Depends on the UPS. Many cheap offline UPS units don’t. Anything line interactive or online will.

APC makes low end offline UPS units, which are cheap garbage.

They also make line interactive and online ups units, which are decidedly not completely garbage.

I pick up line interactive APC units from used locations like eBay, and go buy off label replacement batteries. Haven’t had any problems with them so far.

To date, over the last ~10 years of running a homelab, I have used mainly SMT 1500 units, one was a rack mount. I’ve recently upgraded to an SMX2000. I’ve replaced batteries, but never a UPS, and never any server components due to power issues. I’ve run servers ranging from a Dell PE 2950, to a full c6100 chassis, plus several networking devices, including firewalls, routers and PoE switches. Not a single power related issue with any of them.

To be fair, as long as they haven’t been trying to get a parking fee waived like, every day or every week or something, I’d be like, yeah, seems legit, and waive the fees too.

I mean, as dumb as the request was, it basically reads as ‘i made a mistake’.

As long as they’re not making mistakes constantly, why not forgive it? Silly wording or not.

I hate that I felt this in my bones. Well played.

I’m too tired to wrap my brain around it at the moment, but you gave a valiant effort. I’m sure I’ll get it tomorrow after I’ve gotten my wake up juice.

I think that’s a clear indication I need to take a break for the evening, so wherever you are and whatever time it is there, I bid you a good morning, afternoon, or goodnight… Whichever is most applicable.

Well, they certainly do like to blame my generation for everything, so there’s that.

Lazy millennials. They should pick themselves up by their bootstraps and work hard, just like me, earning more than half of what they do now and paying a quarter what they do for rent. So lazy!

Hey, get off my lawn, you’re going to lower my property value by being poor.

I’m just confused. If it’s a double standard, what’s the opposing view that creates the double standard?

I probably already know, but can someone help out my tired brain on this one? It doesn’t work too good right now.

I think I mostly sit around the bottom left, but I dabble around towards the top left section from time to time.

I have no authority to make any change happen, but if there was an uprising to overturn the corrupt shit we have right now, I’d join. Fuck it. What am I going to lose? I’m in debt until I’m dead.

Were the ghosts friendly?

What are they even complaining about? They caused the problems we’re all suffering through. They have nobody to blame but themselves

There’s certainly costs involved with solar. Even the act of cleaning the panels is going to increase maintenance costs. More panels to clean, more cost. More space needed for the panels, more cost. It might not be much per panel, but it’s still a cost. The wear of the panels is more cost, they only last so long before they degrade, and replacements are not free, so if the panels degrade without doing a lot of “work” (aka the outcome of having them) vs the cost of installing and maintaining them, was it worth it? These are all economic questions that also need to be considered.

Yes, it’s not free, but it’s the closest thing to “free” power we have. Literally pennies for gigawatt hours of output. If that power isn’t consumed, then it wasn’t useful to produce. Whether that generated power goes into batteries, homes, or hydrogen production, that’s going to be something we have to solve for.

I see a hydrogen reactor + fuel cell “generator” as a secondary storage system to batteries. When production is unusually high, push the power into hydrogen. It’s not nearly as efficient, but it can be stored for much longer without losing any. It can be stored far more densely than what can be accomplished by batteries. If the batteries are full and your PV plant is still pouring out unused watts, rather then let that energy go to waste, pushing it into hydrogen storage is a better option. If you don’t need it for 6 months, a year, two years? No big deal. When production is low and your batteries are almost out, just fire up the fuel cell and recharge from the excess energy you couldn’t put in the batteries. It’s inefficient, yes, but bluntly, it’s better than letting any of the excess production go to waste.

There’s other competing technologies for the same purpose. I see hydrogen as the second stage of storage. It’s not as good as the first stage, but it’s better than turning to fossil fuels to generate power.

I don’t know if that’s the right answer to the problem. I don’t know if it’s even a good idea. All I know is that it is possible. IMO, it’s not a bad idea.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if I’m saying anything at all here, it’s that we need to keep researching everything. I don’t want anyone to drop research on another technology to dedicate to hydrogen, just as I wouldn’t want anyone to drop hydrogen to research something else. We need to keep looking into this stuff.

