4.8 hours today

[DamonHD]

My main panel is in a temporary location and fairly badly shaded, and the smaller panel was getting intruded onto again my a neighbouring plant.

So a little bit of shrubbery pruning, and a little bit of application tweaking on my laptop, and a fairly cloudless day, and I got back to nearly 5 hours, though the last hour was 'helped' by me as I forced the LVD to trip back in when it was hovering on the threshold...  B^>

Tomorrow will be a better test without me around to urge it on.

When the main panel is better sited I hope for great things of course!

Rgds

Damon

[DamonHD]

Draft schematic/circuit for my low-voltage-disconnect to drive my 'laptop' car power supply.

http://www.earth.org.uk/laptop-12V-mains-fallback-schema-3-full.gif

Rgds

Damon

[AbyssUnderground]

Nice work. Get those bushes cut and those panels in better sun! :-)

[Ungrounded Lightning Rod]

Since you're using Linux (Ubuntu - Feisty Fawn) you can save a bunch of power on disk spinning by configuring it a bit.

The big culprit is "atime" on the file system, which does writes to update the access time on the inode whenever you read file info - even if the info itself is cached in RAM buffers so you didn't have to hit the disk.  Adding "noatime" to your filesystem mount specifications in the /etc/fstab file prevents updating this, which will let the disk spin down when you're not actually using it.

(There are side-effects for a very few tools, but nothing major IMHO.  I have noatime set on the filesystems on my linux laptop just because of this.)

An article in yesterday's slashdot discusses Linus' gripes about atime, and some of the replies talk about this, and other, linux laptop settings to save power.

[DamonHD]

Thanks!

laptop-mode (which I use) already sets noatime on all the filesystems, though I've put it in manually (and nodiratime) too.

But thanks: always on the look out for things that I may have missed!

Rgds

Damon