This post reminds me of the pre-steam days of gaming servers when certain clan members with fat pipes would host servers out of their homes or after-hours business racks, and often have little blog posts like this on their PHP-Nuke clan website or in-game MOTD, containing whatever little peril the admin had to deal with hosting the server... from kids tripping on wires to rats nesting in the chassis, it was always fun to read.
When resources are scarce, interesting stuff happens. Nowadays most outages are either due to expired payment, disk full, or provider outage. That's a good thing I guess? Just much less fun.
Learning the difficulties of self-hosting is a rite of passage for tech minded people.
It seems nearly everyone goes through a “How hard can it be?” phase where self-hosting seems like it will be a trivial way to save a lot of money. Then you get to learn about all of the things that can, and will, go wrong over time. Great learning experience.
And then there are the rose-colored glasses people who seem to forget all of the troubles they go through with self-hosting. A few companies back we had a guy who insisted on self-hosting some things on premises to save on SaaS costs. The amount of time we spent waiting for him to figure out why the server was misbehaving each week easily cost several times more than any hypothetical savings. Yet when you ask him, he’d claim it was virtually hassle-free. Management liked it because it “saved a lot of money”… as long as you ignore the cost of the time we lost to dealing with it.
>Management liked it because it “saved a lot of money”… as long as you ignore the cost of the time we lost to dealing with it.
bean counters tend to not evaluate your time as lost money. they are paying you anyways, so sunk cost fallacy or something. as long as they are not having to pay an invoice, they are "saving" money
I’ve had the opposite experience in recent years: Excess management and limited engineers leads to a desire to do deals, make contracts, and buy external solutions for everything. In many cases the integration costs are assumed to be $0 and we spent more time trying to make an external tool do something that could have been built in house in the same or less time.
In my thankfully short time at a company that operated this way, there was no upside either.
No decent engineer would stay there because there was nothing to build and management would always just contract out everything. Management, which was promoted internally from bad engineers, couldn't shop a good SaaS product or consulting firm and instead were consistently convinced into buying shitty Oracle products.
In-house products were badly done, which led to contracting out engineering, which led to no engineers, which led to getting screwed in the contracting.
Fixing that company would probably involve firing the whole tech department.
we spent more time trying to make an external tool
do something that could have been built in house in
the same or less time.
Yeah. :-/
There's also a version of the "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM" fallacy/truism at work, right? If management picks $WELL_KNOWN_PRODUCT_XYZ and things go sideways... well, they don't look foolish. But if they rely on... some random in-house engineer and things don't work out, they look like fools.
(Even though, in both cases, it actually just comes down to the same in-house engineers. Because the in-house engineers still need to do the integration work)
And we can expect it to continue going that way for smaller companies, since the tax changes in the US wrt R&D means it's better to buy than build, all else being equal, due to the tax deduction not having to be spread over time.
SaaS mostly exists to extract profits perpetually.
This doesn't mean it's not sometimes worth it, but when you add all the licenses together, there tends to be considerable savings if you're willing to self-host.
In reality both sides of the debate are often wrong.
The one I think about was when I was building a 3D model of a new office in Unity and the options were either purchasing a material or trying to design one myself with basically 0 experience of doing so. Something like $40 for the material or however long it'd take me to work it out.
The $10 option was genuine though, it was for some SaaS tool to monitor endpoints and text if things broke (about 9 years ago when I had basically zero coding experience) - so just one seat, or me trying to hack something together with text/email notifications and a nice UI. Even now I'd probably still prefer using something like that over writing something in-house, although I'd be more happy to look at self-hosting an open source option.
> The amount of time we spent waiting for him to figure out why the server was misbehaving each week easily cost several times more than any hypothetical savings.
I’m not going to argue with your points, but we’ve spent maybe a months worth of man hours figuring out why some SaaS service wasn’t working this year. Only for it to be because some Azure or Office365 or Sharepoint online service wasn’t healthy, and, to be fair, because some of our systems aren’t build very maintainable so that it takes a ridiculous amount of time to figure out what is wrong. Still, it would’ve probably cost us maybe a work-weeks worth of time if we were more competent, which sort of goes against the SaaS idea when the licensing is also approaching the cost of self-hosting and hiring a Sharepoint person. Well, if a Sharepoint person existed of course, but I bet you get my point.
