Just a thought, Solar powered PC's....

[Cogman]

Well, Had to come some time . How possible would it be to hook up a recharable battery that can provide enough juice to power a pc and have a solor panel charging the battery and supplying power to the pc. Also, with all the extra heat that a pc generates, how possible do you think it would be to make an energy converter to supply the pc on its own heat give off . And another thing (full of ideas) I had a little electronic kit, It had a small plate that would give off a small amount of electricity when there was some noise. Why havent power people and such used this?!?!? I mean if you can make electricity from noise, My pc should have enough to supply the city of new york power. . I mean they could put the stuff in their hydro electric dam's and at LEAST supply their own stations with power from the noise the dam makes.

 

[Evadman]

Assuming a PC uses 300 watts of power, then you will need 500-600 watts to power it. The PWS's are only 60% efficent sor so. The rest is waste heat.

a 600 watt photovoltaic cell would be somewhere in the range of 6 square yards, assuming 100 watts per yard which is about the best I can remember.

If you have a large roof, and coat it with cells, it would certainly help, maybe even create excess power for other stuff. My roof is 1400 sq feet for reference

Powering a generator off the heat generated by your PC is not really feasable. Most generators work by boiling water. Little too hot for your PC Of course, there may be other ways. You may be able to boil water in a pressure (vacuum) vessel and get your steam that way.

 

[RU482]

most PC's don't really use 300W of power

example
I have an SV-24 PC, 900Mhz Celeron with a DVD drive and a LCD monitor hooked up in my van.
I also had a 12V inverter to create 120VAC. The most load I saw on the 12V side was ~8A (96W) when running the setup off of a 12V lab supply.
take into account that my LCD is rated @2A/12V (24W) so my PC was actually only using 72W max. This is also assuming 100% efficiency of the inverter, which I think was actually only ~85%. meaning that 72W x .85 = 61.2W.

No wonder the thing only had a 150W PS

Considering an awesome price per watt for solar panels is ~$4, it would have taken a minimum of ~$384 in solar panels (in full sun, mind you) just to sustain my PC and LCD. Not to mention any energy storage (batteries) or inverter to get you to 120VAC, so chunk on another $250 as well as another $384 to get a more realistic set of solar panels.

$1018 for all this power producing capability

considering electricity costs ~ 10 cents/kilowatthour, I would have to run 106042 hours (over 12 years) just for the solar system to pay for it's self ($1018 buys 10180kWhs of electricity / .096kWhs the PC and LCD uses) (excluding any Utility fees, ect)

Just a thought

 

[Turkey]

Solar powered PCs are being made but they are for very special circumstances... check out RISCOS in Africa and do a search on google for solar powered computer. You might be surprised.

 

[Mday]

some monochrome PDAs can be made solar powered, but the size of the panels are still large...

despite the fact that solar is so clean, the amount of space required to place panels, and the efficiency of most panels SUCK!

i'd rather power my pda by walking (army boots, etc)...

 

[Shalmanese]

Hmm... Idea. My laptop sucks up roughly ~15 - 20W of power in typical use (P3-M 933, 14.1", Radeon 7500). I measure the back of my screen to be around 30cm*30cm or about 1/9 th of a sq yard. Thats about 10W of usable power which would just about double my battery life (14hrs, w00t!). Now that would almost be the equivilant of a 2nd battery which works otu to be around ~$100 - $150.

1. Can a laptop take a small amount of charge from the AC slot and get the rest from battery?
2. How much would it cost to mount a solar panel on the back of my screen and have it feed a regular 10.8V through the AC line
3. How much does voltage fluctuate through a solar panel, could it harm the battery
4. Just about how much light am I going to get in practice assuming Im not going to be lying down in the middle of the day with the solar panel at 90 degrees to the sun
5. how much weight would a solar panel add?

