopefully be able to service 20 people and replace all those cars. If the carbon foot print of gas/electric consumption is 12% of a car's total (the rest going to manufacture), then moving to a full shared service model would be a huge gain (and loss of the auto industry)

Jeema101• 11 years ago

I don't know that it's even clear that using Uber-like services reduces carbon footprint. I mean wouldn't a car wear out a lot faster if 20 people were using it as opposed to 1? Sure, some components in a car are mileage independent, but generally not the most critical ones like the engine and transmission...

david-given5• 11 years ago

Hmm.

A washing machine consumes about 100Wh == 360kJ for a load (ref: http://www.rpc.com.au/information/faq/power-consumption/wash...).

The Emma Mearsk, one of the largest container ships around, uses 13 tonnes of fuel an hour to transport 18000 containers, over a distance of (say) 20000 kilometres, which is 1kg of fuel to transport one container 45km (according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport...), or 450kg for the whole distance.

A 7.5kg washing machine load occupies about 0.00025 of a container, so the fuel requirement to transport that washing machine load is 0.1kg.

The ship's engines use 0.163kg of fuel to generate one kWh, so the energy consumption for just the transport of our washing machine load is 0.6kWh, or 2200kJ.

360kJ of USA residential electricity will cost about $0.015. (Pulled randomly from: http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm...)

0.16kg of heavy fuel oil in Singapore will cost $0.05. (From: http://shipandbunker.com/prices/apac/sea/sg-sin-singapore#IF...)

This is, of course, horribly simplified --- e.g. I'm not calculating the cost of washing water, or transport from the container port to the owner's house --- it does at least show that big ship shipping is really, really cheap. While I still think the original author is wrong, they are at least plausibly wrong.

dragontamer6• 11 years ago

Shipping is always surprisingly cheap.

But manufacturing new clothes every time you need new clothes? In China, land of the "who cares about the EPA" coal-laden environmental almost-slave-labor disaster?

Built from synthetics (which are Petroleum-derived) ?

To add insult to injury, he talks about injuries / deaths from HEPPA-regulated American Power Plants without giving a damn about the suicide nets placed outside of Chinese Sweatshops that builds his clothes because he's too lazy to wash them.

maxerickson2• 11 years ago

360 KJ is 0.1 KW-h. So it would be 1.5 cents, not 15.

rtkwe2• 11 years ago

This does assume that the custom made clothes are being slow shipped from China on a cargo boat instead of being shipped via air. Running clothes single use with a 2-3 week lead time for ocean freight sounds a bit tricky.

megalodon• 11 years ago

I fail to see how this makes the article plausible.

sbarron• 11 years ago

The author can still do laundry and skip the washing machine. Hand wash, use the laundry water to flush the toilet, line dry.

enkiv2• 11 years ago

I don't see why he doesn't just stop bathing and stop changing his clothes altogether, if this is his goal. (After all, this is the same guy who drank a potent antibiotic to keep himself from defecating in order to save water; that wouldn't be the craziest thing he's done, and it would make more sense than buying new clothes every day.)

zekevermillion• 11 years ago

Man, I aspire to that level of efficiency though probably could not reach it since I enjoy cooking and eating dead meat too much. I do think there are huge benefits to simplifying life, and relying less on all these time-consuming habits domesticated humans have invented. Even if we can easily afford to pay for big box groceries, and coal power, not relying on these things might free up a lot of mental space I would imagine.

mizzao• 11 years ago

Lead-acid batteries can't be used effectively for energy storage, especially not vanilla car batteries that are optimized for cranking amps but will only last a few cycles of charging and discharging.

Generally, lead-acid batteries will sulfate at low levels of charge, which is a hard-to-reverse reaction.

HNaTTY• 11 years ago

Deep cycle lead-acid batteries are still the go-to battery for off-gridders. They're recyclable and fairly affordable for the amount of energy storage.

He's not using a high-CCA battery, you can see the model of the battery behind the window in the picture.