We are a probably one of the small subset of companies that have moved things back in house and off of 365. We have a lot of data and the previous IT guy just lift and shifted everything to the cloud. There was a lot of problems so we moved it back to our own data center... Funny no one complains about things being slow anymore.
I dunno, my experience has been it's way more straightforward than faffing about with cloud services. It's not quite zero maintenance, but it's really not a significant portion of my time (and the cost savings are substantial!). And that's work. My personal self-hosting I don't think I've actually logged into for more than a year.
It's liberating to know that my emails can't be wholesale data mined or someone can't take down my web project if I commit some ToS thought crime. But doing it for clients was a ball-and-chain that I have no desire to do again. So for personal stuff it's great. For business stuff it's like adopting a pet that you can't leave alone too long. I would keep business stuff outsourced.
Maybe with the exception of Auth? Having some external SaaS startup be in control of your user database can be a bit nerve wracking. Especially if they get acquired by someone terrible.
I'm personally glad that Auth0 wasn't acquired by Oracle. What a nightmare scenario that would be... :D
Where I always go with this is to ask why our software is so damn horrible that it requires this much babysitting. Self hosting could be trivial if our software wasn’t slop.
I wonder how much we spend babysitting slop (either directly or indirectly through SaaS) vs how much it would cost to invest in engineering around automated and reliable deployment and resilient software?
Highly polished distributed file systems, databases, and orchestration tools that incorporated automatic replication and fail over would be a great start.
Don’t just say “it’s hard.” Of course it is. But is it cheaper to do this or to babysit rickety piles of junk?
Another possible way out is AI sysadmins. I wonder how far we are from AIs that can admin a cluster including upgrades and disaster recovery?
And that's a full desktop QEMU "server" - and i don't use initrd, because i don't need every driver in the tree, just the ones that work for my system. No AI needed. You boot a "kitchen sink" kernel, lspci -k, note down what it says, then just enable those things in the kernel and build it.
Even ubuntu being "quite supportive" is 30-45MB.
The kernel source tree is over a gigabyte, but that has to support everything it supports - arm, risc-v, x86_64, etc.
I have recently ventured into home-hosting some non-critical services and it's awesome. I can get 5Gbps residential internet and a dedicated IP through AT&T fiber, I have Solar+PowerWall for uninterrupted power... Once I got through the first few weeks of Network manager and router problems, I've had zero downtime the past 6 months. Since our workloads are very SSD and bandwidth-heavy, both of which are absurdly expensive on public clouds, we hit breakeven to our cloud services in less than two months.
Yeah, it's good when your internet connection is really reliable.
As a counterpoint to this, at my last house in Melbourne (Australia) I was thinking of doing the same. We have a "National Broadband Network" (NBN) deployed that most residential customers in the country are hooked into.
Shortly after moving into the house, the NBN needed to upgrade the network in the area. So, multi-hour outage. Then the same thing happened about 2 months later.
Thus, any idea of self hosting from my house was dropped and we've kept on using Hetzner. ;)
I use a vps for some things (my blog thst no one reads, or my teamspeak server for me a couple buds to use) but I still self host my plex, miniflux etc from home.
Yeah, for those purposes it'd be fine. I was more looking to run stuff which is fairly actively used (~1/2 million inbound connections per month) though doesn't need high bandwidth. For that, multi-hour outages isn't going to work. :/
Within the runtime environment spectrum's opposing ends self-hosted and SaaS, there exist several more choices, of which I consider dedicated servers at some hoster the sweet spot for most projects/businesses, big and small.
When I was young I ran a Team Fortress Classic server from my living room. It was hooked up to 768k SDSL (symmetric). It was 2fort-only—still a common thing in TF2—and popular enough that it was full 24/7, with a 20 player limit. Had lots of regulars, some of whom stayed in touch for years afterward. Some of the things that caused downtime:
The house's floor slab had a crack that wicked up groundwater when it rained too much, so my carpet would get mushy. Electronics off!
