Each month, we create a post to keep you abreast of news and happenings regarding the server, discuss recent events, and to act as town square for the community.
🌟 Community Highlights 🌟
- !fixing@slrpnk.net - Celebrating/talking about repairing stuff, the right to repair stuff, and the intersection of tech and solarpunk ideals.
- !selfhosting@slrpnk.net - Hosting your own services. Preferably at home and on low-power or shared hardware.
- !reclamation@slrpnk.net - A place to discuss and learn about the restoration of disturbed lands to desirable end land uses
📸 Meta Post Image: Asante-Akim Center for Non-Motorized Transport 🎞️
People of rural Ghana organized a school for teaching how to chop, weld, and re-assemble bicycles to better meet the needs of rural Africa. The Asante-Akim Center for Non-Motorized Transport takes its inpiration from punk bike chopping groups in the United States and Europe.
These bikes not only look cool, but are better suited to the poor roads and Jungle environment. Photo from ratbikes.org.
🌏 World Carfree Day / In town, without my car! Events September 21-28 🚴
World Car-Free day is Tuesday September 22nd. At SLRPNK we’d like to draw a little more attention to this holiday, and see it celebrated even more widely and internationally. Like all good holidays, it has its roots in civil disobedience.
In 1961, Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She was one of the organizers of demonstrations that saved a popular public park in New York City from being turned into more road for cars. She was inspired by both the Garden City and City Beautiful movements before her, and her book and methods were internationally influential.
The Netherlands had seen the precursor to car-free days as a response to oil price shocks during the Suez Crisis, and anti-car sentiment has festered due to speeding vehicles in narrow city streets. Late one night in 1968, neighbors in Groningen took pickaxes and shovels to sections of their street to create intentional barriers that cars had to slow to navigate around. Despite official resistance, the civil disobedience movement to create “Woonerfs” or “Living Streets” spread, and in 1972 the first official Woonerf was constructed in Delft.
The Dutch lead the way in re-envisioning cities without cars through the 1970s, but the idea became internationally popular. People began organizing yearly car-free days, with the intention to explore other ways of organizing city life without the use of personal motor vehicles. Car-free days and automobile restraint in Urban planning goes hand in hand.
In one famous case in Jakarta, Indonesia, Car-free day is a weekly event. On Sunday mornings, several streets into the city are barred from use by traffic. They become popular paths for pedestrians and cyclists who come to the city for Sunday events. Initially it was planned to occur only 3 times a year in 2007, but as interest and infrastructure around the event grew, it became a weekly event only 5 years later. The streets used for this purpose have become more pedestrian-friendly as their use by pedestrians grew.
The most popular day for yearly Car-free days is September 22nd. In french-speaking countries, it is called “En ville, sans ma voiture” or “In town, without my car” - but the concept is the same. What ever the concept is called in your locality, we would like to boost it here as a Solarpunk holiday. Check out related communities for this event:
- !urbanism@slrpnk.net
- !utilitycycling@slrpnk.net
- !publictransport@slrpnk.net
- !TacticalUrbanism@slrpnk.net
⛔️ Defederation with lemmy.devr.cc ⛔️
lemmy.devr.cc was abandoned by its admin and allowed for open sign-ups (no manual review of new applicants), resulting in it being used by advertiser bots and others posting illegal material, necessitating us defederating from it. As it’s a small instance with no active communities, the defederation is unlikely to effect any of our users.
🔋 How to Support SLRPNK.net 🌱
If you’d like to donate to SLRPNK to help cover Internet, electricity, and domain name costs, you can now send a one-time (just select do not auto-renew) or reoccurring donation via Liberapay: https://liberapay.com/F-hub.org/
Currently, F-hub.org and thus SLRPNK is receiving 68.72€/month in donations from 13 people, which is covering most of our recurring expenses. Thanks a lot!
💬 Open Discussion 💬
Now it’s your turn to share whatever you’d like down below; your thoughts, ideas, concerns, hopes, or anything related to the server. If you have a new community you’d like to shine a spotlight, shine away! If you’re a new user wanting to say hi, feel free to post an introduction :)
SLRPNK Community Resources:
- Community Wiki - Moderators, you can create your own Wiki here for your communities!