There’s no single solution to our energy needs, as of right now. I don’t see one emerging in our lifetimes. The only goal I want to see pursued, if not obtained, is net zero for climate change. Stop the destruction of the environment, especially, but not limited to, our energy needs. Whatever gets us there, whether hydrogen, nuclear, fusion, solid state, flywheel, heat storage, thermoelectric, geothermal, hydroelectric, or whatever… I’m game. I feel like hydrogen still has a lot of discoveries that can be made, and I really don’t want to see it abandoned because of a lack of popularity in the consumer space. It’s there, it’s green, it’s got potential, let’s keep trying to get it to a place where it can be beneficial, just like with everything else in that market segment.

Yep. When you’re using the energy quickly, within days or weeks, then hydrogen is extremely impractical.

The merits of hydrogen are in long term storage and cycles. A well built storage tank can last a lifetime. To be fair, a poorly built one might not last a year… So it’s very dependent on the external factors involved.

Batteries have their flaws, which I think we all know by now. Weight (regardless of state of charge), volume (energy density), charging speed, cycle life, etc.

It’s all about the application. Is the energy storage method going to be efficient for the desired outcomes.

Regardless of what other outcomes are in play, one that should be constant is to preserve the environment. Lithium technologies have reached a high level of development in recycling, so, for the most part, the environmental impact of end-of-life batteries is effectively mitigated to a large extent. This is a great thing that we have developed.

We need to do the same with solar PV panels, and mitigate as much of the environmental impact as we can from that as well. I know that’s something that’s being worked on, but we’re not at the same level of efficiency as we are with batteries, probably due to the comparatively long life of PV panels, vs the comparatively short lifetime of lithium cells. We’ve simply had a lot more lithium to deal with and find ways to recycle, so far. I’m sure PV panels recycling will come along as more early adopters upgrade to something newer, and more panels get into the stage where they need to be recycled. I haven’t checked in on PV panel recycling in a while so I’m not sure how outdated my information is.

To be clear, I am not, have not, and would never suggest that we move all our efforts into any technology, including, but not limited to, lithium, solar, wind, hydrogen, or anything else that’s been discussed. IMO, we need to leverage several technologies to achieve our long-term goal of global net zero, while meeting the energy demands of everyone.

I just feel like hydrogen is treated like a dead end technology, and I can’t blame the public for thinking so. A lot of the information about it as an energy storage solution is either very old, or still in its infancy. From electrolysis, which is a very old idea, to hydrogen fuel cells, which are extremely new by comparison. IMO, there’s a lot of work that can be done here, and we need to keep looking into it. Maybe it goes nowhere, maybe it becomes so practical that other solutions seem like shit by comparison. I don’t think either of those is likely, we’ll probably land somewhere in the middle of those extremes. I don’t know, and I’m not a scientist, so I’m just hoping we, as a society of people, keep working on it.

One thing I’m particularly excited for in this field is solid state batteries. But that’s also in its infancy. I know a lot of work is being done on them, so we’ll see what happens.

My point, if I have any point at all, is that we need to keep researching varied technologies for it. While solid state might be the right answer for EVs, and cellphones and most consumer electronics, they might not be the best solution for other applications. We need answers to energy demands of all sorts and giving up on something like hydrogen when there’s still research to be done, isn’t a great idea. We don’t know what researching a technology could uncover. Maybe an air battery that’s hyper efficient and has a high energy density, better than solid state technologies could hope to achieve. Maybe a lot of things. We just don’t know.

Let’s try everything and figure out what works for what application.

We’re hoping that happens, and you don’t get stonewalled by idiots. We’re cheering for your efforts.

To be fair, we have our own share of problems, including, but not limited to, hardline conservatives pulling similar crap, and even the odd Canadian Trump supporters, which always confused me.

We’re coping okay. Hopefully it doesn’t get any worse.

This is what gets me. Relative efficiency of stuff is pretty much nullified when the energy used is free. Total power use still matters because it will determine the total size of the array of solar panels to generate the power needed.

But this is near and dear to my heart. I like hydrogen as energy storage. If you burn it, you get water. Natural gas is just CH4, so the output of burning it is 1CO2 + 2H2O. But a lot of natural gas stuff can also use hydrogen with little modification, so we don’t have to upend entire industries to adapt. Machines can be updated to use the new fuel type with little expense and we’re not throwing out entire production lines to replace them with ones based on electricity.