I hope this situation changes in 2016 because I'm tired of adding distilled water.

joshdance• 11 years ago

I gave up the article at the "I never cook" line.

afandian• 11 years ago

It's a shame. You missed out on "I have not done laundry in years".

Glide• 11 years ago

And that's where I stopped.

I can appreciate people who can run low powered devices. But new clothes? Just run a washer and hang your clothes if you're in a dry climate. Then you wouldn't even need to buy new clothes because you don't have a machine that slowly turns clothes into lint.

nickhalfasleep• 11 years ago

He didn't give up AC, unless he has a magical perpetual-computing-motion EC2 node. This is feel good for a local minima.

pavel_lishin• 11 years ago

I have not done laundry in years. I get my clothing custom made in China for prices you would not believe and have new ones regularly shipped to me. Shipping is a problem. I wish container ships had nuclear engines but it’s still much more efficient and convenient than retail. Thanks to synthetic fabrics it takes less water to make my clothes than it would to wash them

I'd like someone to run some more numbers on that. He already addresses the shipping costs, but what about manufacturing as well? I'm not entirely sure I buy that the entire manufacturing process takes less water than laundry, unless he's wearing the same clothes for a very long time before donating them.

fezz2• 11 years ago

And in the big picture, the clothes have to get washed again so he's simply shifting the energy consumption onto the next users.

danielweber2• 11 years ago

It's crazy. If you were really committed to not using AC, you could still put some bleach + detergent + cold water in a basin with your clothes to manually agitate, and then air dry.

mortenjorck2• 11 years ago

You can do even better than that. For $129, you can get a pedal-powered mini washing machine: http://www.gizmag.com/yirego-drumi-foot-powered-washer/37586...

AnkhMorporkian• 11 years ago

A better headline would be "How I push all my carbon footprint to other people to make myself feel good."

danielweber2• 11 years ago

And by putting it in a place where he can't see it, he has no idea how much environmental damage he's doing.

Restaurants don't give a shit about reducing their carbon footprint. And those Chinese clothing manufacturers probably aren't even constrained by local laws about what they dump into the air and soil in making all his new clothes.

jhildings2• 11 years ago

First, I never cook. I am all for self reliance but repeating the same labor over and over for the sake of existence is the realm of robots.

Well then he does cooking wrong, he could also try to improve himself but in the craft in itself but also add more creativity to it

mcdougle• 11 years ago

He's also the creator/founder of Soylent, and even if he were a good cook, he'd likely continue to live off of his creation if only to say "look, I do this!" which will probably get more people to buy his product.

dragontamer6• 11 years ago

Ah, the inventor of Soylent.

Makes sense now. It doesn't really speak well for Soylent when his life choices are "Lets go eat out all the damn time" however.

jbrooksuk• 11 years ago

I think it makes more sense when you know that Rob is the creator of Soylent.

jhildings2• 11 years ago

I see, and as mentioned in others comments it's probably more marketing than anything else. But the argument "doing X is for robots" is quite flawed when X can be improved in a lot of ways

tedks4• 11 years ago

Who the fuck wants to do that? Here are 10 things I could be doing besides slaving over a stove (the seventh might surprise you):

1. Reading hacker news

2. Reading reddit

3. Engaging with people engaging with my brand on Twitter

4. Reviewing my productized consultancy analytics

5. Reviewing my startup numbers and analytics

6. Emailing brand leaders to gauge interest in new startup ideas

7. Posting on hacker news

8. Writing blog posts about the freedom provided from abandoning things like laundry, cooking, cleaning, driving, and other mundane, bullshit tasks

9. Meditating, which I do for 15 minutes daily to center myself spiritually so that I can growth hack better. Growth hacking begins with personal growth.

10. Appreciating the beautiful life I've cultivated for myself, surrounded by dynamic people all focusing on the same beautiful goal as myself.

