Solar at home

For the last month or so I’ve been working on making my home server (which also hosts this blog!) solar powered. It’s pointless but entertaining, and this is a first of a series of posts about what I learned on the way.

The summary is that a 55 W panel with 200 Wh of battery is enough to power a Raspberry Pi 4 with SSD during the European winter. You still need a mains power fallback, as a couple of days of grey weather will deplete the battery.

The last 7d have been fairly sunny:

This graph shows the power generated over a 16h window, so the peaks are the total generation for that day. Total for the week was 741 Wh or $0.15.