1.5 hours runtime for like half a liter of gasoline?? That's unbelievably inefficient. A half-liter of gasoline is like 15MJ, should power a laptop drawing 30W for a week.
Maybe it would be better with a fuel cell.
this post was submitted on 03 May 2026
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I don't think that little generator cares if anything is drawing power, it will just output what it outputs full time
One of my friends is homeless, living out of his RV. Rather than going to the library or some other third space to charge his phone, he runs his generator. Then complains about running out of gas.
With the amount of fuel that must cost it's crazy not to get a solar setup going.
Or just get a couple power banks. Should get a couple full phone charges out of one of those.
30W is 0.04 HP. That engine is just way, way bigger than you'd use if you were designing something like this from scratch, I think. Like putting a truck engine in a go kart, and being surprised that uses a lot of gas.
30W is 0.04 HP
anything but metric :/
I like metric fine, I just figure US audience is more familiar with small engine HP.
In the US, most small engines are rated in CC's, like for lawnmowers, mopeds, etc. but then tiny motors are back to HP, like a 1/3 HP sump pump.
Makes sense to someone, I guess.
It’s AI bullshit anyway
With the current energy prices for fossil, I feel like it'd be a smarter thing to charge them through off-grid solar.
seriousness aside, this is cursed and awesome. wonder how long it'd take for the tank to run out after running modded Minecraft w/ shaders?
My generator runs basically the same consumption regardless of whether you have a 150 or 300w load on it so probably the difference is going to be negligible.
Was about to say. I can't help but feel like it'd be easier to put solar cells on the back of the laptop and let them charge its normal battery.
I don't think a solar array the size of the back of a laptop screen would be enough to run it, but it'd definitely be enough to charge it.
For an old power hungry laptop, you’d probably want a 100w panel. They’re about 1x0.5 meters. And realistically they put out 75-80w most of the day.
But none at night, when everyone wants to hear a chainsaw idling next door.
Nice profile picture, and by the way, I'm not on an airplane
That's gonna be one unhappy hard drive, if it still has one.
How off-grid are you really, if you still rely on a grid-connected service to get the gasoline? Should have called it diesel-punk instead
"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should" 😅
That there is not the work of any scientist.
"Y'know, I'm somethin' of a scientist m'self."
- Redneck Engineers
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.
With a super lightweight laptop, 5w is achievable during light usage. I have one that draws that. It's usable for Google Docs sort of stuff indefinitely on a 5w charger. It can also go down to ~2.2w with low screen brightness and very low load. It is absolutely terrible though, celeron 3855u. I got Minecraft Java to run at 60 fps though... But it was probably using 7-12w then.
With a modern arm chip, you could get pretty great performance at that power draw. My phone (snapdragon 8 gen 3) in power saving mode can be like 5-10x faster at about 6 watts it seems like.
Also just for reference, a human consumes about 100W of continuous power output.
You can calculate this easily. WHO recommends 2000 kcal a day, which is 8 MJ, divide by 86400 seconds in a day --> 100W average consumption.