I'm happy to now know about perma computing.

> up to the level of the mid 90s

So pair this with back-to-basics tech (e.g. text files)... that can serve us extremely well.

As a dad, I have a strong compulsion to tell (bad) dad jokes. Ideally puns. All the time. I didn't used to be this way.

Are your kids teenagers already? Telling them in front of their friends is 10x better.

Yup. The closer I am to her friends... the stronger the compulsion. It's like magnetism.

As a daughter, I approve. Hell, I'm the one telling them to my dad most of the time

Literally laughing out loud to this.

I can relate.

I have always had this desire, and now I have social validation that it's part of my role ;)

my Brother in pungnaciousness.

> As a rule, the highest-paid workers at Mondragon cooperatives earn only six times more than the lowest-paid workers.

And I bet these salary-capped co-op leaders are still appropriately capable / qualified. The U.S. billionare situation is ugly.

But there is some valid concern around internet-connected PV / battery power electronics getting bricked remotely.

Power electronics shall never be connected to the "Internet".

Any such installations of solar panels, batteries and the like must be interconnected only in a private network without Internet access.

For remote monitoring and control a proxy mini-PC must be used, to which one should use an authenticated and encrypted connection.

For any competent person, this is trivial to do today, to ensure that even if some electronic device includes a backdoor for its vendor that backdoor cannot be accessed.

If there exists any kind of wireless connection provided by the vendor for a device, it must be disabled, e.g. by removing any internal or external antennas. Unlike wired connections that can be filtered externally, wireless connections cannot be secured.

This is awesome. It'd be even more awesome if it was easier to show a power plant's info upon hover / click. ...It's currently too much of a cat-and-mouse game for me.

Give https://mapcomplete.org/infrastructure a try

Thanks, it's much easier to load info with the option you shared.

Sorry about that. Are you on desktop or mobile, and iOS in particular? Just want to make sure I understand what you're seeing.

All good, I appreciate what you built! On desktop with Windows 11. I just tried it again and it was much easier to see the info (thru hover) than before.

I've heard the EV charging has played a big role in the maturation of GaN / SiC.

Yes, EV and high frequency electronics (microwave, mmWave, photonics) that require very fast switching capability.

And military radars love GaN

A distinction was made:

> the transfer switch variety switches your house between the inverter and the grid whereas the disconnect just physically disconnects the inverters output

Origionally:

> That simply is a transfer switch that is built in.

Then in this comment:

> but both a transfer switch and a disconnect are the same thing

These statements are false, and the fact that the second one was written even after being corrected once makes me think they still do not understand.

This user appears to blast paragraphs upon paragraphs of irrelevant noise at anyone who responds to them so that either the comment has internal conflicts (as you noticed) or any criticism seems nitpicky.

> Why the fearmongering?

The main concern is exporting to a downed grid that line-workers are trying to restore.

If you can design and build your own inverter I would take it as read that you know how to read code and know how an actual inverter should function:

If you're grid connected and see valid phase on the input for a certain amount of time of matching phase and measuring voltage you can provisionally connect at exactly that phase and voltage but without injecting power. After that you are allowed to slowly ramp up your output by leading the phase (while raising the voltage within certain limits) as long as you observe the effect that you have on the grid. If the grid phase drops away or there is any other anomaly (such as a voltage drop or rise of more than x V/s you are required to immediately disconnect, there are many other disconnect requirements but that's the main one with respect to line worker safety.

Three disconnects within a short period of time = no reconnect attempts for a much longer time. If the situation persists that's a failure and you are no longer allowed to connect to the grid until there has been an intervention and an inverter reset.

If your inverter is of the islanding variety then the rules are slightly different, then the transfer switch only gets energized when you match voltage and frequency but in the meantime the (usually battery backed up) inverter can supply local consumers.

By the time you come up with the idea of rolling your own inverter you have either become familiar with the requirements (which differ from region to region, and which in a properly designed inverter are mostly a matter of tweaking firmware parameters) or you will have to do so because you realize your responsibilities.

Anybody up for this kind of project will with a high degree of likelihood have the required knowledge because that knowledge is a lot simpler to acquire than the knowledge to build an inverter that isn't going to result in you being laughed out of the room when your EE buddies come look at your creation.

I would expect you to do a better job than 95% of the imported ones that I've taken apart and which all had massive shortcuts taken, good enough to pass first inspection and a year into warranty, not good enough for long term safe deployment. This ranges from unsuitable connectors, low quality inductors, even lower quality relays, undersized FET boards, insufficient cooling, bad cast aluminum housings, in general bad housings (not rodent and/or insect proof) and so on.

Thanks, and I agree that a DIY-inverter designer should be able to meet grid-interconnection requirements (e.g. IEEE 1547-2018). With that said, I think case-by-base evaluation from the AHJ would be prudent without a UL listing... something that AHJs don't want to do.

I'd prefer to just put the DIY inverter behind a transfer switch (with an adequate battery bank and maybe a small propane generator)... with the grid as emergency fallback.

That's exactly the setup that I had in Canada with a windmill thrown in for good measure (which really helped in the winter, after we got the windmill up we never ran the generator again).

Not that this is accepted by insurers or AHJs ("authorities having jurisdiction"), but one can use UL-certified components in an (open-source) _assembly_ that itself isn't UL certified. This at least supports the argument that the overall product is safe if thoughtfully designed and assembled. An example is the OpenEVSE level-2 car charger (which I had a really good experience with).

The creator of OpenClaw, for example, has come to appreciate grammatical / spelling errors in human writing (as he said in a recent Lex Fridman interview).