Why hydrogen? Simple, hydrolysis. Using power generated for free from the sun, you can split water into its base components. Hydrogen and oxygen. With some fancy knowledge, you can capture pretty much all of the hydrogen and none of the oxygen, and store it for use.

It’s inefficient compared to some other technologies, in that it takes a lot of power compared to how much hydrogen/oxygen you get, but bluntly, if it’s coming from solar, who cares? Not like we’re paying for the power anyways.

I keep thinking about this in the form of industry. Say a factory uses natural gas in boilers to make something hot. Whatever the material, whatever the reason, that’s what they’re doing. With little modification, the system can be adapted to hydrogen, and the company can build a hydrogen hydrolysis reactor on site using either city water, rain water, lake or river water… Even an underground well. The reactor runs all day and generates hydrogen, stored in a large, high pressure tank, also on site, then pipelines run it to the machines, boilers, whatever, to run the production lines. It’s free to run, and only requires a single capital investment.

Hydrogen, also, can be stored indefinitely and not “lose charge” unlike other, battery-based storage systems (or heat, or flywheels). So hydrogen is ideal for long term energy storage. Fuel cells are still the most efficient way to convert hydrogen to electricity, and yeah, you lose a lot of potential energy in the electrolysis/fuel cell conversions, but the energy input is free in the first place, so who cares?

I’m not saying we should go all in on hydrogen. I’m just saying that it’s worth continuing to develop the technology for it. Batteries, capacitors, storage via heat or flywheels, they all have their place in the energy future. At least until fusion makes them all obsolete (once we find a way to make that self fueling or use materials that are not extremely limited. IMO, we’re making good progress but we’re decades, if not centuries away from something practical, given our currently known planetary resources).

And yes, battery EVs are a good thing. Hydrogen electric vehicles… Let’s just say “too soon”, and leave it at that. Batteries for daily charge/discharge for home use, absolutely. Larger scale heat/flywheel storage, absolutely. But longer term than days to months, hydrogen may be the better option. It’s certainly a good option for industry that currently relies almost exclusively on natural gas.

I hate to say it, but, these things don’t change a lot, or quickly.

IP blocks, or “large groups of IP addresses” are assigned to regional internet registries, or RIRs which then hand them out from there. There’s a couple RIRs. I think five in total? ARIN covers North America, and has, by far, the most IP addresses given out.

There’s also RIPE, in Europe, APNIC, for Asia and the Pacific areas, including China and Australia, AfriNIC, which is basically all of Africa… If that wasn’t obvious. And lacnic, which is South America.

Large IP blocks can, but rarely ever do, get transferred between RIRs.

But wait, it gets more complicated. IP addresses allocated in one region could be used anywhere in the world. The vast majority are not, and it’s important to note that because of global routing, you can’t have a block smaller than 256 addresses allocated in the default free zone (DFZ). The DFZ is the part of the internet that doesn’t have a “default gateway”. All routes are advertised, and by those advertisements are learned by others. The routers in the DFZ only have so much memory, and there was a crisis a while ago when the memory of most of the routers in the DFZ were dangerously close to being full… That was around when ipv6 was first switched on. The routing memory is extremely fast, because it needs to be. Looking up a route in a table with a million+ entries takes time, but that time needs to be so short that latency is effectively mitigated. So that memory is some of the fastest used in tech at times, notwithstanding newer technologies.

I’m off topic. Anyways, my point is, ARIN is big. They have a lot of IPs. However allocation doesn’t and shouldn’t imply usage. A large number of addresses are allocated for US military use that are basically unseen in the internet. There’s a few infamous /8 blocks of around 16.7 million addresses that don’t get advertised and can’t be used by anyone besides the US military. I forget which branch of military owns it. They’ve owned it since the internet started giving out allocations (more or less) and today one of those /8 blocks is worth billions, with a cost of about $50 per IP.

So yeah, the US has a lot of IP allocation, they also have a large amount of unused IP addresses.

I’m not even American, I find my thoughts defaulting to this.

Stop giving them ideas.

To be fair, squirrels are pretty interesting.

As a Canadian, we’re feeling it too. I’m sure it’s not as significant as what you’re all feeling.

It’s weird having a half deranged megalomaniacal neighbor, where they’re fine most of the time then occasionally go completely off the rails.

Ahh the United States of America. What a fascinating planet.