Cooking is boring and takes way too much skill to do right. Moreover, it is objectively unfun and isn't related to startups, technology, or growth hacking in any way. Why would I waste time learning to cook when I could be learning how to write single-page web apps in Haskell with the latest framework? Do you even test your code?

jbondeson• 11 years ago

It's sad that I had to get to bullet point 9 before I could tell if this was satire...

cafard• 11 years ago

Objectively unfun?

a. I do test my code, and I do taste my cooking.

b. I can't say much about growth hacking, but I haven't noticed that cooking gets in the way of appreciating life, however undynamic some of my acquaintances may be.

jkot• 11 years ago

Power generation produces 32% of all greenhouse gases

Water is also greenhouse gas...

Anyway nice island setup, for my taste it is too small. I would add a few square meters and perhaps a generator for doing laundry.

And good luck with your diet.

mchanson• 11 years ago

I think this is the best thing I've ever read from Hacker News. My favorite is his eviscerating the kitchen as a terrible place.

alextgordon• 11 years ago

Reminds me of Shabbat lamps. Since observant Jews are forbidden from using electricity ("starting fires") on Saturdays, what they do is turn on the lamp on Friday and just keep it on the entire time.

That way they're not using any electricity.

icebraining4• 11 years ago

Lamps? There are full ovens with a Shabbat mode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbath_mode#Oven

"the standard six- or twelve-hour automatic shutoff is overridden"

sp3323• 11 years ago

It isn't about using or saving electricity. It's about not doing work. I'm a Protestant Christian and I know that.

mynameisvlad• 11 years ago

That's not true at all. The translation is "Ye shall kindle no fire throughout your habitations upon the sabbath day." Literally, you cannot light fires (which many have extended to electricity use). Nothing about work involved at all.

ars2• 11 years ago

Since observant Jews are forbidden from using electricity

That is not true. They are forbidden from changing electricity. i.e. turning something on or off.

The Sadducees believed like you, that it was forbidden for the fire to be on, but the oral Torah is very clear that only starting (or extinguishing) a fire is prohibited.

http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/484251/jewish/...

And only Jewish humans are prohibited from turning on the fire, machines (timers, etc) are allowed to. So are non-Jews.

luso_brazilian• 11 years ago

The author seems to be conflating two different things in his choice of lifestyle under the same umbrella, one being energy conservation and the other a form of secular asceticism with the purpose of saving time and reducing life complexity.

Some of his more controversial choices (based on the comments in this article) reflect more the later than the former.

It is possible both to prepare (delicious) meals using barely no electricity (and even without burning any fuel), to do the laundry by hand using nothing but water and soap and to dry it at the clothesline. The drawback is that those are very time consuming tasks.

The choice to eat only Soylent and to buy cheap clothes for single use seem to be motivated more by the desire to save time than by the idea of conserving energy.

Both are worthy goals, to save time and energy but IMO it is very important to know how to strike a balance between efficiency and enjoyment. Otherwise we become the very robots we are trying not to be.

ChuckMcM• 11 years ago

I was thinking the same things. When camping we use a simple water agitator to wash clothes, and we can bake bread in the noon day sun and a solar oven. But it does take time, but if that is how you choose to spend it (as we do while camping) then its great.

wklauss2• 11 years ago

I have long wanted to fully switch to DC in my life and would love to see common appliances designed for a DC world. It's a shame that the opportunity to discuss this is lost in this post because of the pedantic tone of the author.

Phrases like "I think it was a bit presumptuous for the architect to assume I wanted a kitchen with my apartment and make me pay for it" or "I don’t want to live with red hot heating elements and razor sharp knives. That sounds like a torture chamber" are ridiculous, even if you really try hard to see them as an attempt of making a joke. The continuous references about how many books he has and reads also threw me off.

