Taking the Bedroom Media PC Off Grid

2013 vintage ASUS Transformer P1801 18.4" Tablet & All-in-One Desktop Computer

I've been wanting to do this for years and finally spent a few hours getting a 10/2 12V power cable run into the bedroom. I followed the existing TV and phone cable entry. That hole is partially covered by the vinyl siding that was installed many years ago. The hardest part, though, was getting the power cable into the back of the box fitting in the wall for the cable and TV connections. Once that was done, just fitted a 12V lighter socket to the end and plugged in the D4C adapter. Power is tapped off the 12V DC load output of the 24V - 12V charge controller via a fuse block and fuse:
https://youtu.be/EhNI3Ui5cYA

Pwr+ D4C car adapter, 12VDC input, 19.5V/4.62A output:
https://amzn.to/3bwZIMi
https://pwr-plus.com/product/dell-laptop-car-charger-power-adapter/

PC uses 5-6 KWH of energy per month. That used to come from the grid and now comes from the 12V DC solar power system. The TV signals come from either a pair of Silicon Dust HD HomeRun network tuners via my Synology NAS running TV Mosaic or from an internal AverMedia PCI-Express ATSC TV tuner card. Only external connection needed is for downloading periodic updates to the PercData Electronic Program Guide.

This is just one step in my plan to move one item at a time off-grid in the house. While any one conversion like this may not make a big change, add up a number of these over the years and it adds up. Currently averaging about 40% of the house electrical consumption is off-grid, hoping to move that up to 50% as the next goal. This one load of about 5KWH/mo. will make a change of 1% in that percentage. For example, in March 2021, used 280KWH from the grid and 195KWH from solar. Assuming the same total with 5KWH more on the solar side, that changes the number from 41% to 42%, just by swapping a power supply on a PC. This amounts to 64 lbs. / 29 kg. of CO2 per year.

This is also a backup PC for my main work system. It's loaded up with the same applications as the main PC, synced to the same NAS folders, etc. I've used this to edit a few YT videos on as well as transfer files from video camera and also to convert media file formats.

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