Our UK garden is about 75x75m, which is a decent size, but not massive. About half to 3/4 of it is grass, which I hardly ever water, and haven’t this year even though we had a drought.

We have 5 IBCs, and several other randomly-sized water butts (~7000l total (1500gal UK, 1850gal US)), to keep our veggies and fruit bushes watered. We ran out this summer, and had to use about 500l of tap water until it rained again :(

Dry periods are likely to get worse in future, so I need to get more water storage. I also want to start using rain water to wash clothes (or at least fabrics we use for our pet rabbit houses), but I need a good filtering system first.

We have 2 IBCs stacked, and I was trying to use the top one to gravity-feed our downstairs toilet cistern for flushing and worked well, although it took 7 minutes for the cistern to fill, which isn’t great if you have to accommodate a lot of people. It is good enough for us though.

I could add a pump to speed up the process, but I’m trying not to add more cost and complications to the system unnecessarily.

I can fit 1 more IBC in somewhere - they don’t look pretty, but they are very practical. I normally transport them home on the top of my car on a roof-rack… and drive slowly! :)

It would be good to know which wifi controller and “alternative controller” you are planning to use. I’m after one, but so far, most of them I have seen need crappy apps. I want mine to use an open API etc.

You can also buy IBCs with galvanised sides, which is pretty cool. They can be £10-20 more expensive, but makes the whole thing more robust, in my opinion.

Eg: https://smithsofthedean.co.uk/product/ibc-tank-1000-litre-galvanized/

Ours have little holes drilled in the front side every 100l to expose the plastic tank underneath, so you can see the liquid level.

I would recommend this type so you don’t need a separate cover, which could get ripped etc.

Cool! but “Scania didn’t disclose how much stuff its new long-range truck can haul.”, which isn’t very helpful - is 447miles with no trailer or load?

… Also “often a waste”??? always a waste. People (myself included) need to get better at planning meals so there’s less food waste generally. I’m guilty of wasting food sometimes, and I get really cross with myself.

No, some things last for a long time, others don’t.

For example:

1. We bought 3 pallets of Almond milk (by mistake! I only wanted 1) at an auction a few years ago. It is all in 1L tetrapaks, and although it went out of date in August 2024, it is still good, and we use it every day.
2. Crisps - We have a pallet of Walkers cheese and onion crisps in “aluminium” (mylar?) bags bought at a similar time. They are still crunchy and taste fine. Some Morrisons own-brand dorito-type corn chips in normal plastic (with see-through section) bags which came in the same package, didn’t fare so well. They lasted less than a year after their BBE date.
3. Organic Seaweed sheets - these were also packed in “aluminium” (mylar?) bags too (with moisture inhibitor “pillows”. They lasted well past their BBE date, but don’t taste nice when eaten straight from the bag - maybe this is something to do with the oil that was used (and possibly the same reason as why the “doritos” didn’t last long)?
4. Beer - different types age differently. I don’t like beer, but I had loads of Fosters and Stella left over from a party. Both had similar BBE dates. After about a year past their BBE, the Fosters cans started frothing when opening (even though they weren’t shaken), and made my stomach feel a bit weird (I was trying to make shandies out of them as I can cope with that!). Stella Artois, on the other hand, was still fine at the same point, and for several months after.
5. Pepperami - I ate one that was 10 years out of date. It tasted fine, and I didn’t die, which was a bonus.

I don’t risk it it with meat so much, but you can usually tell as it changes colour obviously.

As I’m trying to eat less meat and more vegan alternatives, a lot of the alternatives to sausages and burgers etc. last a long time after their BBE. Recently one vegan burger had a bit of mold on it, so I scraped it off before cooking it and it tasted fine - I wouldn’t have done that with a meat version :/

It really annoys me when people throw stuff out the day after something goes out of date. Whatever it is won’t become immediately radioactive/poisonous, are they that stupid?? grrr

Some induction hobs have a timer function which could help. Our cheap oven also has a timer on it, and the rice cooker flips to “warm” mode when things are cooked.

Also, we have all our kitchen appliances connected to one of these: https://www.netio-products.com/en/device/powerbox-4kx, which you can program to turn off and on at certain times.

I’ve got mine set up to the travel kettle, so i can fill the kettle, press the kettle button and then leave it ready for when I want a cup of tea. I then have a small script I run from my laptop to turn the power on. When it’s boiled and turned off, I get an alert that it’s time to go to the outdoor kitchen and make myself a cuppa 😋

Over-engineered? for sure. Does it feel good? also, for sure :)

We have a small flight case on wheels that we use as an outside kitchen with the following appliances:

• 1 induction hob - 1.9KW max
• 1 rice cooker - 400W, which also works as a slow cooker
• 1 small oven / grill - 800w
• 1 “travel” kettle (0.5l) - 900w

They are all plugged into a 2500W low-frequency inverter which is connected to a 48V 5KwH LiFePO4 battery, and is serviced by 3 PV systems, two 800w and 1 360w in various position.

I would recommend not using 12 or 24v for cooking, as your cables will have to be really short and thick.

We can use all the appliances at once on the inverter (athough the inverter is rated for 3kw over 4 minutes max which helps) without problems.

