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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • FTA:

    The so-called plug-in systems involve routing the direct current generated by the panels to an inverter, which converts it to an alternating current. They can then be plugged into a conventional wall socket to feed power to a home.

    So, yeah, almost certainly illegal in pretty much any grid-powered home in the US.

    The basic problem is that if the grid power goes down the inverter can back-feed the grid enough to electrocute the people who are working to fix it.

    Utilities require an approved isolation system of some kind that prevents that happening. They are pretty strict about this for various other technical and political reasons too, but evidently it is mostly a safety concern.

    I’ve got some good locations at home for panels, and about 500W in panels that I use for camping, but the equipment I’d need to handle easily and safely consuming the power at home is kind of expensive (just running an inverter and a battery for an isolated system is easy enough, I’ve got all that, but it’s not cheap to seamlessly connect it to my home power system). Would love to have a safe and approved system like what is described in the article.







  • what I’m wondering is what would it look like if a human in the deep sea was suddenly exposed to those pressures, as would happen if a submarine rapidly pressurizes?

    Kinda depends on how fast ‘rapid’ is. Consider that the pressure difference between the outside and the inside volume of the sub represents a potential energy. At a depth of 4km for a sub that size you’re talking about the energy equivalent of about 50 kilos of TNT (thanks to Scott Manley’s live stream for the estimate ).

    That’s a lot of energy even if the release is relatively slow, which means that the forces pushing things around as everything comes to equilibrium are quite large. There might be a rate at which the forces are low enough to not significantly damage a human body, but also fast enough that the people won’t drown before the target pressure has been reached. As a guess, an average untrained person under normal conditions could probably last at most 2 to 3 minutes before beginning to drown (an extremely well-prepared person can last 24 minutes 37.36 seconds, the current underwater breath hold record), so that’s like 22 psi per second (equivalent to a descent rate of about 45 feet per second or 30 mph, pretty damn fast).

    I’m skeptical that this would be survivable, and at a minimum it would be extremely painful. As the pressure increases the air in the lungs would compress collapsing the lungs. That alone isn’t a huge problem, breath-holding free divers experience that. However, as the air is compressed the volumes in the skull (nasal sinuses and inner ears) could no longer be pressure-equalized by forcing air into them, so the surrounding tissues would be pressed into them. As anyone who’s flown while congested can tell you even a few pounds of pressure is extraordinarily painful. At 22 psi per second I suspect the forces would at least tear nasal sinus and inner ear tissues, and possibly crack skull bone.