The best part, so far, is the first Discus comment at the bottom.

icebraining4• 11 years ago

Joey Hess seems to live a much saner life, while also living on battery (and solar, I assume): https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/notes_for_a_caretaker/

jefurii2• 11 years ago

joeyh++ And with a much better attitude too. Living off the grid certainly helped him come up with some innovative ways to use Git (e.g. git-annex).

teamonkey• 11 years ago

Just what practical options are currently available? With roof-mounted solar panels becoming commonplace (at least where I live) it seems like 12V DC is a practical target, but it irks me that it gets converted to AC before being reconverted back to DC by a wall wart a few meters away.

ars2• 11 years ago

80V DC might work, but 12V DC means the wires would be far too thick to be practical.

In the past you needed AC for the ability to have transformers. These days you can do that in other ways. But you still need a high voltage, meaning you still need that wall wart.

wklauss2• 11 years ago

That's the problem, there are not many (some fridges designed to be operated from car plugs, camping gear, things like that) and often is just an appliance that has a converter inside, so it is as inefficient as you'd expect. Not sure if there's a way to design stoves, fridges, ovens and washing machines powerful enough just using DC, though.

marcosdumay• 11 years ago

Well, 12V is really wasteful. Placing an inverter in the loop is probably cheaper and more efficient than routing 12V electricity though one's house.

fnordfnordfnord6• 11 years ago

I have long wanted to fully switch to DC in my life and would love to see common appliances designed for a DC world.

Modern HE washers and dryers along with many other appliances already are in some sense. They have their own high efficiency power conversion built in to drive the motors at variable speeds. Powering current-gen stuff requires two redundant conversion steps, but the conversions don't lose too much.

mrbig4545• 11 years ago

sorry, but I can't take someone who doesn't cook because soylent is more efficient seriously.

edit: ah, he's the creator of soylent. even less reason to take his seriously. humans are not supposed to live off a drink. I've always assumed it was a joke product, but I'm begining to realise that unfortunately it's not.

Still, he can drink his algea, and I'll keep eating what I eat. Each to their own

condescendence• 11 years ago

As another user hinted at, this article is completely back-asswards.

I have not done laundry in years. I get my clothing custom made in China for prices you would not believe and have new ones regularly shipped to me. Shipping is a problem. I wish container ships had nuclear engines but it’s still much more efficient and convenient than retail. Thanks to synthetic fabrics it takes less water to make my clothes than it would to wash them
Thanks to synthetic fabrics it takes less water to make my clothes than it would to wash them
Thanks to synthetic fabrics it takes less water to make my clothes than it would to wash them

I had to double post this again just to make sure everyone read that line correctly. What argument are you even trying to make anymore? You use less water? Weren't we just talking about energy? What hipster madness is this? How about the amount of coal that is being burned to make your 'custom' clothes. I am 100% sure that the process of getting water and electricity to your house is less environment killing than getting new things made from factories that have zero regulations, and fuck everything let's just get some money in my pocket strategies.

You haven't done anything but say "okay let's see my most carbon producing areas are," and your only solutions are "let's see if someone else can help me reduce my carbon by taking the responsibility off of my own shoulders"

This was absolutely craptastic.

Demiurge3• 11 years ago

I stopped at

I utilize soylent only at home and go out to eat when craving company or flavor.

right after we found out kitchens are nasty and wasteful. Of course, out of sight, out of mind?

HeyLaughingBoy2• 11 years ago

I can spend the money I saved from groceries and take out to buy a friend lunch or dinner

Or you could learn to cook and make a friend a probably better tasting lunch or dinner at substantially lower cost.

nzp2• 11 years ago

His point I think is that collective cooking/eating is more efficient. I don't have the numbers, but it makes sense.

ovulator• 11 years ago

When I got to the washing part (I skipped over the Soylent part because I assumed it was just a paid advertisement), I expected him to talk about using a washing board or something.

No, I just buy new clothes. So instead of using a little energy for a spin cycle, I have factories in China spew coal, then have shipping freights (some of the worst environmental offenders) bring it half way across the world for me so I can wear it once, then presumably add it to the land fill.

xienze2• 11 years ago

then presumably add it to the land fill.