The anti-cheat software I ran (PunkBusters) went crazy after an update and banned anybody who connected. I noticed when my MRTG graphs flatlined.
Girlfriend once yanked out the Ethernet cable when we were having adult time. I didn't bother explaining that one to the players.
Heavy web browsing would cause lag, so I ended up learning how to do QoS via iptables (or its precursor, whose name I forgot).
At the time, the server used an astonishing 25 gigabytes of bandwidth a month. Always raised an eyebrow with the ISP tech when I called in, but they never complained.
I miss TFC. I remember learning how to conc-jump with the medic and figuring out the detonation points for pyro, and ultimately getting to the point where my presence was materially beneficial to my team. I never managed to get there in TF2; they had (at least at first glance - I presume the meta simply changed) blunted the ability of a single player to significantly move objectives forward. I had already been burnt by the changes between Day of Defeat, and DoD: Source, and the TF2 changes seemed to confirm that I was simply not a member of the target audience for the Source remakes.
You might enjoy playing Junkrat in Overwatch 2 if you like pyro. I skipped TF2 (the playful paintbrush texture were a turn-off at the time) but now 10 years later some of the OverWatch characters give me the same joy to play I had in original TFC (sniper=Widowmaker, medic=Mercy, soldier=Pharah, spy=Sombra)
The holy grail was always someone at a university with a 100 Mbps connection. That was godlike back in the day when most people still had 56k dial-up and the lucky people had ADSL which was, iirc, 768 Kbps.
1200 bps Unix shell access from TENet (Texas Educators’ Network) - thank you, Mr. Horner, my 9th grade US History teacher, for telling that nerdy girl who turned in all her papers in dot matrix print about what she could get her mother, a fellow teacher, to pay all of $5/year for.
Oh, and daring to have us look at Reconstruction’s sudden cut-off, Jim Crow and the fact that we were less than 30 years from its legal end in Texas, the Bonus Army, our rather late entry into WW2, the Japanese-American internment camps, and various shenanigans to do with the Vietnam War - you taught us that it’s possible to both love your country and to accept that it is by no means perfect.
Where do you live?! I thought we had it bad with 15Mbps ADSL in rural Vermont. YouTube and Netflix are surprisingly tolerable as long as only one person is watching. How is it for you at 5?
Do you get cell service? We don't and that's actually the bigger hassle. Wi-Fi calling is kind of shit, and the coverage outside the house is appallingly unreliable. iMessage is frustratingly unreliable too. I'll be on Wi-Fi, but it won't have gotten synched up with Verizon and it'll refuse to send a message until it does.
The GP may well only have 4G/LTE available, not the faster 5G/fixed wireless. In our neighborhood, the 5G/fixed wireless stuff is not yet available from T-Mobile or Verizon, only 4G/LTE.
And either way, even that coverage is spotty and speed varies highly on the time of day that you're trying to use it.
All this is fine for a tertiary backup solution (behind Starlink) but not as a primary method of accessing the Internet.
My parents had 5MBbps ADSL in the middle of downtown Atlanta for the longest time, and it'd get worse when it rained. They refused to get cable for "we don't even own a TV" ideological reasons or something, but apparently there was no way to get better internet from a telecom company.
144kbps(IDSL, actually ISDN), 384kbps, 768kbps, and 1.5mbps were incredibly common speeds during the early days and especially not in major cities. I was on dialup in BFE, switch to 64k ISDN in 97/98, and cable came alone at a whopping 3mbps in 99, complete game changer.
Higher speeds of DSL came along with ADSL2 in 2002/2003. There were higher than 1.5mbps before that, but you basically had to be across the street from the CO to get that.
I grew up in a small town that Europeans would have a hard time calling it a village. We were too far away from a CO to get DSL even with repeaters. No cable provider wanted to bring us service either as there were not enough people to ever recovering the expense of stringing the lines. The best I ever had while living there was 33.6k using a 56k modem
I moved into the dorms with two computers: a gaming laptop circa 2001 and a cheap AMD Duron based box running Linux and the counterstrike server software. Good times.
I remember back in the day when the something awful forums went down for a while because of hurricane Katrina.
