MidwestSolarpunk

Unfortunately many have to finance even for modestly priced vehicles. Saving just a few thousand dollars is unfeasible at lower incomes, depending on your situation. Right on for Toyota though, hard to find a more reliable car (maybe Honda).

Option two certainly is better, for those who can swing it! Being able to go carless and just use public transit/bike/walk everywhere is the new American dream honestly.

You telling me I can eat my cat’s food in times of need? I don’t think he’d forgive me if he saw me do that.

Iterating and innovating isn’t just for tech bros, you’ll know better next year and get an even better crop. Beautiful plants! I also love those air balloons, are those lights? Or just meant to reflect the sun?

Hell yeah! That’s part of what drew me to solarpunk too, the hopefulness of it. I see the world drifting further and further into a cyberpunk dystopia and it makes me want to say “nope, we can do better.” To me, solarpunk is that vision (even if it starts out as fiction) and the acts (small or large) of creating that brighter future in spite of the forces pulling in the opposite direction.

In a culture increasingly addled with AI slop and sanitized “commercially viable” visions of the future, taking the time to create art like yours for yourself and for its own sake is an act of defiance. That AND choosing an electric bike over oil-powered propulsion AND making tea with the power of the sun? Solarpunk as hell. ✊

For real though, get your auto loans through credit unions. Checking and savings there too. And mortgages. Actually, just don’t use big banks.

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I hear you. In just the last month we’ve had a run of bad luck: tree branch tearing down our service line (some siding repair $$ + tree needs trimmed & cabled $$$$), failed water heater (upgraded to heat pump $$$$), and overwhelmed sump pump causing slight basement flooding ($$$ DIY plus a lot of headache). We’d hoped to progress with our plans more this year but it’s just not in the cards.

However, something I’ll say that saves a lot of money is propagation instead of buying new plants. Get cuttings from friends and neighbors, some rooting hormone, and just make new plants. Even adding a few to your yard can make a big difference for the pollinators!

🤘

I will come back and share my findings if/when it happens.

Could make everything within ~3ft of the road non-edible natives, either companion plants for the food or native cultivars to help pollinators (which in turn, will help the edibles closer to the house). So there’s still a way to make this work!

My understanding is that they get into the soil and can then get into the plants. Then into your body.

Oh no! I was just saying how little conflict and migration we’ve had this last century+ of oil.

Well good on you for making it happen! Not sure where you are or the weather, but issues in storms/heavy wind? That’d be my concern here in the Midwest US (we get a few nasty squalls a year).

Hopefully a little ground-mount plug-in option will be available soon, if my state can bother to pass a bill allowing plug-in solar. Even two extra kW would be nice to have, and it’s DIY by design. I talked about it in another comment in this thread, but I’m hoping to put them over my raised garden beds, make more use of verticality but also diffused light is apparently really good for plants (a little at-home agrivoltaics).

Do you have any experience with plug-in + roof mounted solar on the same home? I’m told it’s technically possible, just not common.

Damn, guess I never looked that closely at the itemized parts for my install (if there even was one). Any idea why it’s so expensive? You know of any good alternatives?

The pros did a good job on mine, new roof and no sign of leaks yet. Of course, I’m not a pro, so maybe I do need to look for other options.

That’s true, it had a high skill ceiling, but there are a lot of casual worriers getting into it. Honestly great for the genre.

Real question: what did people feed cats in that day, before kibble? Constant stream of chicken and fish?

If you’re younger, I find worrying about the climate is a good entry into the hobby. It’s a looming threat that affects everyone, definitely a Big Deal, yet it’s a slow burn. Super accessible for novices and experts alike.

Oh I’m already in, on both platforms! I’m slowly but surely converting my grassy hellscape, it’s only like a fifth of an acre but I’m trying to go the permaculture/food forest route. A little more ornamental in the front than the back, but it’s come a long way since I started.

Front yard: planted a native tree, expanded an existing bed with 20+ natives and berry bushes, added two large mulch beds with native plants and large ornamental rocks. Gutter-fed rain barrel, statically watering our busiest bed with a soaker hose. Plan to add a rain garden to capture some runoff from a drainage trench running down the side of the yard, plus a hang out spot with seating and a fire pit, ringed in plants.

Side yard: my “rewilding” project, a narrow corridor between my carport and fence. I’ve boxed it off and sewn it with native seeds and other ornamental varieties, sunflowers took off the most this year but I’m going to keep chucking things at it until it’s basically an impassibly tall prairie. Two more rain barrels here, one with a soaker hose that runs through and the other that I use to fill watering cans.

Back yard: built a wooden platform patio, two large-ish raised beds, two apple trees (they’ve been having a rough go of it), and two greenhouses (a small one that’s more of a staging area for seeds before they go into the large beds, and a bigger one where I hope to grow some hardier plants year round). The greenhouse also lets me capture yet more water. I have three more in-ground no till beds planned, maybe next year. I had some sun diffusion shades up that my plants seemed to love, but a tree branch took the larger of the two out during a storm a couple weeks ago, so I’ll have to replace that next year. If plug-in solar gets passed in my state, I might install some panels over my beds to get a little agrivoltaic action going. Not really related to the concept, but also hoping to squeeze in a hot tub in one corner. 😅

Surely the rail mounting system they all seem to use is available somewhere, right? I haven’t looked into it yet but I was basically just going to copy the pros’ homework.

None seem to be perfect, but my Enphase system is connected via Ethernet (it still has a SIM for backup) and can be accessed locally if the internet is down entirely. Still, it’s not without its issues. Just yesterday I was reading about someone’s backup battery on the fritz because of a bad update. Your dad’s can’t connect to his Wi-Fi or anything? Is the SIM just good indefinitely?

Full local (with the option to connect for periodic firmware updates, because there are always bugs to fix and improvements to be made) would be great… but we can take the solarpunk to another level if we learn how to gut the firm and soft in these things, replace it all with self-made/open source alternatives, and flip the bird to the corps who barely want to upkeep their existing systems since there’s no money in it.

New here and also enjoying it! Hope it continues to grow and be more active with time.