Oh no, he donates his single use clothes. That gives him yet another thing to feel superior about.

stephengillie• 11 years ago

Not to mention that the crews of most freight cargo boats aren't much more than slave labor.

shawabawa32• 11 years ago

then presumably add it to the land fill.

He said he donates it, so presumably some charity ends up footing the bill for his laundry

throwaway8954• 11 years ago

If he lives in LA he should use good white linen clothes, wash them with a bit of water after every use and whiten / disinfect these with sunlight.

These would look much better than cheap synthetic staff, would not use (child?) slave labor (drones?) in China, would not use resources to make/maintain drones in China, no need to ship these, would not result in the laundry cycle in the charity, etc...

uiri• 11 years ago

(I skipped over the Soylent part because I assumed it was just a paid advertisement)

This is authored by the founder of Soylent. Slightly different than a paid advertisement but most likely similar content

xienze2• 11 years ago

You haven't done anything but say "okay let's see my most carbon producing areas are," and your only solutions are "let's see if someone else can help me reduce my carbon by taking the responsibility off of my own shoulders"

Well, in a sense I can understand how someone can think this way. The entire notion of reducing a person/company's carbon footprint is based around shifting the dirty work somewhere else. Globally, we impose carbon caps on developed nations and let China do whatever it wants. Ergo, production shifts to China. The pollution is still occurring, but hey, at least _we're_ not doing it. On a smaller scale there's this silliness around buying "offset credits", which smells of a modern day religious indulgence-purchase scheme.

pje• 11 years ago

Not to mention this:

I cannot in good conscience force a fellow soul through this gauntlet [of shopping at an American grocery store]

Followed up by this:

I get my clothing custom made in China for prices you would not believe and have new ones regularly shipped to me.

Unless this custom Chinese clothing is made by robots and shipped to LA via zero-emission SolarDrones, I'm calling bullshit on your conscience.

qrendel• 11 years ago

Not to mention those synthetic fabrics are a direct cause of microfiber pollution, so using them over something biodegradable, like ordinary cotton, is pretty much the opposite of environmentally friendly: http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2014/oct/27/...

kenOfYugen• 11 years ago

It appears that nootropics turn software engineers into narrow minded robots ;)

MurMan• 11 years ago

This guy is going to be really sad when he learns that the dc-dc converters in most of his devices are actually dc-ac-dc converters. Evil ac must be purged.

Azew• 11 years ago

Even in less temperate locales I wonder if we really need to define our environment to within single degree Fahrenheit.

Hey, sure, tell that to everyone in the northern states, no need for heat right? I mean when it's 10°F outside you can just shut the windows and be nice and warm, right?

dalke2• 11 years ago

The Passivhaus method was influenced by the Saskatchewan Conservation house project. Quoting from http://esask.uregina.ca/entry/energy-efficient_houses.html :

It had no furnace; instead, the house was heated with a solar heating system designed specifically for Saskatchewan’s extreme Climate.

Demiurge3• 11 years ago

I was hoping this another article about how a building was switched from AC to lower voltage DC.

Stratoscope• 11 years ago

I can feel the searing pain and loss of consciousness from when I was electrocuted by exposed house wiring as a boy.

Since he is dead, was this article ghost-written?

dragontamer6• 11 years ago

So he eats out all the time to "save money" because he's too lazy to learn how to cook himself. He buys new clothes all the time because washing old clothes is wasteful.

How is this getting upvoted at all?

54mf• 11 years ago

"For storage a $65 lead acid automobile battery does the trick. It’s 12V so can be charged directly from the solar panel, and holds 420Wh, way more than I use in a day. That’s $0.15 / Wh so I don’t see why everyone is so excited about Tesla charging $0.43 / Wh for the Powerwall, sans inverter and installation."

I'm not smart enough to take this apart, but my gut tells me the best-in-class engineers and (tens/hundreds of?) millions of dollars in R&D at Tesla aren't going to be outwitted by Mr. I'm-Repulsed-By-The-Idea-Of-Kitchens. Anyone want to take a swing?

shawabawa32• 11 years ago

It's summed up nicely here:

http://www.powertechsystems.eu/en/technics/lithium-ion-vs-le...

