> Batteries have gotten so cheap

Any pointers for a regular Joe Shmoe homeowner looking for a backup battery? The Tesla Power Wall stuff and similar costs are halfway to six figures.

For full house backup, it sort of sucks right now. They are all charging a premium over what you can otherwise get if it's not specifically a whole home product.

What I've done and would suggest is right now looking for battery banks for big ticket important items that you'd want to stay on anyways in terms of an outage. A lot of those can function as a UPS. You can get a 1kWh battery pack for $400 right now. A comparable home battery backup is charging $1300 per kWh of installed storage.

I currently have a 2kWh battery pack for my computer/server/tv and a 500Wh pack for my fridge. Works great and it's pretty reasonably priced. The 500Wh gives my fridge an extra 6 hours of runtime after a power outage.

If I wanted to power shift, I have smart switches setup so I can toggle when I want to.

In the EU €1800 gets you a 10kWh battery (ex install)

That's on the high side, I would guess. Depending on what brand you want, you can get 10kWh of LFP for under a grand right now in the US.

With a BMS and inverter? What brand should I be looking at?

You will get a battery and BMS for that price. Decent inverters are expensive, however, so you won't get a whole 10kWh setup with appropriately sized inverter for under US$2K. Probably twice that.

I hesitate to offer any brand advice, because that is very situational, depends on what you're after, what experience level you have, what trade-offs you want to make, etc.

I don't know if the market has improved but when I looked at this a year or two ago I concluded that the consumer market here was utter crap with hugely inflated prices.

The cheapest per kwh way I could find to buy a home battery (that didn't involve diy stuff) was to literally buy an EV car with an inverter... by a factor of at least two... I ended up not buying one.

Unfortunately cheap batteries doesn't translate to reputable companies packaging them in cheap high quality packages for consumers instantly.

You jest, but I ended up getting a lot of use out of being able to do this in software for a dimmable LED lamp. Dimming the LED required PWM, and the potentiometer resistance -> PWM frequency map ended up fairly intricate to make the knob "feel right."

Now what I would have loved to have done is come up with some crazy analog circuit to implement an arbitrary transfer function from potentiometer input to LED voltage, but I didn't know how to do this at the time and the dev cycle would be a lot more painful than with software.

Yeah, PWM on an Arduino is easy enough (no need for the Pi).

I picture a scene with Richard Crenna knocking on our old fogey's cabin door to ask us to come out of retirement and help hand-optimize software in this new environment

> sink two or three tankers to shut the whole thing down.

How so? The narrowest point is still 20 miles wide. Is there a deepwater lane that's narrower than that, but still impacted with a wreck?

You shut it down by making the next ship go "lol fuck no".

I stayed away from the management track but friends who didn't tell me one of the metrics they are graded on is retention, i.e. if your reports leave at a more than average rate you will have a problem.

Every engineer in a given department knows who the good and bad managers are. If you don't care about your engineers' development, you won't be able to keep good engineers on your team as they will transfer internally. Engineers also talk to directors and make sure they know who the good managers are. There's really no upside to treating your engineers like crap.

My favorite aspect of it is the keyboard shortcuts. It makes things so much faster.

But, isn't the albedo of a solar panel farm still way dark? It means the radiation is still being captured rather than reflected back up.

Capturing the radiation to convert it to electricity is the whole point of solar panels.

Even if it was just 0 albedo no generation, irradiation on whatever's parked beneath would be cut in half plus rest of (re-)radiation converted into far-ir. This is not unuseful. Just don't mandate this kind of thing in places where parking lots have to be cleaned up with bulldozers in winter.

If there are solar panels over the parking lot, then the parking lot doesn't have to be plowed. You can design the panels at appropriate slopes to direct the snow off the lot.

You're not looking at the albedo of the solar panels in isolation though, you're comparing it to asphalt and cars. Typical solar panels have an albedo of ~0.3. Asphalt around ~0.05.

I think the problem is every tribe/nation/area has a percent of psychopaths (the estimates are 1 in 25), and if they run unchecked they end up doing evil things. This can then echo as the other side seeks retribution, etc. It takes significant effort to stomp out the fire.

The only way to stop the fire is to stop blaming others for their fires.

Mi smo Titovi, Tito je naš!