- Movim Chat - Open to all members (use your SLRPNK login credentials)
- Etherpad - Collaborative document editor (we are currently looking for an alternative for this as the Etherpad project has started to use LLMs for development quite heavily).
🗃️ Meta Archive 📰
Our Monthly Meta posts are sometimes home to more in-depth sections written by our admins. Many of our newer members may not be familiar with some of the past guides, so for those interested, we’ve compiled a list below.
- December 2024 - How to Prepare for a Fascist Regime
- February 2025 - How to avoid Big Tech and maximize your digital security & privacy
- June 2025 - A brief guide on Security Culture & Adopting FOSS as prefiguration
- July 2025 - How to build community with fun projects!
⬛ Union Resources 🟥
These are unions from around the world who can train you to become an effective organizer to form a grassroots union with your co-workers!
Out of curiosity, what company made his system? I assume he had to get new inverters too? Did he do the work himself?
I’m thinking about expanding mine in a couple of years, but will have to jump through hoops both with Enphase (who made my system) but also with my utility (they have to permit any changes). But thinking about doing it DIY.
DIY is very doable, especially the PV panel side, as that is really standardized. The main issue is building a strong roof mount.
Surely the rail mounting system they all seem to use is available somewhere, right? I haven’t looked into it yet but I was basically just going to copy the pros’ homework.
Yeah, but super expensive (typically cost more than the panels they hold) and you still need to find a way to connect it to the underlaying roof structure, which depending on the type and age of the roof isn’t easy (and can compromise rain proofness).
Damn, guess I never looked that closely at the itemized parts for my install (if there even was one). Any idea why it’s so expensive? You know of any good alternatives?
The pros did a good job on mine, new roof and no sign of leaks yet. Of course, I’m not a pro, so maybe I do need to look for other options.
No idea, maybe the long length makes it costly to transport?
I improvised my own solution from off the shelf metal fittings, but it was honestly a huge PITA and took ages. But I have an old, badly build roof with ceramics tiles, so that added to the difficulty. No “pro” wanted to touch that, so I had to DIY it.
Well good on you for making it happen! Not sure where you are or the weather, but issues in storms/heavy wind? That’d be my concern here in the Midwest US (we get a few nasty squalls a year).
Hopefully a little ground-mount plug-in option will be available soon, if my state can bother to pass a bill allowing plug-in solar. Even two extra kW would be nice to have, and it’s DIY by design. I talked about it in another comment in this thread, but I’m hoping to put them over my raised garden beds, make more use of verticality but also diffused light is apparently really good for plants (a little at-home agrivoltaics).
Do you have any experience with plug-in + roof mounted solar on the same home? I’m told it’s technically possible, just not common.
I see no reason why two entirely separate systems feeding into the same grid connected home circuit should be a problem. Only on island systems with no grid connection there could be issues.
🤘
I will come back and share my findings if/when it happens.
Not sure which company it was, I gotta ask him, but I assume it’s a smaller local installer. The HEMS is from Smartfox.
He’s too old to do something like this on his own and it took them longer than he liked, but now they’re done and it’s coming online.
I assume the expansion would’ve been more complicated if the panels didn’t need to be replaced anyway.
I personally don’t like the HEMS runs via SIM cards when it’s actually a very local, just on the roof. A completely locally controlled system would be more Solarpunk.
None seem to be perfect, but my Enphase system is connected via Ethernet (it still has a SIM for backup) and can be accessed locally if the internet is down entirely. Still, it’s not without its issues. Just yesterday I was reading about someone’s backup battery on the fritz because of a bad update. Your dad’s can’t connect to his Wi-Fi or anything? Is the SIM just good indefinitely?
Full local (with the option to connect for periodic firmware updates, because there are always bugs to fix and improvements to be made) would be great… but we can take the solarpunk to another level if we learn how to gut the firm and soft in these things, replace it all with self-made/open source alternatives, and flip the bird to the corps who barely want to upkeep their existing systems since there’s no money in it.