Basically, lead acid have much lower lifespans, and also degrade very quickly if discharged below 50%. So straight off you have to double the size of your battery to not massively shorten the lifespan, so his costs are already closer to $0.30/Wh.

Also, lead acid batteries are larger/heavier per Wh, and even if you never discharge below 50% last less than half the time of Lithium batteries

soneil• 11 years ago

Car batteries simply aren't designed for deep-discharge. It actually damages (sulphates) them. They're designed to provide thousands of cycles at 2-5% discharge. Using them for deep discharge, you're likely to see them increasingly unusable (or at least, holding nowhere near the designed charge) after 30-150 cycles.

So that 420Wh battery is most likely designed to actually provide about 21Wh. Past that it's a good assumption it's lifespan is being degraded faster than design.

To match a 7kW powerwall with these figures, he'd need roughly 350 such batteries (nearly $23k) to stay within a 2-5% discharge cycle.

So his setup may be capable of delivering 420Wh cheap. Or it may be capable of lasting 1-2000 cycles. But not both.

(Deep-discharge SLA are available. They're usually marketed as marine batteries rather than car batteries. They'll survive such usage better - a couple of years, rather than a couple of months in this scenario. But still not tesla's claimed 5000 cycles.)

rtkwe2• 11 years ago

That battery has very poor deep cycle and recharging characteristics. Standard lead acid car batteries don't like being discharged below ~50% like others have pointed out. Because of this the battery is going to lose most of it's capacity quickly and need to be replaced long before practically any other choice, there are lead acid batteries called deep-cycle that are designed to be drained and recharged.

Like most things you can slap together something that works on the surface much cheaper in initial costs than the commercial equivalent.

sandworm101• 11 years ago

Reading this article I half expected the author to forgo vaccines to reduce his water consumption.

This is a hypocritical lifestyle through which the author outsources energy consumption so that he can live a falsely monastic life. A true monk reduces life to essentials but by doing so ends up performing much more daily work. They don't stand around all day enjoying how much less effort it takes to live the simple life. They take on the responsibility of meeting their own needs, usually through physical effort or toil, rather than lay those tasks on others.

This guy is a tourist spouting off about his low-energy hotel while sitting in the first class cabin of a 747. He's not flying the plane. HIS ticket is paid for with eco-bitcoins. We all are the ones killing the planet with our wasteful battery-powered watches.

PS: I hope he has a fuse or two somewhere on that rig. Electrons in combination with lead blocks swimming in acid are not your friends. But maybe he has outsourced that risk via renter's insurance.

lotsofcows• 11 years ago

This reminds me of Thoreau's Walden: If I pass off most of my needs to others, I need very little. Now, where's my high horse?

davis_m• 11 years ago

Even in less temperate locales I wonder if we really need to define our environment to within single degree Fahrenheit. I am not so controlling, but I do want to take back the rooftops from those horrible HVAC units.

I understand that the temperature is usually pretty nice in LA, but here in Iowa temperature control isn't an issue of defining our environment to within a single degree Fahrenheit, it is an issue of defining out environment into a livable temperature. Heck, most people I know have up to a ten degree delta between what they keep their home at in summer vs. winter.

However, without temperature control at all in Iowa, people would die. Sub-zero temperatures in the winter and above 100 degree heat in the summer are not mild inconveniences.

GBond• 11 years ago

Can't tell if satire or not.

fnordfnordfnord6• 11 years ago

Is this for serious? It reads almost like a troll post.

I was electrocuted by exposed house wiring as a boy.

No, he was shocked. Electrocution means death.

I use a butane stove. It is much cheaper and more energy efficient than a Keurig

I doubt that small parcels of butane are cheaper than any electric coffee maker. If he wants to optimize this he needs to look at a rocket stove and a high efficiency pot. http://www.wired.com/2014/07/a-jet-engineer-designs-a-saucep...

