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1.5 hours runtime for like half a liter of gasoline?? That’s unbelievably inefficient. A half-liter of gasoline is like 15MJ, should power a laptop drawing 30W for a week.
Maybe it would be better with a fuel cell.
I don’t think that little generator cares if anything is drawing power, it will just output what it outputs full time
One of my friends is homeless, living out of his RV. Rather than going to the library or some other third space to charge his phone, he runs his generator. Then complains about running out of gas.
With the amount of fuel that must cost it’s crazy not to get a solar setup going.
Or just get a couple power banks. Should get a couple full phone charges out of one of those.
30W is 0.04 HP. That engine is just way, way bigger than you’d use if you were designing something like this from scratch, I think. Like putting a truck engine in a go kart, and being surprised that uses a lot of gas.
30W is 0.04 HP
anything but metric :/
I like metric fine, I just figure US audience is more familiar with small engine HP.
In the US, most small engines are rated in CC’s, like for lawnmowers, mopeds, etc. but then tiny motors are back to HP, like a 1/3 HP sump pump.
Makes sense to someone, I guess.
It’s AI bullshit anyway
With the current energy prices for fossil, I feel like it’d be a smarter thing to charge them through off-grid solar.
seriousness aside, this is cursed and awesome. wonder how long it’d take for the tank to run out after running modded Minecraft w/ shaders?
My generator runs basically the same consumption regardless of whether you have a 150 or 300w load on it so probably the difference is going to be negligible.
Was about to say. I can’t help but feel like it’d be easier to put solar cells on the back of the laptop and let them charge its normal battery.
I don’t think a solar array the size of the back of a laptop screen would be enough to run it, but it’d definitely be enough to charge it.
Nice profile picture, and by the way, I’m not on an airplane
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should” 😅
How off-grid are you really, if you still rely on a grid-connected service to get the gasoline? Should have called it diesel-punk instead
That’s gonna be one unhappy hard drive, if it still has one.
actually that reminds me — there’s a series on youtube about putting solar panels on machines and checking whether they generate enough power to power the device
so they put solar panels on a car and check whether the car runs,
they put solar panels on drones to check whether they fly
would this work for a laptop? how much solar panel area do you need to run the laptop? I assume 30W power usage, that means you need 0.15 m² solar panels under full sunlight, my laptop has like 15x20 cm which is 0.03 m² … so, you could only use it 20% of the time to give it time to recharge.
Also just for reference, a human consumes about 100W of continuous power output throughout the day (24-hour cycle).
You can calculate this easily. WHO recommends 2000 kcal a day, which is 8 MJ, divide by 86400 seconds in a day --> 100W average consumption.
