Self-hosters:
Well I have a VPS to run lemmy just because I don’t want something that public near my home network but I haven’t found the limit to my little i7 HP mini PC… Yet
MORE CONTAINERS
Thermal cycling is one of the biggest stressors electrical components can be subjected to. Leaving your processor on and at a consistent load massively improves the lifetime of the chip. So take THAT, mom!
Heat cycling is a huge stressor on any material. That’s part of why diesel freight trucks tend to last well past a million miles while it’s newsworthy if a passenger car makes it that long. How many times a week is your Toyota Corolla driving 10+ hours at a time? Most commonly, when you hear of a million mile vehicle, it was making long haul deliveries daily and was maintained at the correct intervals.
What’s the heat stress difference between idle/off and heavy-usage/idle for a PC? If the latter is much bigger, then turning it off may have a negligible impact while still saving some energy. Avoiding heavy-usage may also be a better solution than avoiding turning it off.
I think there are a lot of other factors in that case.
The biggest reason why it’s rare to see regular cars get to a million miles is because they don’t get driven as much. At the average of 14k miles per year it would take 71 years for someone to drive 1 million miles. Since it takes so long to get there, many non engine related issues start taking hold like rust and obsoletion.
I had to scroll way too far to find this. Especially considering that I have a desktop with full disk encryption, I don’t worry about it. If anyone ever did break into my house and take my computer, they would have to unplug it first; at that point, the disk would encrypt, and they’d have some really nice hardware which sucks for me, but that’s all they’d get.
If anyone ever did break into my house and take my computer, they would have to unplug it first; at that point, the disk would encrypt
The disk is always encrypted. When data is accessed, it is stored decrypted in RAM. The drive doesn’t decrypt when unlocking it and doesn’t encrypt when turning it off.
My refrigerator was never the same after everything that happened in Yugoslavia.
Just be sure to clear the lint off your coils every five years or so. Otherwise you’re making the poor guy suck air through a shag carpet.
Old fridges never die. Modern fridges are more efficient but more break-y, can’t have both.
Actually modern fridges are usually less efficient. But that’s because they use refrigerants that are literally thousands of times less harmful to the environment.
Old appliances frequently used R-12 which is an damn nice refrigerant except it depleted ozone and has a GWP (global warming potential) of 10,900. That means 1lb of R12 released into the air causes the same amount of global warming as releasing 10,900 lbs of CO2.
Newer appliances use refrigerants like R134a which still works pretty well, doesn’t deplete ozone, and only has a GWP of 1,430.
The newest appliances are more frequently using R-600a which is hard on compressors because it has a high head pressure and it doesn’t cool quite as well. But it also doesn’t deplete ozone and it has a GWP of just 3. The bigest downside of that one is that it’s very flamable (it’s isobutane) so the legal limit on how much residential appliances can us is very low.
Old appliances broke, but they were made to be easy to fix so our grandparents could just swap out the broken parts. I helped my dad replace the compressor on an older fridge as a kid and the heating elements on my grandma’s toaster. I remember my dad taking me to some locally owned mom and pop hardware store where we could buy replacement parts for old appliances off the shelf. My parents still have the toaster, but that store closed down and new stuff isn’t made to be fixable anymore (most likely due to planned obsolescence thanks to late-stage-capitalism).
On a tangent, when you think about it, throwing an entire toaster away because one heating coil burned out or throwing awag an entire fridge just because the compressor gave out is not rational. But if you tell people we should have the freedom to buy repairable appliances then they look at you like you are crazy. To me, it is the other way around. Sustainability isn’t political or a luxury, it is an inevitabe, unstoppable force of equilibrium.
When it comes to refrigeration in particular newer appliances tend to break more frequently because they are using more environmentally friendly refrigerants. Old CFCs cooled really well with minimal work from the compressor. Newer fridges and freezers are more frequently using isobutane (R600a) because it doesn’t deplete ozone and it’s GWP (global warming potential) is 3 where the GWP of even non ozone depleting HFCs can frequently be in the thousands. The problem is isobutane requires higher head pressures to work properly and doesn’t cool as well as older refrigerants so the compressors have to work much harder to get the same result.
Also when it comes to household fridges and freezers, they really aren’t worth it to fix anymore. You need an EPA 608 cert to even touch refrigerants (in the US anyways). Plus you need a two stage vacuum pump and a recovery machine (amongst other things) both of which can easily cost as much as a new fridge. Then you need to actually have the skillset to remove the broken component and braze a new one in because everything uses brazed connections now to minimize leaks. Then you need to have the know how to properly recharge the system with refrigerant which when you’re working with a critical charge of maybe 2oz of refrigerant is an absoulte pain. All in all, maybe if you are already an HVAC tech and had the tools and materials on hand you might barely break even fixing your own fridge or freezer.
When it comes to consumer refrigeration they can’t be user repairable due to having to work with refrigerants and economies of scale mean they just generally aren’t worth a trained techs time to fix.
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but in all seriousness, very informative… thx