Last year, we cooked on it every day for around 2 weeks when the weather was good (and I was working from the garden), and it was very reliable.

All those ratings are max, and the induction hob worked really well, and pulsed from 900w to 1.7kw during cooking pasta sauce once it got up to temperature, for example. It was only £35 from some dodgy chinese make, which has an advisory on it from our regulator about fusing problems, but we use it outside and there’s various fuses between it and the battery, so we should be ok :/

I really wanted to get DC equipment so I wouldn’t need to use an inverter, but finding any is difficult. The best DC kettle I have found is only 1L and 24v with a “din” connector, and I haven’t had chance to try and set that up with a DC-DC converter yet. A friend of mine modified a little oven like we have to work off ~42v DC, which worked, but I don’t know how he did it :( I did buy a 48v immersion heating element, which I wanted to use to heat water for washing up etc, but I’ve not tried that yet either :(

There are various DC fridges you can get for camping, but we don’t use them on the system .

Hope that helps!

It’s just started getting warm and sunny here, so we will start using the system again when I am working outside. We have only used it once this year so far.

There’s also plasma hobs coming out from China, which look interesting, and might behave more like cooking on gas. I would like to try one sometime, but they aren’t very common yet.

I set up OpenFire (https://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/) for my XMPP server, and it was very easy on my recent version of Ubuntu. It’s also easy to update when new versions come out.

I’ve heard good things about Prosody (https://prosody.im/), but I’ve not tried it myself.

Done, but I feel there could have been more questions about the sustainability aspect.

Just “will your instance be running in 12 month’s time” wasn’t really granular enough imo

He may have a point, but as someone else pointed out, a lot of these self-hosted services are running on out of date equipment that wouldn’t be used for anything else.

I run all my Fediverse stuff on an old Dell R620 that a friend gave me. Mine is totally specialised for hosting… Yes, it is overkill for my ~10 users, but hopefully more friends will join. Also, it’s not the most efficient way of doing it - the device is probably 10 years old and uses ~130w 24/7. A newer NUC or equivalent would probably only use 40-50w. However, who else is going to use this machine? No company would touch it, “everything” is going cloudy, so it would either be stripped for parts and the rest dumped either in landfill or sent to some 3rd world country.

You can claim it’s a waste of electricity to use it, but a lot of energy and materials were used to create the server in the first place, and most of that will be lost, even with recycling.

People run Fediverse (and other services) on a Raspberry PI - fine for a couple of users, but too restrictive for my use. These things only use 5-20w, which is amazing.

My electricity supply is from a “green” supplier, and I have a local SolarPV system that powers the system when there is enough sun. Last summer I managed to run it for over a month using my local system only. There’s no reason that we can’t build more renewable sources of electricity. Here in the UK there’s a proposed 140 DCs in in the planning phases, which is ridiculous, all for AI BS.

Self-hosting isn’t for everyone of course - not every household should do this, but there’s no reason why groups of friends, families or “activity” groups couldn’t do this effectively.

It’s absolutely optimized for the long term - how many Google services have been discontinued when there are still users, just not enough to be profitable? Self-hosted services can run as long people are interested. A mail server created 20 years ago is still compatible and useable today because it uses ratified, slow-moving standards.

Oh, sorry, the bot is running on Mastodon, and Lemmy doesn’t seem to show them, try this: https://mammut.gogreenit.net/@BirdNet instead

Nice! That graph looks way better than the standard Birdnet one!

I am running the standard version, and I am using the standard Mastodon python module to upload the daily stats here: @BirdNet@mammut.gogreenit.net

It seems to include a battery, which would not be necessary if you just want to save money rather than it being useful in a blackout (although their website says you can’t using in a blackout). Removing the battery element would decrease the cost a lot.

Thank you for the update!

I don’t see why we should restrict “regional” communities. Maybe when Lemmy gets bigger this can be done, but now, if creating more regional-specific communities bring more people to the Fediverse, I don’t see a problem. Surely you can enforce moderation standards if required?

There may be factors about solarpunk that for some reason only apply to regions, and supporting other languages might not be a bad idea surely? Ideas and good articles will bleed through to other communities eventually, surely?

hahaha! I just saw the story about it: https://www.boredpanda.com/obi-wan-kenobi-jesus-portrait-mormon-parents-prank/

“This is awful, but what can we do?”

er, I can think of a simple thing to do about it…

They could have been a bit more forceful in their response to a stupid idea…

I run OpenFire (https://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/) as my server. Upgrades are easy, and I like the 2000-era interface as it doesn’t take up much room, but if I was starting from scratch again, maybe I would try a different server, as the way it deals with Lets Encrypt certs is a bit annoying when it’s time to renew - this could be user error, but it’s not obvious.

ejabberd having it’s built-in “certbot” equivalent sounds great!

I use Monocles (Android) and Dino (Linux) clients, and it’s pretty stable. Monocles also allows some server commands from the client, which is pretty cool. Sorting out TURN was a faff, but it doesn’t help that my server is behind 1:1 NAT I guess :/

Still, now that is sorted, it’s great :) I just need to find out a way of enticing my friends to use this instead of WhatsApp etc <sigh>

https://woof.tech/@Purple/115344050312673769 has some installed if you have questions, although they are in .nl rather than .de