As title says. I think my PC is using like a max of 500w when it’s juicing but idles for less. I was thinking of using an ecoflow high grade setup for this. Anyone have experience doing something similar?
I might switch to a small micro tower setup by Dell or Lenovo that uses like 120w max. The new Mac minis seem to cap out at 39w though which is crazy.
Or a laptop, those are crazy efficient, have a battery, and can deal with outages. I don’t know anything about solar but perhaps there is a special solution for lower voltages? Remove the transformer from your laptop. For example there’s solar for charging phones, and perhaps that works for laptops too.
Newer laptops often charge through USB-C I believe, so that should presumably work the same way as charging a phone. Whether one of those solar phone chargers could generate enough to charge a laptop I have no idea, but if anyone wants to try it I’d be interested to hear the results lol
You don’t directly charge a laptop from a solar panel. You charge a power bank and use the power bank to charge your laptop. I think that works fine, but you’re going to want a bigger solar panel setup than you’d use to keep a cell phone or tablet running, since laptops use a lot more power, power banks designed for laptops are correspondingly bigger, and you don’t want to take days to charge your power bank.
And I’ll take this opportunity to plug one of my favorite articles, on the details of running a server completely off of solar power:
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/01/how-sustainable-is-a-solar-powered-website/
A laptop with USB-C charging is probably the best option by far.
The setup would be solar panel —wire—> battery -----usb-c cable -----> laptop.
This will be way more efficient than trying to power a full desktop setup.