I also can’t really come up with reasonable uses for excess power, there is only so much a household can use.

I just looked up the law and it’s even more fucked up than I remember. It only applies to installations with > 2 kWp, so the famous Balkonkraftwerke are not affected.

As long as you don’t have a smart meter (only about 5% of homes in Germany have a smart meter yet, disregard the 23.3% “Pflicht-Rollout”, they are misleading)), you are only allowed to feed up to 60% of the installed power back to the grid (e.g. if you have 10 kWp installed, and you generate an excess of more than 6 kW, you have to limit its output so that you only feed 6 kW to the grid).

The regulations for installations with a smart meter also changed, the details are too convoluted for me to really care, but in the end the new law aims to reduce solar power output during “noon”/peak production hours.

There are several reasons this annoys me, but the worst is, that the grid is not really “overloaded”, it’s mostly just that coal/oil/gas power plants don’t get regulated down as much.

Take, for example, this months electricity generation in Germany (You can click on the legend below to filter out generation types) - even though solar, wind and biomass is regularly able to provide enough power to meet demand for several hours a day, fossil fuel power plants are running during those times. Even gas, which supposedly is so flexible and only there to provide power when necessary.

Anyway, this is getting way too long already - the blame is put on solar and renewables, when it is also fossil fuel power plants that are not properly regulated.

That’s an interesting concept, sounds similar to the german WG (Wohngemeinschaft), but that’s, to my knowledge, also mostly used by younger people that are still studying or similar.

Should have mined bitcoin.

And since we’re already straying off topic, germany “recently” introduced a law where you have to limit rooftop solar production to 60% of the installed peak power (you’re not allowed to feed more than that back to the grid). Now I’m wondering whether I should start mining bitcoin at my parents place, despite my disgust for bitcoin. I’ll have to see whether I can get some E-waste to put together an appropriate rig, I’m definitely not getting new hardware for that, if at all.

I like your positive outlook on things, even if I personally don’t share it. I hope you can keep it :)

I’m curious whether the 2000 Watt goal can be achieved without some kind of “degrowth”, but it’s hard to argue with the current approach, as it still sounds so much better than what most other nations are doing.

As for housing and apartment sizes, I think that’s a trend that’s visible in almost all developed nations. I’m not sure how it was in other European countries, but at least in Germany up until a few generations ago it was not that uncommon to live in a house with multiple generations. (That’s a point that maybe doesn’t really belong here, but one could argue that there is no “real” housing crisis - in the sense that it’s self-inflicted - as living space per person and the size of apartments have been increasing over the last few decades, so obviously there won’t be enough housing)

I wish that concept was more well-known. I think I stumbled upon it the first time when I read the ministry for the future. However that concept includes stuff that makes people get defensive very quickly. E.g. switching to a vegan diet, reducing reliance on cars or sharing living spaces with more people (I guess the last one is so far out there that many don’t even consider it).

Some of those things can probably be achieved otherwise, but it’s going to take way more resources than … well, not doing those things. Electric cars require more resources than public transport, reducing energy for heating per person requires more insulation if you live alone…

Does the implementation of this in Switzerland include approaches relating to degrowth or is it mostly based on technological improvements?

Yep. I mean… the wikipedia article is right there, linked in the comment… according to it, Switzerland had a primary energy consumption of 5.1 kW per person in 2008 and reached 4 kW per person in 2020. So still quite some way to go

It’s 2 kW total primary energy consumption, including everything. Transportation, industrial production, food production, your own electricity consumption, everything

There also is a deposit on glass bottles in germany. Just not on all of them, but the same applies to plastic bottles

All of this sounds great, especially +1 for avoiding unnecessary travel! A lot of people start to drive more once they get an EV, as it’s “more eco-friendly”, in the worst case creating a rebound-effect. It takes willpower and thoughtfulness not to fall into that behaviour

Glad we could be of help :)

Using it as an on-demand machine sounds like the perfect middle-ground! My jellyfin-server is also not running 24/7. Sometimes I think I could as well host jellyfin on the same machine that I’m watching/listening stuff on, as I’m the only one using it. But I started similar as you - I had a machine laying around, and wanted to do something with it.

When it comes to upgrading your machine, which I guess is still years in the future, as you asked for 0$ tips, I’d suggest first seeing how much “compute power” you actually need. People tend to oversize their machines (that also is a problem in data centers [or at least used to be, not sure about AI data centers]), so before you upgrade your machine, check how high its utilization is.

The hill I’m willing to die on is saying that people have too much RAM, and underestimate swap.

As for beginner-friendly Linux distributions, I’m not sure if I can help there, I feel like I’m still somewhat winging it. But there seem to be articles and wikis for everything, or someone somewhere had the same problem and others with more knowledge helped out.

In general, and I’m not sure if that’s blasphemy, I’d say that most Linux distributions are interchangeable. They mostly only differ in the packaging system, the default desktop environment, and the preinstalled software. At most you get a different init system. (Please someone correct me if I’m wrong :D)

I sporadically tried Ubuntu ages ago, then “seriously” started with Manjaro (should have gone for Arch, in the long run Manjaro seems to be just causing problems), and then switched to Void Linux. Arch has a nice wiki that is useful independent of what distro you run. Void Linux also has a nice handbook.

