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Comment Re:If it's free, you are the product (Score 1) 99

My total mail archive over the last 12 years is 30GB. When you store images in the original quality from the camera, you can easily assume 5-15MB per image. That's not even RAW images. So 15GB is just 1000-3000 photographs and over 5 years, that's just 3-6 photographs a day. Even with aggressive pruning that's quite easy to do.

Comment Re:Well cult followers (Score 1) 338

Other countries use the base charge to pay for maintenance. You are also ignoring that residential PV installations are highly unlikely to ever cover all the power needs of commercial zones or cities. There might be time-based incentives to not export power to the grid, but that's more an argument of installing batteries with smart charging.

Comment Re: Erm (Score 3, Informative) 55

There was no replacement. It's just that the Intel driver folks at the time failed to properly implement core rendering and switched from one acceleration architecture to the other, each clearly superior to its predecessor except having a new unique set of bugs (sarcasm intended). Removing XAA killed hardware acceleration for 20 years of graphic cards, but that doesn't matter to people mostly paid by graphic card companies, since those older cards are obviously not generating revenue.

Comment Re:Learn how to read before commenting (Score 1) 58

Thank you for proving my point. The most obvious danger is that a PV cell with micro inverter should be used on a circuit of its own, because it can prevent fuses from working properly. This is especially problematic in America due to the lower voltage. Let's say you have a 15 amp circuit and a 500W PV cell working at maximum capacity. If there are also consumers on the circuit, the wiring can be constantly overloaded by 30% without the fuse triggering. That's easily enough to create a fire hazard if the installation is even a bit shoddy.

AC circuit breakers and fuses in electrical panels exist to protect downstream wiring. They do so regardless of direction of current flow. If less current feeding an outlet is pulled in either direction a protection device need not trip. If more is pulled in either direction the protection device interrupts the circuit.

If current from PV feeds local loads thereby reducing current required to be pulled from wires feeding an outlet this would indeed allow loads to run on the circuit that would otherwise trip the protection device. This isn't a dangerous condition because the wires feeding the outlet are not being overloaded.

This faulty reasoning is exactly why it is dangerous. If you have a 15A fuse, wiring is rated for a bit less than that as permanent load. If you have a PV feed of 5A in the circuit, consumers can pull at least ~17A without triggering the fuse. That's enough to start damaging the wires over an hour or two.

The other major safety issue is that non-electricans have a history of ignoring installation rules and wanting to install more than one PV system. Once you have two micro inverters, the island detection can become unreliable

This is baseless nonsense. Systems with large numbers of micro inverters are common especially here in the US due to requirement for MLPE stemming from 80v per conductor limit of NEC 690. Anti-islanding is a universal feature of all such devices. The kits come with standard electrical wall outlets and are designed for normal people to plug into an available outlet and have millions of installs.

Not all anti-island detection implementation are the same. Some can detect parallel inverter, others can't. Chances are high that the cheaper the micro inverter (and therefore the home PV), the less likely it is to actually be able to detect this case. Especially when mixing different models, things become out of spec very fast and anti-island detection is essentially the feature that keeps the upstream RCD working.

Comment Re:Learn how to read before commenting (Score 1) 58

Thank you for proving my point. The most obvious danger is that a PV cell with micro inverter should be used on a circuit of its own, because it can prevent fuses from working properly. This is especially problematic in America due to the lower voltage. Let's say you have a 15 amp circuit and a 500W PV cell working at maximum capacity. If there are also consumers on the circuit, the wiring can be constantly overloaded by 30% without the fuse triggering. That's easily enough to create a fire hazard if the installation is even a bit shoddy.

The other major safety issue is that non-electricans have a history of ignoring installation rules and wanting to install more than one PV system. Once you have two micro inverters, the island detection can become unreliable, effectively killing safety features like the RCD.

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