Recent content by jtr1962

Getting the extra power isn't a problem. Dissipating it effectively is. 280 watts is a lot of power to get rid of. You need a massive heat sink and great airflow, or liquid cooling.

The market won't support solar panels with a life of only 5 to 7 years. Half the cost of solar is the installation. If you have to put in new panels every 5 to 7 years the economics don't work out. While the problems mentioned exist, they can be mitigated designing panels with longer life. We...

We only have one bathroom and it doesn't have a fan. I always thought fans were a thing if you had a windowless bathroom. We have a bathroom window, and if it gets :poop: , we can open it and turn on the whole house attic fan.

That all may be true, but look where they're testing it. It's probably miles from anybody but the people testing it. I also don't think it would fall a whole lot faster even not autorotating. It's light with a fairly large surface area. I'd be surprised if its terminal velocity at lower...

I've read it's possible to get waivers but that's probably beyond the means of hobbyists. Companies like Blue Origin have to get waivers to launch their rockets, for example. It looks like there are no rules regarding height in Mexico, so that's one possibility...

Those are my thoughts exactly, Doug. I would love to try something like this but it's obviously not happening in NYC, or probably anywhere in the NY Metro area, for obvious reasons. My parents bought a plot of land in New Mexico. It's pretty much in the middle of nowhere. The area was supposedly...

You can see the ascent/descent rate in the info screen (middle right just under the altitude). It looks like it maxed at around 37 m/s (83 mph) for the 33,000 foot flight and about 48 m/s (107 mph) for the 40,000+ foot flight. That slows a lot as you descend into thicker air. The propellers...

Express elevator going up, way up: Record drone flight to over 33,000 feet Later record to 40,000+ feet As far as I know, it's completely legal to go this high with drones in the area where these flights were made (Western Siberia).

The Earth will be devoid of life something like 7 billion years before that happens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_Earth Hopefully sometime in the next few thousand years, we'll start looking for other worlds to settle.

Add about 50°F to 100°F to those numbers once global warming runs its course. If I live long enough I might actually see 200°F broken somewhere on the Earth's surface.

Honestly, when I was researching solar panels it was kind of a shock to me that by default you won't have power if the grid was down. One of the reasons, albeit a minor one, for getting solar panels is exactly so you have power during blackouts. The fix is relatively simple, namely to have a...

I don't have any machine that I can put one in or I would jump at it for that price.

Or just get a Ryzen 2400G APU for about $136. If you don't want a gaming PC, you likely won't notice the difference between 4 cores/8 threads and 6 cores/12 threads. The IGP on the Ryzen is superior to anything from Intel. In fact, nowadays if you don't want a gaming PC I'm not seeing much...

The price sounds in line with what other places charge. One thing everyone should do before installing solar is see where usage can be reduced. We went from an average of around 1000 kW-hr/month to 670 and dropping (I'll know the exact figure as soon as the cooling season is over). How did we do...

I'll need to check if ConEd does something similar, although the way I'm sizing my system it probably wouldn't generate a net surplus beyond my annual average usage. That makes sense from the perspective you mentioned, plus micro-inverters already have all the other advantages I mentioned. The...