Many inverters aren’t even UL listed.

Yes but many inspectors and insurance companies won’t want you to install electrical equipment on “real property” or buildings if it isn’t UL as that falls into the scope of AHJs and insurance providers. If there’s something that has the potential to start a fire, you need to have safety certifications so operating the system not only reduces the risk of fire, but also selling the house in the future to a new owner doesn’t come with excess burden on behalf of the next insurer.

If your solar system is off-grid AND off-building, I see no reason that you need to have a UL listed system.

This is of course dependent on local AHJs and utilities, but UL 1741 covers both standalone (off-grid) and grid-interactive (on-grid) inverters. If you’re choosing an inverter manufacturer that makes non-UL listed off-grid inverters, I would probably be suspect of their products’ quality as it’s easier to gain UL listing regardless of how the inverter is used: off-grid or grid-interactive.

That’s the problem.

That is a problem. Off-grid inverters that aren’t certified to UL 1741-SB aren’t required to have anti-islanding protection that cuts the inverters off if there’s an absence of grid voltage. If a “balcony solar” inverter were to NOT cease to energize upon loss of grid and stay islanded, then voltage is introduced to the building’s/community’s shared local distribution system. If work were to be done on that portion of the distribution system or grid where lineman and wireman expect conductors to be de-energized, then you might have injuries as a result. Now, you may be able to say that lineman and wireman should always test for presence of voltage prior to doing work, and as a solar engineer I would absolutely expect folks to do this, but that’s not always the case. People cut corners. And in the event that certain crews cut corners, don’t check for voltage and investigate where the voltage source is, and start touching wires and introducing paths to ground, people can get seriously injured or die.

You may think that because solar panels are current-limited that this fact protects workers in the event of becoming exposed to live voltage, but any combination of voltage and current can kill.

I’ve always wanted DRM for my inverter.

In the context of safety, this is a good thing. Skirting DRM on movies or TVs won’t mean you injure yourself or others or worse. Skirting inverter settings can cause inverters to operate in ways that are unintended, and could hurt people. These things are not the same, and it’s concerning that you can’t see the difference.

Also, having locks on settings means that other bad actors are deterred from changing those settings maliciously, whether intentional or not.

There is not substitute for a qualified person operating and maintaining an electrical system, regardless of voltage.

I think it should just require a permit

Agreed

Inverters in the US are all listed to UL1741-SB which dictates that they shall cease to energize their AC outputs if they sense an absence of grid voltage.

Now, one thing people are ignoring is that UL1741-SB allows for islanding protection, and the disablement of it. If an inverter has its settings changed such that islanding protection is OFF, then the inverter will keep sending power to the “grid” because it thinks it’s operating on a microgrid that was previously disconnected from the larger grid via a Microgrid Interconnection Device (MID).

The settings these inverters have are user-settable, which means they need to be checked by a qualified person, either a contractor, engineer, or inspector. These settings must also often be checked by the utility you’re interconnecting to before they allow you to energize, so usually all of these parties have eyes on the inverters’ settings and can stop work before energization until things are corrected.

Ultimately I agree with you. If we don’t want to have to need inspections for every solar installation, especially residential ones and especially where plug-and-play solar modules are used, then inverters need to have their settings pre-configured for the grid code in the factory that then cannot be changed by the user or operator in the field. That would be a way to shoe-in this kind of installation.

Hard setting grid codes into inverters prior to shipping to site might be overly conservative though, especially as utilities change their grid codes over time. You need to have a way to update those settings, which could be using a wireless portal hosted by the inverter OEM with credentials made only available to the OEM. Problem with this is that then you shift the burden of configuration to the manufacturer which already has a ton of other UL standards as well as rules and regulations to follow.

What do y’all think?

God the more and more I hear about China the more based it is.

President Xi Jinping save us all

authoritarian— but I know you’re apathetic towards authoritarianism

All governments/states are authoritarian. That is their nature. No government is excluded from this.

The difference with some governments over others is who wields that authority: the majority of working class people, or the minority of capitalist class people.

I’d prefer to live in a state that advocates for my best interests as a working class individual rather than submit to capitalists that want to extract everything that I’m worth for themselves and hoard for no good reason.

