• 5 Posts
  • 49 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • A lot of shaky stuff in here that has a long way to go before it makes it out of the lab.

    3.5 cubic meters of material ought to be enough to make quite a comfy house

    OP, a 3.5 m-wide cube is not 3.5 cubic meters. That’s the size of a decently large shed… Of solid concrete.

    would have enough capacity to store about 10 kilowatt-hours of energy, which is considered the average daily electricity usage for a household

    No mention in the article about round trip efficiency, self-discharge rates / storage duration, etc.

    Storing 10 kWh doesn’t mean much if it loses much of that to internal losses, leakage into the environment, etc., before you can use it.

    Capacitors generally tend to be designed to store very little energy but can charge/discharge repeatedly at a high rate. Is this designed to discharge quickly? If so, what happens if someone touches the giant Borg cube in your yard?

    Concrete is also prone to cracking, which last I checked, is not good for electronics.

    That said, this is an interesting concept, and if it can perform at a useful level / scale, I could see industrial uses for large systems with high peak loads / energy recovery / regenerative braking, as a cost effective way to smooth grid loads, but probably wouldn’t expect to see it in use at people’s homes for a loooong time.

    Less “you can make a super capacitor at home”, more “innovative material uses may one day make super capacitors more cost effective for certain applications, if it can be scaled out of a lab”














  • Certainly sounds familiar, my tip to him is to try and write recipes down and get in the habit of mise en place-ing (prep chopping / pre-measuring) when you know what you’re gonna cook. Once the food hits the hot pan, any semblance of a plan goes out the window

    (but also know “sticking to habits” is hard for us with ADHD, as it frequently goes against our nature, so don’t be shocked if he struggles there)

    I tend to be the one to cook the “whatever’s leftover in the fridge” dish, which is a guaranteed source of a little chaos. In those instances it’s always helpful to have my wife around to pass ingredients or do some prep tasks on the side so I don’t lose focus and burn the onions.

    Also, if you don’t already have recipes written down, having someone help build out a recipe book as you go can help smooth out future cooks.

    Shout out to Recipe Keeper - after a first cook, usually from a website or book, we put everything we like in there for future reference.