Old School Tech has posted an article about converting Christmas LED light strings into emergency DC lighting for use directly from an off-grid battery array, no inverter required. This kind of lighting is great for safety-critical areas and allows a reliable backup source of lighting when other sources fail. Annoying AC flicker is also eliminated. […]
Old School Tech has released a new article, this time on solar wiring, connectors and tools. Although this is the final article in the hurricane ground solar series, it isn’t our last article on solar. This past week, we interviewed a system designer at Iron Edison about their nickel iron and lithium iron phosphate batteries; […]
In the past week or so, Leech City has had a few updates. The most important of these is the satirical description of a theft of a log (yes, some people will steal anything). We’re still letting that one work its magic on the local criminal psyche. In the meantime, we think that how that […]
Old School Tech has released a new article in its ground solar series, this time about the batteries. Originally intended to only run a freezer, we were able to also run two refrigerators off this system, but only for about four hours per night. One of the missions of the nightwatch during the hurricane power […]
Old School Tech has released a new article about the ground solar array we deployed during Hurricane Matthew. This time, it is about the inverter, or in this case, the 24 volt MicroSolar 1000 watt pure sine inverter. As you will read in that article, we had to derate it by about 3x, which is […]
OST has posted a new article introducing the book Caveman Chemistry, by Dr. Kevin Dunn. “Starving the Monkeys” readers will recognize this book from our recommended reading list; we use it all the time for our homeschool chemistry lab manual to supplement text books. If you only have room on your self-sufficiency shelf for one […]
Old School Tech has just published a new article in the ground solar series, this time on the selection and use of a charger. As with the previous ground solar article, this one is all technical; not much to add from a political or self-sufficiency point of view.
Old School Tech has a new article on solar, this time a very detailed article about combiners and their essential role in an off-grid system. This one is pretty much all technical; not much to add from a political or self-sufficiency point of view.
Old School Tech has just posted an article for making a Morse decoder using a Raspberry Pi. The accompanying video was shot weeks ago, we just haven’t had a chance to get it put together until now. This is the first step in a series of articles that is going to expand on this foundation […]
We’ve posted a new article over at Old School Tech about solar panel principles. As always, we keep the technical details over there, and handle the self-sufficiency and controversial issues over here. Go check that article out, and come back for more details. The linked article mentions the steadily declining price of solar panels on […]