They had a message up for a while that said they were unavailable because their servers were either underwater, or on the back of a looter's truck that was itself underwater.
Agreed. Feel like there’s a proper life lesson in here about enjoying the difficulties and embracing the journey. The destination might get a bit boring.
I feel like there's some liability on Netgear's part here: People can't be expected to know they can't leave it connected and a charging circuit should not constantly feed the battery.
It's a shame there aren't more affordable connectivity options for projects like this. Hotspots with batteries tend to be a lot cheaper than battery-less routers and USB dongles. The latter of which isn't even available for 5G.
I have a battery powered hotspot from my provider. Like a phone, it refuses to run off usb without a battery installed. But it yells at you and shuts down when plugged in for too long. I need to have it online all the time.
I "fixed" it by plugging the charger into an old school mechanical timer. Every six hours, it runs off the battery for 30 minutes. Has been working great for 2 years.
> It's a shame there aren't more affordable connectivity options for projects like this.
There's tons of options, and the "professional" grade routers aren't much more expensive than that consumer grade AC800s. With the one I have I get a removable SIM, dual SMA antenna connectors for MIMO with the ability to have an external high gain antenna, 5 ethernet ports, and a box that runs a version of ddWRT that I have full control over.
I have a ZTE MF286D that I picked up for €80 last year.
Installing OpenWRT requires soldering wires to access the serial port, so I haven't bothered yet (the native OS works fine for what I need), but as I understand everything is supported.
> charging circuit should not constantly feed the battery
To me this seems like a common misconception. I can’t see it being true - we’d see so many more battery fires out there if this was true, including in this very case (his setup would’ve burnt down within days in that case).
Why is that such a problem if it’s apparently fine to keep phones and other small devices connected 24/7? Aren’t charging circuits standard parts? I would have expected them all to work more or less the same
I've gone through more swollen LiPo pouch batteries at my CA desert property than I can count, fortunately none have caught fire.
The cheap ZTE devices in particular seem especially bad at keeping the thermals within a safe range. Even with a 100% full battery they'll let the electrolyte boil if left plugged in for their charging logic to do as it wishes in a hot environment.
What's so frustrating is practically every consumer electronics device seems to now have some form of LiPo pouch cells in them. I wish it were normal for manufacturers to offer chunkier variants using NiMH AA/AAA cells to consumers. Instead I've been resorting to "industrial" stuff having no battery at all like the Gl-Inet X300B [0] I eventually ended up with.
For a while I used a hacked together pack of four NiMH AAs with a battery board stolen from the LiPo on a ZTE/AT&T hotspot that kept swelling its pack. The battery board kept the device happy enough to believe it had the proper LiPo connected. The now external AAs stayed charged more-or-less, and didn't care how hot the ambient temps got through summer. But it was a sprawling mess of wires, soldered AAs arranged like an 80s-era RC-12L saddle-pack, kept ~together with Duck tape.
Because I gave zero fucks for how actually useful the battery life was, I just wanted the hotspot to turn on again after the LiPo swelled up so much the pogo pins lost contact. NiMH AAs were onhand in abundance for flashlights.
They had enough voltage to let the thing turn on and weren't going to catch fire, problem solved. Left it that way for years.
NiMH handles gentle overcharging gracefully. They generate a little bit of hydrogen, and the battery has an internal catalyst to convert it back. It can do that indefinitely as long as it's at a low rate.
When aggressively overcharged they may rupture, but they don't go up in flames like Li-ion does.
I’m not sure which SD card was chosen in the past, but I do recommend upgrading to an industrial one (and not just high endurance), and they are typically purchased through electronics components retailers/suppliers.
One brand I use is ATP for my ruggedized systems[0]. Yes, they may be an order of magnitude more expensive than even a high endurance from SanDisk or Samsung, but I started using these in 2015 or 2016 and found they hold in harsh terrain, tolerate brown outs (these devices are solar powered and run off of super capacitors), and JustWorks(tm).
I clicked that link expecting to see an outrageous price, but it appears to be $28 for a 256 GB highly reliable SD card. That doesn't seem right. Am I missing something?
There are varying degrees of ruggedness, this line I use when moisture or vibrations are not an issue (just temperature fluctuations and minor humidity changes).