 

[pm]

One of the talks that has been at the last two conferences that I attended was on microsensors. I can't remember the buzzword that was used to describe them off-hand but the basic concept was a really small, hyper efficient chip that is capable of generating it's own power and that can communicate wirelessly (packet-based, low-frequency radio) with other microsensors in a network array fashion. Uses for these things were pretty far-reaching but probably the most useful would be for structural integrity of an object like a bridge, or monitoring of enviromental conditions within a building.

The generation of power was one of the more interesting problems with these theoretical constructs that researchers keep themselves busy imagining. The hypothetical power supplies for these things were based on a number of ideas such as accoustical/structural piezoelectric (sound and/or structural vibrations vibrate a crystal which generates electricity based on the piezoelectric effect) and themocouples (differing temperatures on two different surfaces generate electricity) or more conventional (radiation, solar, fuel-cell, battery, capacitively coupled AC, etc.).

One of the far-fetched applications was a form of distributed computing based on a whole lot of these things working together to solve distributed computing problems. Not exactly on the topic of the thread, but this just kinda reminded me of them.

 

[BillClo]

It can be done, but it isn't cheap. If you're talking powering a laptop, it's a lot less expensive than a desktop. Here's an article on how this fellow rigged up a multi-source charger for his laptop batteries. Seems he was in the field alot, and had problems with keeping his batteries charged up. http://www.homepower.com/files/laptoppv.pdf

I have a solar rig here at the house, and let me tell you, it would be pretty expensive to power my desktop. Figure a 300w 12v AC power consumption. The solar panels would run probably $12000-$15000 alone. You need 3000+ watts of panels, and an inverter to convert the DC power to AC. Such a large inverter would probably cost a couple thousand bucks at least. Then if you want to use your system when the sun isn't shining, you need a very large battery bank. All in all, you're probably looking in the neighborhood of $25,000+...

A laptop is much easier to power.

Now if you had a property that's very windy all the time, you could get a good sized windmill, use an inverter on it, and sell the excess to the electric co. Still,you're unlikely to see the break-even point, moneywise, until you're old and grey.

 

[Mingon]

Solar powered Laptop chargers are available - 8 hour charge for 3 hour run time, so 3-4 running together should be able to work.

 

[drag]

ya the laptop solar-power thing sounds good, but that RISCOS computer is a crock.

I am sorry, I know this is inapropriet, but stuff like that pisses me off. Look at the specifications of it: ARM 7500 proccesor (50 mhz), 16M RAM, 716M harddrive (at a 1000 dollars per pop).

My old 486DX could kick this computer's butt.

And it uses 40watts of power!?! Somebody said that their laptop uses about 25 watts and that would have a decent harddrive and processor!

you could go a buy a bunch of old laptops (<400mhz) that are cheaper and be better off than purchasing than the RISC-P.O.S.

It is obviously a con. What would a developing country use it for? Surfing the web? from what connection, a satalite dish hooked to the ridicules solar panel? what possible use for this computer would be for ANYBODY. You can't program with it. You can't set it up as a server. You can't use it to control manufactoring equipment. What? For educational purposes, thats all. It's silly.

Look at the specifications for the OS designed for that computer. Sounds like a rip-off of QNX's demo disk to me. How is a crappy computer with no purpose other than surfing the web be any use to modernizing a nation.

Sounds like some dishonest bussiness or con-man made a booboo when making/buying a new type of computer and has a bunch of these p.o.s's laying around and knows the only people stupid enough to actually buy these things are moronic enviromentalists or third-world dictatorships that don't know better.

They make it sound like they are doing the world a favor by unloading this crap on african nations that would be better off investing their limited resources elsewere (like learning modern agricultual technics)
GRRRHRHRGHHH!!

(sounds alot like these NC computers)

read down to the bottom of the article. PC prices kept at riduculesly high prices?!? So powerful?? people who use PC's incapable of understanding their complexaty??!!! his stupid NC would sell at 500 when you can buy a budget system for as little as 400 dollars! People like that are DANGEROUS.