actually that reminds me — there’s a series on youtube about putting solar panels on machines and checking whether they generate enough power to power the device
so they put solar panels on a car and check whether the car runs,
they put solar panels on drones to check whether they fly
would this work for a laptop? how much solar panel area do you need to run the laptop? I assume 30W power usage, that means you need 0.15 m² solar panels under full sunlight, my laptop has like 15x20 cm which is 0.03 m² … so, you could only use it 20% of the time to give it time to recharge.
30 Watts at idle is desktop territory, a laptop should be maybe half that nowadays. I’d love to check at the wall with a watt meter, but my older ThinkPad does not have a removable battery anymore and I cannot say how much it would draw just from a USB-C power supply.
That really depends on many factors, including type of CPU, RAM, thermal setup, screen size and brightness, radios etc. But you can test that pretty easily with a wall wart kill-a-watt type meter or a usb-c tester.
actually that reminds me — there’s a series on youtube about putting solar panels on machines and checking whether they generate enough power to power the device
so they put solar panels on a car and check whether the car runs,
they put solar panels on drones to check whether they fly
would this work for a laptop? how much solar panel area do you need to run the laptop? I assume 30W power usage, that means you need 0.15 m² solar panels under full sunlight, my laptop has like 15x20 cm which is 0.03 m² … so, you could only use it 20% of the time to give it time to recharge.
Most laptops come with 100W bricks, 30W is consumption at idle but most consume around 60W when under load
30 Watts at idle is desktop territory, a laptop should be maybe half that nowadays. I’d love to check at the wall with a watt meter, but my older ThinkPad does not have a removable battery anymore and I cannot say how much it would draw just from a USB-C power supply.
That really depends on many factors, including type of CPU, RAM, thermal setup, screen size and brightness, radios etc. But you can test that pretty easily with a wall wart kill-a-watt type meter or a usb-c tester.