Solar powered sites are cool and fun, but I find it ultimately lacking because so much of the rest of the networking infrastructure is reliant on the grid. It would be more energy efficient to just host the static site on cloudflare or whatever, and use the solar panel to charge some batteries, or something you would normally use the grid for. I suspect overall energy usage would be even lower if the site was hosted on a CDN, due to the CDN operators keeping their machines near full utilization, and fewer network hops required for an average request.
The solar-run site is at <a href="https://solar.dri.es/" rel="nofollow">https://solar.dri.es/</a> in case everyone wants to check it out all at once ;)<p>Of course this got posted on a sunny, cool and breezy morning in Boston. Sneaky!
Pretty cool. I use one of these small panels as a battery tender for a generator. It only is about 30w, but keeps a small 12v battery from dying over the months. It also has a charge controller built in - <a href="https://www.amazon.com/OYMSAE-Portable-maintainer-Cigarette-Alligator/dp/B08N4SBDB3" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/OYMSAE-Portable-maintainer-Cigarette-...</a>
controversial take: but I think it's fine to host stuff on your own machines, rather than the massive big-data hyperscale datacenters. Yes, google/cloudflare/AWS might be more efficient per watt, but I don't like giving them more money to continue to violate privacy/TOS/labor... (AI, kiwifarms, &, well, everything amazon does).<p>No, it won't be the most efficient, but it's yours.
Great job.
I was thinking about it too, but stopped on the networking.<p>Would be so cool, if networking could also be kinda "self-hosted" and "free", like mesh-networks, or satellites, or smth.
Shame the solar panels can't do "self-healing".<p>I this this is cool, I know a couple folks who got homelabs on reddit who mainly use solar power due to the cost and want to go green.
Nicely done!<p>Now, Low Tech Magazine also has instructions to convert a stationary exercise bike into a human powered generator, which you could build to add power during the winter :-)
Cool project and I’d really like to try something similar with a 4G/5G connection so it doesn’t rely on site WiFi.<p>I don’t think your cost comparison is fair between the rpi and hosting. I host my website on a £1/mo shared vps and for my energy costs that equivalent to running a low power server at home, ignoring all the other benefits of it being off-site.
Obligatory post of the most well known solar website. Low Tech Magazine<p><a href="https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/" rel="nofollow">https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/</a><p>They do a lot of other sustainable web development[0] practices like letting you read offline, having incredibly small page sizes (always shown in the lower left corner), and dithering all their images[1] (which imo creates a cool effect)<p>[0] <a href="https://sustainablewebdesign.org/" rel="nofollow">https://sustainablewebdesign.org/</a><p>[1] <a href="https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/#how" rel="nofollow">https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/#h...</a>
> In contrast, traditional hosting might cost around $20 USD a month<p>Hosting that is vastly more powerful than a RPI in the first place. And there are much cheaper VPS that costs only a dozen dollars a year, too, and can do a lot more than this rpi. No matter how you look at it this is not saving any money.
I suggest a different reasoning: what's about domestic p.v. with storage and racks in the basement with "free" A/C in terms of WFH and distributed "datacenters"?<p>How many have realized how much stuff can be hosted at home with availability levels not really far from most common datacenters?
This is cool, but I mean... come on. This guy lives in a $2M apt in a big city.<p>The amount of energy being "saved" yearly is wasted almost every second.