My solar-powered and self-hosted website

[IncreasePosts]

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.

[genter]

You don't like that the rest of the infrastructure is on the grid, so you're proposing moving the site to the grid too?

[Vegenoid]

Agreed. When I see this type of thing, I am always turned off by people describing it as "greener" or “more sustainable”. Every small website having its own solar panel and hardware is not greener. People frequently think only of the carbon emissions of the energy used by the hardware once it's running, ignoring the carbon (and raw material) cost of building that hardware.

Serving websites is an area where capitalism’s promise of achieving efficiency of resource utilization through economic incentives probably actually works, via shared hardware.

This is a hobby and aesthetic thing, which is valid and interesting.

If anyone has some good data about carbon emissions of self-hosted vs shared hardware I’d love to see it.

[jvanderbot]

Come check out my solar site. it's hosted in my basement and I paid a premium to my utility company so my power comes from solar credits (xcel)

It's be neat to have a digital ocean or equivalent that allows locating in data centers by energy source.

[lightlyused]

Have you heard of https://meshtastic.org/ ?

[j45]

That doesn't seem to make sense.

Yeah, it's only a 50W solar panel. The solar power could be upgraded to a 400W no problem and the issue you have will no longer exist.

Often people smart with a small system to get things figured out how they want it before adding more capacity. Seems reasonable, no?

Networking equipment shouldn't be much power, speaking from personal experience.

It can be on a small UPS, even one from Costco to run it all off battery, and then solar to refill.

[Scoundreller]

The solar-run site is at https://solar.dri.es/ in case everyone wants to check it out all at once ;)

Of course this got posted on a sunny, cool and breezy morning in Boston. Sneaky!

[punnerud]

Is this the same page that had the background effect indicating level of the battery?

[Eumenes]

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 - https://www.amazon.com/OYMSAE-Portable-maintainer-Cigarette-...

[pluto_modadic]

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).

No, it won't be the most efficient, but it's yours.

[cortesoft]

You wouldn't be giving cloudflare any money to host it with them.

[sdepablos]

Heavily inspired - I suppose - by the oldest (2018) solar-powered website, Low Tech Magazine https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website

[emdanielsen]

This is so cool! I'm so surprised I've never heard of someone doing this before :)

[mrweasel]

There was a project a while back, sadly it seems to have gone offline, it was a kosher news aggregator. They had the most interesting rules, like only charging the batteries on Tuesday. It was such a weird and interesting projects.

Archive of the website: http://web.archive.org/web/20200707101320/https://jewjewjew....

[mbrizic]

I did something very similar a while back: https://mbrizic.com/blog/solarhosting/

[vicnaum]

Great job. I was thinking about it too, but stopped on the networking.

Would be so cool, if networking could also be kinda "self-hosted" and "free", like mesh-networks, or satellites, or smth.

[tonetegeatinst]

Shame the solar panels can't do "self-healing".

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.

[kjkjadksj]

You can get self healing solar power if you grow bamboo and use the resulting charcoal for fuel. Carbon neutral I guess.

[louwrentius]

Nicely done!

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 :-)

[mttch]

Cool project and I’d really like to try something similar with a 4G/5G connection so it doesn’t rely on site WiFi.

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.

[anoth3rsmith]

How many more panels/bigger battery would your need to move the switch and other required home infra to run the site?

[culi]

Obligatory post of the most well known solar website. Low Tech Magazine

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/

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)

[0] https://sustainablewebdesign.org/

[1] https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/#h...

[ekianjo]

> In contrast, traditional hosting might cost around $20 USD a month

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.

[photochemsyn]

Cool project, but also a great all around tutorial - the appendix section is a nice idea and very helpful for many people I'm sure.

[rijoja]

> Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP or LiFePO4) battery

This should be "Lithium Ion Phosphate...", right?

[snickerer]

No, they used a Lithium IRON battery. LiFePO₄ literally means Lithium Iron Phosphate. These batteries are safer, more thermally stable, and have a longer cycle life compared to typical Lithium-Ion (LiCoO₂) batteries. However, LiFePO₄ has a lower energy density, meaning less capacity for the same size and weight.

[WesolyKubeczek]

Fe is for iron here

[kkfx]

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"?

How many have realized how much stuff can be hosted at home with availability levels not really far from most common datacenters?

[imwillofficial]

This is such an incredibly cool site. Bravo.

[tomfly]

this is really neat.

[elintknower]

This is cool, but I mean... come on. This guy lives in a $2M apt in a big city.

The amount of energy being "saved" yearly is wasted almost every second.

[genter]

I can't speak for his specific apartment, but apartments in general are more energy efficient that a suburban house. New York City is one of the lowest per capita CO2 emissions in the US.

[rkwz]

The author clearly explains in the post:

> When I started this solar-powered website project, I wasn't trying to revolutionize sustainable computing or drastically cut my electricity bill. I was driven by curiosity, a desire to have fun, and a hope that my journey might inspire others to explore local-first or solar-powered hosting.

> The cost savings? Looking at our last electricity bill, we pay an average of $0.325 per kWh in Boston. This means the savings amount to $2.85 USD per year (8.76 kWh * $0.325/kWh = $2.85). Not exactly something to write home about.

[tomcam]

How does it help the discourse to bring this up? Would you like it if someone inserted this kind of (irrelevant) and unsubstantiated information when commenting on an article you wrote?