Is this SD card as fast as an average SanDisk/Samsung card you get off Amazon for photography or cell phones? If so, I want to only buy these from now on; SD cards are notorious for failing when used as a boot disk in Pis.
The ones I used are sufficiently fast. Each one usually comes with a data sheet that have performance specifications. Some sacrifice speed and capacity for data integrity (writing twice), but in general, the main features and use-cases are highlighted on the first page.
I wouldn't use LiPo cells, especially consumer ones, for anything that stays on 24/7 and unattended in rural areas. LiFePo4 ones are safer and more durable although for medium/low current solar powered devices with backup battery, Lead Acid might still be a viable, cheap and very safe choice. Unfortunately the author area isn't served by broadband, so he's forced to rely on mobile connectivity, which restricts the options wrt available router devices. I would have either used a (more costly) external DC powered (no internal battery) router supplied by a 12V battery and the solar panel, or modified the portable one to work only through external supply.
Also, the author says the SD card in the Raspberry Pi developed errors. This is normal as SD cards are quite unreliable and prone to errors with time and use; I would have used a eMMC capable board, plus external disk with moderately aggressive spin down (to save power) for data storage.
The pictures do indeed speak for themselves! Goodness me.
What are the statistics on lithium-ion battery failures? Are they dangerous full stop, dangerous in certain scenarios (e.g. heat), or do we only hear about the failures when 99.9999… of the time they are fine as they are everywhere?
I like to do a bit of napkin math when storing batteries. I don't care what the technology or marketing says.
Think about it in terms of "A 33kWH battery roughly equals 1 gallon of gasoline". This is the most paranoid possible way to look at it, but it does help to establish some perspective. Energy is energy and if you don't really think it through, you may wind up with much worse than LTE modem/router fires.
Tesla power walls are an example of something I could never install in my home due to this simple math. I would not be able to sleep at night knowing there is a chance they could go up while bolted to my home. I've got one of those EcoFlow batteries (2kWH) for emergencies, but I keep it on a concrete slab (protected from weather) outside my home.
Go look at how a datacenter does their batteries if you want to get a sense of this very same paranoia at scale. All the DC-scale UPS systems I've seen typically consist of gigantic, low voltage cells installed in a manner expressly designed to deal with the worst case.
I think the density of the energy is what is most dangerous in my mind. A whole room full of lead acid batteries might not be very portable, but its a hell of a lot easier to inspect room-scale components, prove they are safe, and deal with emergencies before they turn into catastrophes.
> Think about it in terms of "A 33kWH battery roughly equals 1 gallon of gasoline". This is the most paranoid possible way to look at it, but it does help to establish some perspective.
Nah, that's the wrong way to think about it. Oxidation (well, burning) of lithium releases far more energy than the electric charge of the battery. Electric (dis)charge merely gives the initial heat to break structural integrity and set lithium on fire.
And even then the problem is not in the amount of energy, but in that it's almost impossible to extinguish a lithium fire. And the fumes from battery are thick and toxic.
> I think the density of the energy is what is most dangerous in my mind. A whole room full of lead acid batteries might not be very portable...
Nah again. Lead-acid just does not burn so spectacularly. And about the energy density - filled fuel tank of a regular car has much higher energy density than Tesla battery, but is significantly harder to ignite, easier to extinguish, and when burning, releases the energy slower.
The worst case scenario with a lead-acid battery is some manner of electrical fault leading to electrolysis in the batteries, releasing hydrogen and oxygen gas which subsequently may cause a very violent explosion.
I've never heard of a house blowing up like this, but it has happened with submarines.
> VAXen, my children, just don't belong some places. In my business, I am frequently called by small sites and startups having VAX problems. So when a friend of mine in an Extremely Large Financial Institution (ELFI) called me one day to ask for help, I was intrigued because this outfit is a really major VAX user--they have several large herds of VAXen--and plenty of sharp VAXherds to take care of them.
> (large skip)
> So now the whole data center was dead, sort of. The fire alarm system had it's own battery backup and was still alive. The lead acid storage batteries of the immortal power system had been discharging at a furious rate keeping all those big blue boxes running and there was a significant amount of sulfuric acid vapor. Nothing actually caught fire but the smoke detectors were convinced it had.