Thanks for this explanation. This was my understanding as well, except for the GNU part.

I asked because the parent commenter directly above my first comment made the distinction between the operating system and the kernel. I wasn’t actually sure what the overall umbrella “OS” was for Linux, since as you say the kernel is Linux while there are GNU packages. I can’t really recall someone on Lemmy saying what exactly the operating system is for any given computer that happens to run Linux as the kernel.

I guess this scratches at what the definition of an operating system is: Windows, macOS, or GNU/Linux. In reality, doesn’t Windows run on the Unix kernel? Why don’t we call it Windows/Unix then? Is Unix used with other “operating systems” that layer on top of the Unix kernel itself?

I went to school for electrical engineering btw and had to take many classes about digital logic and all of the entry level stuff about PCs at a hardware level. Didn’t really get taught much about what goes on top of the hardware aside from maybe microcontrollers with Assembly and C.

Thanks anyways!

The DeRidder Diddler

The real title is always in the comments

As a Linux n00b, now I need to know which is the kernel and which is the OS.

I believe Netflix does yeah. Foreign language shows don’t bother me

12 Monkeys and DARK. Both shows deal with time travel in a very cool way.

Severance and The Boys are also fantastic.

Spain should quickly establish trade relations with China in the absence of trade with the US.

We’ve already seen Germany violate the statutes of the EU by (allegedly) harboring Benjamin Netanyahu while he has an ICC warrant for his arrest.

No strong reasons to stick with the federation right now

Please dear god USS Gerald Ford soldiers keep shitting so the carrier is incapacitated and the US can’t invade

Can Cloudflare help prevent this?

Netflix made a documentary about the European islands that prioritized switching away from oil: Islands of the Future.

I would say with China’s help, a renewable Cuba is entirely possible.

My only concern is the hazards introduced by hurricanes, which can be compensated for by implementing flush roof-mount solar PV systems (minimizes wind loads), underground electric power lines, subgrade geothermal loops with heat pumps, indoor substations and Battery Electric Storage System (BESS) facilities, and pumped storage hydropower utilizing Cuba’s mountain ranges. Wind is probably not a viable technology given that hurricanes can completely cover the island with crazy strong winds.

Edit: as another commenter pointed out, tidal power would be a good alternative too. The best technology I’ve seen to utilize tidal is made by Orbital Marine Power based out of Scotland, who basically slaps 2 turbines onto a submarine to collect power. Could have offshore substations that collect that power and send it back to shore.

Oh when will China start making HDDs and SSDs and GPUs and CPUs

PLEASE China PLEASE flood the market with cheap, top shelf computer parts that will force Western corporations to lower their prices or go bankrupt when they don’t

Glad we’ve moved on from farming animals to make pianos.

Still doesn’t stop humans raping and pillaging the natural world, of course.

The obvious solution is architecting society such that parents have more time to parent while making enough to pay the bills, rather than exporting parenting because they can’t afford to miss work due to parenting.

You start having enough of these conversations, and it all eventually points back to capitalism and taxing the rich.

If the pushback on social media doesn’t get Discord to drop these plans, then I’ll just have to delete the app.

Not caving to another app asking for Personally Identifiable Information (PII) only for this same data to be leaked months to years later.

Society will do everything to protect children aside from making better parents.

What’s dd?

As soon as you convert from an .XLS file to a .CSV file, the data and sig figs used to display that data are saved while the math formulas used to calculate that data are erased.

This means that when you try to go from .CSV to .XLS, Excel doesn’t know the original formula that created the data to then be able to display more decimal points. The formula is absolutely necessary to change sig figs of displayed data.

The only other way I can think of that would allow one to change sig figs in .CSV data is if the .XLS file was converted with like the maximum number of sig figs displayed, or let’s say 10-20. Then in a .CSV, you can modify the sig figs to something less, like 0-20.

But I want to say that if you save that .CSV file after the sig fig change, where you original converted it with 10-20 sig figs but then changed them to 0-20, the .CSV overwrites the data and you lose the sig figs that you concatenated.

Result: adding decimal points in a .CSV isn’t possible.