I assume you’re in the UK (who else has “allotments”) and I assume I’m from the US (planers and jointers?). That’ll matter when talking about the power grid; The US and UK grids, and appliances that plug into them, are engineered differently.

So to keep confusion down, I’m going to call Jackery-type devices “power stations” and the lithium power packs you plug into power tools “drill batteries.”

The power station I have is an Anker-Solix C2000 Gen 2, it has a 2048 watt-hour battery and an inverter that will sustain 2400 watts and peak to 4800. It’ll not only run, but START, my 13 inch DeWalt thickness planer, and it’ll take 800 watts of solar DC in. It cost $900 plus a few hundred in solar power and I’m not even maxxed out on it.

If you want a little unit you can install on your shed with a solar panel on the roof to just recharge the occasional drill battery, that’s WAY overkill. You probably don’t even need one that can deliver full standard wall socket power. A typical American wall outlet puts out 1800 watts, my drill battery charger uses a small fraction of that. I bet you could get away with a power station in the 300-500 watt range with a 50-100 watt solar panel. I would double check by putting a meter on your tool battery charger to see how much power they take. Do they make Kill-A-Watts in fish-and-chips flavor or only cheeseburger flavor?

Yeah I have 100 watt panels that make 70 or 80 most of the time; those ratings are for “ideal conditions” which I take to mean “perfectly aligned, in space.”

As to the rigidity: It is a little flexible, compared to glass and aluminum. I bet it’s perfectly serviceable at smaller sizes, but when it’s 7 feet (2.13 Celsius) long:

the damn thing sags under its own weight. They shouldn’t be made this big. Those glass panels together have the same rating and they actually work worth a damn.

I’m gonna give this warning: I have a panel of that type but much larger. It’s rated at ~200 watts. I’ve never seen it make more than 80. I don’t think it’s a great idea to make large, flexible solar panels, I bet something internal is cracked in it. It’s…virtually impossible to handle gently. It has kick stands on 3 of its 4 panels and you CANNOT stop that one inner panel from twisting. So…I am going to avoid that style of panel if it’s larger than, say, a book. OP’s 30 watt panel is probably fine but if you’re dealing in the hundreds of watts honestly my glass panels are easier to deal with.

We’re not going to nuke each other. Everyone is gonna die of dysentery from Texas’ lettuce-borne ass plague.

So there’s been a massive spike in demand for a product, that demand isn’t forecast to let up for the foreseeable future, and yet it’s outright impossible to get in on the action.

RAM is Lostech.

I have a backyard shed that serves as a small but competent woodworking shop. It is connected to the house via a single 20A circuit. Running table saws, routers, planers, jointers plus lighting and dust collection can get to be a lot on one circuit, so I can haul the battery bank out there for more.

Just recharging power tool batteries and things like that, you could get away with a smaller unit. 1kWh or lower, with one, maybe 2 100W panels?

Okay Valve. Can YOU make memory?

I got one of those Anker Solix boxes, and a couple hundred watts worth of solar panels. I kinda want it rather than a generator for power outages. I’ve tested it, on battery alone it’ll power my fridge for about ten hours, with the panels I have the practical limit is about 24. And I’m not at the limit of number of panels I can install.

But, it has an interesting thing about it: It has a Time of Use feature. So if you’ve got peak power billing, you can set it to run whatever’s attached to it on battery during peak time and recharge during off-peak or discount hours. So it may get attached to my fridge for that purpose, with or without solar.

Nothing he added was pointful. All of the CGI retouches of the original trilogy were pointless CGI effects for the sake of having pointless CGI effects. At one point in the Mos Eisley sequence a huge pack animal walks through the frame, obscuring almost all of it. Why? Because it was some computer generated shit to throw in!