> The fire alarm klaxon went off and the siren warning of imminent halon gas release was screaming. We started to panic but the data center manager shouted over the din, ``Don't worry, the halon system failed its acceptance test last week. It's disabled and nothing will happen.''
> He was half right, the primary halon system indeed failed to discharge. But the secondary halon system observed that the primary had conked and instantly did its duty, which was to deal with Dire Disasters. It had twice the capacity and six times the discharge rate.
Long ago a friend's car battery exploded. The car was an early 70s chevy nova so there wasn't much in the way of electrical system to check. Everything was good and the next battery lived +5 years with no changes.
Always figured there was some minor defect or something that caused the battery to start emitting hydrogen.
Always wear safety glasses when charging, disconnecting, jump starting, etc. car batteries (lead acid). The small amount of hydrogen generated can ignite from a spark, and it's enough to explode the top and shoot plastic scrapnel everywhere. It won't seriously injure your meatier bits, but it's more than sufficient to take out an eye.
If I am ever in a scenario where I could have a house-sized battery system, I intend to have a disconnected concrete shed dedicated for storing them. Seems like a simple mitigation which would make me feel significantly better about the situation.
Take a look at this guy's setup. He put consumer modem into a closed outdoor box under the sun without any ventilation or cooling whatsoever. Given there is enough sun to power the solar battery, I'd bet the temp inside the box is >70 degrees C.
I am honestly amazed the whole setup lasted for so long.
That is what you have to plan for when dealing with consumers. That someone will stick the device somewhere in the messy real world because it is easy. You have to engineer for people "holding it wrong" when failures can lead to loss of life.
Author here. You are totally right, this whole thing was a self-confessed shoe-string hack job so it was far from ideal in any respect. I was pleased how long it lasted though and performed.
Regarding temps, the modem itself, I seem to remember, never reported a temp higher than 55 degrees C. I don't live in a very warm place though...
Jokes aside, hard to say, but it's mostly scenarios.
Some batteries have proper venting (or puffing), protection circuits and sensors to prevent thermal runaway, and they are very unlikely to fail catastrophically, they would stop working before, generally.
Now those take more space, so such features are often offloaded onto the PCB designers to make them fit, and you may trust them more (or less) than the battery manufacturer.
More or less the same can be said about the charging circuit, and how it might handle low voltage or trickling/stop charge.
Personally I've seen flashlights that burn through the 18650 without respecting the minimum voltage whatsoever, and that would put 5V to charge. There a proper battery will refuse to charge or just die, but an unprotected one might catch fire.
As anecdotal data, after dozens and dozens of devices, I've only owned two batteries that became spicy (without catching fire), a Chinese-brand laptop and a cheap quadcopter battery.
Seeing the carnage I thought that there were no fuses for devices powered from 12V lead acid battery and some few hundred amps went through device.
But, this is not really a failure of solar power system, just failure of a Netgear device. It seems that it used it's battery as a high current source for when it needed more peak power for wireless transmission, thus the instability and failures when just plugged to USB charger. I don't think such constant drain and constant recharge was really healthy for the battery. I wonder if it was/is stated in manual that it was supposed to be used charged and unplugged and not really as full time usage device.
I have some old phones mounted on my walls in various locations as control panels for Home Assistant. However every now and then one of them gets hot and its battery starts bulging, and I have to toss it. It's a problem even though they are (old) flagship phones.
I'm looking for some kind of tablet that is wall-mountable but doesn't contain a Lithium battery. Some other kind of safe battery (NiMH?) that can last through momentary brownouts and power cuts of a few minutes would be nice.
How are you powering the server running home assistant and all the smart devices during the brown out? Can you hook up the tablet to the same power source? Or if they are not powered, what do you expect to manage during the
Brownout?
The server is a VM on a rack-mounted machine with a UPS.
The tablets are wall-mounted in multiple places elsewhere in the apartment. I don't want them to go into a full reboot cycle if power is lost only for a couple of seconds or even minutes.