First, I never cook.

Good for him, I guess. That's not a reasonable solution for most people though.

Next, I switched from beer to red wine.

I'm a little surprised that he doesn't make his own. It's very easy and cheap to make red wine.

most of them are Priuses which use DC motors so I’m good there

No, they don't, and I'm starting to think he's got a fixation on the names of things.

I get my clothing custom made in China for prices you would not believe and have new ones regularly shipped to me.

Okay, this is not about reducing waste anymore, there are few things more wasteful than the global clothing/fashion supply chain. I'd bet he gives his used clothing to a thrift... yup. Those clothes get, wait for it, laundered, and then probably baled up and shipped to Africa or Haiti destroying local clothing manufacturing in those areas.

My apartment came with a Nest but I removed it

He could have just switched it off.

Traffic and trash and pollution will evaporate,

Nope, just displaced to Asia. Okay, I'm done with Rhinehart's post now, and I can see that most everyone else is as well.

tcpekin• 11 years ago

I have not set foot in a grocery store in years. Nevermore will I bumble through endless confusing aisles like a pack-donkey searching for feed while the smell of rotting flesh fills my nostrils and fluorescent lights sear my eyeballs and sappy love songs torture my ears. Grocery shopping is a multisensory living nightmare. There are services that will make someone else do it for me but I cannot in good conscience force a fellow soul through this gauntlet.
I buy my staple food online like a civilized person.

I'm not sure if going to the grocery store could ever be described as a multisensory living nightmare.

I think it was a bit presumptuous for the architect to assume I wanted a kitchen with my apartment and make me pay for it. My home is a place of peace. I don’t want to live with red hot heating elements and razor sharp knives. That sounds like a torture chamber. However, it’s not a total loss. I was able to use the cabinets to store part of my book collection.

Or a kitchen as a torture chamber. This guy seems kinda nutty.

CameronBanga2• 11 years ago

Fair confident this is all satire. Read his post on dating. Same vein of humor, but more obviously a joke.

http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1005

mortenjorck2• 11 years ago

Oh my goodness. I re-read the AC current one after reading the dating one, and yeah, I'm pretty sure now that this one is just an even dryer, more subversively satirical piece. There are probably real elements in it (likely the author does use a solar-powered NUC as his dev machine), which are then extrapolated ad absurdum.

mdekkers• 11 years ago

"Nevermore will I bumble through endless confusing aisles like a pack-donkey searching for feed while the smell of rotting flesh fills my nostrils and fluorescent lights sear my eyeballs and sappy love songs torture my ears."

Author needs to cheer the fuck up - his life sounds like a chore...

chermanowicz• 11 years ago

With no friends, no spouse, no girl/boyfriend, no kids, no pets, my life is considerably simpler, lighter and cleaner than before.

newman314• 11 years ago

I'm flabbergasted at the cognitive dissonance displayed in this article.

This is everything that is wrong with the echo chamber that is the Silicon Valley. The hubris etc.

The sad thing is Rob in all likelihood believes whole-heartedly in what he has written and all dissenting opinions as people that just "don't get it".

pinaceae• 11 years ago

this and the Ustream debacle points to a16z being in the snakeoil business, backing weirdos with massive money. and if this is true for these clear cut cases of BS, what does it mean for their overall method of investing?

AJJB• 11 years ago

how do you heat up water for showers? this is what uses the most electricity, if you don't need to use it to heat your home.

pbreit3• 11 years ago

The guy is basically right about both Soylent and this energy thing and yet elicits so many haters. What gives?

Sure, you don't have to live like he does. But I find it pretty interesting and actually sort of wish I was in a position to try it out (sans family).

jefurii2• 11 years ago

All the extreme reactions against Soylent used to amuse and mystify me. Now I understand they must have really been reacting to his blog. Weird.

EC1• 11 years ago

He's obviously taking the piss.

How I Gave Up Alternating Current

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