I like the minimalistic approach of Void Linux, and I think it was recommended for old computers somewhere (any distro coming with xfce by default probably is recommended for that, but Void Linux really comes with basically no bloat). It requires some tinkering, as the base install is, well, pretty basic, but it’s doable. I can play games on my desktop PC and have jellyfin running on it in a docker container on my old (now headless 💀) laptop. My recommendation for it would depend on how well you are versed in using Linux in general.

Otherwise, as I said, Linux distros are pretty interchangeable. Point at one that looks nice and shoot. If you don’t like it, just try another one, reinstalling (at least when you don’t have a lot of data stored on it yet) is not really a big deal.

Probably. Anecdotally I can say that I have an Eastpak backpack that served me well for the last 15 years, and still does. However I’ve recently been shown this beautiful website, which I think fits this community pretty well:

https://www.worseonpurpose.com/p/your-backpack-got-worse-on-purpose

Granted, they even kind of say, that Eastpak is still good, and I also couldn’t recommend other brands.

Use it as my gaming rig

sent from my i5-750 with 8 GB RAM

Only somewhat kidding. I don’t use that machine to browse the internet as it uses too much electricity for idling 90% of the time, but I do actively use it for games that require a “beefier” GPU than the iGPU of my laptop (which usually just means needing more VRAM. Damn modern games).

Pre-post edit: Sorry for the long text, this definitely got out of hand and might not even be very useful 😅

[…] use it for experiments […] Turn it into a local server, NAS, self-hosting box

I’d be curious what kind of experiments require additional PCs. Networking stuff and self-hosting comes to mind, but that doesn’t necessarily require additional PCs, and desktop-PCs tend to have too high power consumption for letting it idle >90% of the time. NAS servers or even something like jellyfin also don’t need a lot of compute power. My jellyfin server is running on a 15 year old shitty but very trusty 18 Watt E-350 APU. Then again, don’t listen to my negativity - if you have a use case for that PC, use it!

Use it to learn more about local AI, although I assume the GT 730 is far too limited for most modern models

I’m not familiar with local AI, but I wouldn’t expect to get far with that GPU if you mean LLMs. Maybe if you have the 2 GB version, but even then, it will be slow. It has, even for its time, very slow memory and seems like it was never designed for any intensive workloads. That GPU only has compute capability 2.1, no Vulkan support and only OpenCL 1.1. That’s good enough to start getting into GPGPU programming if you wanna play around, but LLMs sound like a stretch, not just performance-wise, but also software-support wise. But I have never tried running local LLMs myself, so maybe software-support isn’t that much of a problem.

Also, and this is definitely just opinion from my side, but I would say running AI, even locally, might be somewhat against the idea of permacomputing glancing at the side bar

Sell it cheaply and put the money towards a newer, more energy-efficient machine

Thing about this is, that if you sell it so that you yourself will get a more energy-efficient machine, that PC will still be out there being used by someone else, so not much gained efficiency-wise. However, and I am contemplating writing a post about this topic here at some point, the production of a PC is responsible for the majority of the energy required in a PCs whole life-cycle. Selling (or trashing) this PC to get a more energy-efficient one might not save energy overall at all, at most it would reduce your power bill, but even then the question is whether it would be worth it compared to what a new PC costs (electricity really is cheap, you really have to run it 24/7 to be worth it). Efficiency is kind of a scam when it comes to reducing overall power consumption, but that’s a topic for me rambling another time. You have to use a computer very long to make up for the energy required for its production with the efficiency gains.

What I want to say: if you want to do the environmentally friendly thing, use this PC as long as you can, instead of replacing it with a newer one (assuming you have a use-case for it).

What would you do in my situation?

If you already have a new PC (which I somewhat expect), then… errr… I don’t know. I have a similar problem - just last week I have been cleaning three PCs that a friend of mine wanted to throw away. I’m even considering using one of those as my new gaming PC, but I’m not sure yet if I can separate from my PC after all those years. I’m probably just going to fix them up and bring them into good shape for the next LAN party, but otherwise I also have no real use for them. Kind of sucks letting all that hardware go to waste, I can’t use four PCs at the same time, and other people usually want the latest hardware.

For real though, probably a mixture of salvaging parts and still keeping the remains, if it’s a PC that is not in active use. SSDs and HDDs are the easiest to reuse, and SSDs also tend to require a lot energy to produce, so reusing it makes sense from that point of view. 24 GB of RAM is a very good amount, some new PCs don’t have that much. RAM speed is not as important as the amount, so it being DDR3 is not really a problem in my opinion, it just limits how modern the next mainboard/CPU can be.

If it is a PC that is in active use I’d upgrade the GPU and call it a day.

For further reading and motivation, see https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/12/how-and-why-i-stopped-buying-new-laptops/

Sorry for the rambling and that none of this is really answering your question

I’ll try to help if I don’t miss it :D

The website didn’t load properly on my phone, does anyone happen to have the exact date?

What do you mean by

I’d been pretty skeptical that solar could ever cover its production costs

If you mean EROI, no one should be skeptical about that, unless you are constantly being fed misinformation. Solar panels quickly generate the energy required to produce them, in the worst cases it takes a few years.

And the good thing about solar panels is, they are incredibly durable, once they are put up they just keep on producing energy. Personally, I would argue that as long as not every roof is covered with them, recycling solar panels is bad. Why replace something that is still producing energy (and at that point for free, in EROI terms), when you could leave the old ones up and put the new panels on roofs that have none yet.

Luckily, companies are starting to see that as well, and refurbish solar panels instead of recycling them.

There’s a reason it goes reduce -> reuse -> recycle.