Beat me to it.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8iN99qWYJrk

I’m thinking bigger than that. There are companies right now operating robotic taxis on American roads with no human operators on board. A car that may or may not even have a steering wheel arrives, a human passenger climbs into the back seat, and the car drives off with them. Who is legally responsible for the operation of that car? If it hurts someone, who do they sue? If it commits a crime, who do we punish?

Argue about how specialweshul you are until you’re blue with stars in the face. Doesn’t change the fact that an idiot with bad teeth said something stupid to me over a decade ago.

Unhealthily watching = scrolling shorts for too long.

The concept absolutely exists in law but it’s just called… “the driver.”

There’s another aviation term, “The Pilot Flying.” The Pilot In Command bears the authority and responsibility. The Pilot Flying is doing the work of steering. If present, a Pilot Not Flying might help with checklists, system monitoring, navigation, radio communication, handling secondary controls like flaps and landing gear, but the Pilot Flying is in immediate control of the aircraft.

The PIC is very often not the pilot flying. I used to be a flight instructor, when teaching students who aren’t yet qualified to command, I acted as Pilot In Command, but the student was the Pilot Flying as much as possible.

Autopilots have been a thing for most of aviation history. It doesn’t count as a crewman. It’s a piece of equipment like any radio or gauge. It is a tool at the PICs disposal. It is the PIC’s job - sometimes delegated to the Pilot Flying - to monitor the autopilot and take over if it begins doing something wrong.

That’s the concept that is missing with self-driving or driverless cars. Tesla drivers will sit in the driver’s seat and abdicate command of the vehicle to the autopilot, or worse, cars are operating as taxis with passengers in the back seat and no one in the front seat, or with no onboard controls at all. Fully autonomously, or remotely operated by Southeast Asians who…totally have a valid American driver’s license. Definitely.

Corporations love it. “Legally, the driver is responsible for the vehicle. Our car has no driver, so legally no one is responsible for the vehicle. Responsibility averted.”

I was born and raised in the state of North Carolina. One of several states that seceded from The Union during our Civil War. That was right at 160 years ago, and we’re STILL riding the waves from that splash. As a student of history I tried to warn them, but the damn limeys had to find out the hard way.

I’m a citizen of the United States of America. I know what a federation is, the separation of powers between my state’s government in Raleigh and my nation’s government in Washington D.C. has direct effects on my daily life.

Per Wikipedia, “The EU is often described as a sui generis political entity combining characteristics of both a federation and a confederation.” So it’s a Federation Umm Actually. The part where it has a legislature populated by delegates from each member state is the relevant characteristic here, a trait the EU shares with federations.

That Blimey Limey that bitched at me years ago was presumably expressing frustration that the United Kingdom only got to send one representative to the EU Council, and then accused me of not knowing what life is like in the United States of Mitch McConnell.

Brainworm man is pro worm. long live shitworm disease.

You know, I bet you could hate yourself and others on Truth Social just as much as you do here, so why don’t you head back there where you can give everything you own to some prosperity gospel scammer or gold smartphone bullshit or whatever else you “too straight to fuck women” assholes do.

Birth Control Glasses. Spectacles so ugly you can’t get laid wearing them. +2 perception, -11 charisma.

I’ve got a scar across the bridge of my nose because of my wireframes. I was working as both an instructor and company mechanic at a small flight school, I needed to take some precision measurement of something on the engine, so I went to the toolbox, got a pair of calipers, and I was setting them up as I was walking to the plane, I ran slam into the trailing edge of the wing at eye level. Knocked my ass to the floor, and as I got up I realized I had blood running down my nose, because the wing had pushed my glasses into my face so hard the wire frame cut me.

Do you know what a static wick is? See, airplanes are prone to gathering static electricity, which will build up around the airplane and cause Saint Elmo’s Fire. Which wasn’t a problem back in the days of tall ships, it is a problem in the days of modern avionics. So airplanes will often have these antenna or frayed wire-like structures attached to their trailing edges to bleed off static electricity. And judging by the scratch I left on that wing flap, my eye socket missed one by about 5 inches.