Unfortunately the Pi-s, especially the 4 and 3, have really finicky power circuitry. That lack of robustness combined with your usual SD-cards that can't handle it either is in my opinion one of the worst aspect of the Pi-s.
I had a barely used first generation iPhone in my safe and went to get it the other day to show it to some friends just to discovered it had blown up. It didn't look charred as your modem but it definitely exploded. Next day I ordered a few fire retardant boxes where I put all of my lithium batteries and power banks.
The problem is that there is plenty of stuff that you probably don't even realize has a Lithium Ion battery in it. With a phone at least it's obvious. But what about that controller for your e-bike? Camera? Remote control? Headphones? Authentication token? Toy? Microscope? and so on... they're everywhere. And they are not always announced properly, especially smaller pouch cells.
I too had dreams of an all solar future, until recently when my bms had failed, I temporarily removed it so I could still have power to my well... Fast forward a few weeks and we had a frost. About $2k worth of Prismatic cells are now swelling and probably at 20% the original capacity. Ughh. I still want to do solar, but it's expensive, unreliable and... Maybe kinda dangerous if you're doing not so kosher things.
>I was actually aware this could happen and technically shouldn't have left the battery in the device while it was hooked up to power constantly
This really isn't on them at all, a properly designed Li-ion system will be absolutely fine left plugged in 24/7. Netgear either doesn't understand how to design a safe battery powered device, or this was a rare case of a bad battery just going off regardless of how you treat it.
I’ve had a LiPo swell on me once…it was embedded in a tracking device I used for anti theft on my car…tucked away hidden…
I always knew in the back of my mind that I should check on it since it got so hot inside…
Anyhow I sold the car and removed the tracking device and opened it up…that’s when I noticed the swollen LiPo. Counted my blessings that day.
I run a NetGear M5 in my campervan. It has a battery that is charged with the solar on the van. The thing gets stupid hot and I'm always afraid it is going to combust. I just leave the back cover off of it and put a fan on it, and that seems to help.
For the price of a mifi and a pi you can get a cellular wifi router and run code directly on there. Either from "random string of characters" on Amazon or Mikrotik or Teltonika. Then you have something designed to run 24/7 and most of them will run off DC power.
Of course the router isn't as nice of a software environment as a pi but that's part of the fun, no? If you want easy just use GitHub pages or square space or whatever.
This is why I cringe a little when people say "you can buy li-ion batteries for this much, therefore scaling it up to do renewable energy storage is cheap enough to do right now."
Remember there isn't enough lithium for grid scale renewables and it's dangerous, but there is enough lithium for disposable vapes which are completely safe for ordinary trash.
(/sarcasm, obviously, I have no idea how those things are legal)
They're different in scale but the cells are pretty much identical. There are only so many manufacturers and so many form factors and just about all of them are used industrially as well as for consumer stuff.
Where they differ is how the cells are organized, safety measures taken outside of the cells themselves and things like cooling, mechanical construction of the assembly and so on. And even big manufacturers get things wrong, notably: Bosch. They have a pannier mounted e-bike battery pack that has serious problems with water ingestion, boards frying and balancing wires catching fire.
Are there any super capacitors based batterys which emulate a LiIon which won't bloat but will still act as a battery for intermittent high drain situation?
Charge level control for such devices should be standard. All my always connected devices with LiPo batteries have led to eventual bloating and safety hazards.
I think not. It keeps battery cycles low and is likely better than some other behavior. As far as I remember, batteries don't like to go way below 20% and don't like fast charging from 80% upwards. However, to my knowledge, it is wise to drain the battery 1-2 times a year so that the charging controller can calibrate. A way to do that is to type "yes" in your terminal (or 3-4 terminals) and wait, it will make the CPU run at 100%. After your MacBook shut off, leave it for some hours before you charge it again.
Somee MacBook Pro models also incorporate a feature called "Battery Health Management."It can help optimize the charging patterns based on your habits and usage to reduce the wear on the battery over time. It may slightly adjust the charging levels to prevent the battery from staying at maximum charge for prolonged periods (to stop battery aging).
When resources are scarce, interesting stuff happens. Nowadays most outages are either due to expired payment, disk full, or provider outage. That's a good thing I guess? Just much less fun.