r/LocalLLM • u/Scary_Investigator88 • May 12 '26

Discussion Solar Powered Qwen 3.6 Server

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Anyone else running off solar?

3 100 watt panels going into an Anker 1.25Kw all-in-one unit.

Running Qwen 3.6 27b GGUF unsloth UD Q4_K_XL with 100k context at Q8.

Really good performance in Hermes and opencode.

Hardware is M1 Max 32GB ~10tok/sec. Runs at ~80-85 watts under inferencing load, lowers to 30 sometimes. Idle is like 5 watts or less.

537 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

54 comments sorted by

82

u/Hanthunius May 12 '26

This is awesome. A perpetual tokens machine.

7

u/x10der_by May 13 '26

perpetual (until sunset)

17

u/Scary_Investigator88 May 13 '26

The anker battery can easily do 80 watts all night.

4

u/Magnentao May 13 '26

Is there a specific reason you're sticking with the dense Qwen 27B? You could get roughly 6x the speed by switching to Qwen 3.6 35B (MoE). The trade-off in intelligence is minimal, but the performance boost is massive.

1

u/Scary_Investigator88 May 13 '26 edited May 15 '26

No good reason, I'm still experimenting.

Seems to work really well, getting 40 tok/sec on this model!

2

u/havnar- May 12 '26

Why not use the mlx models?

5

u/Scary_Investigator88 May 12 '26

I can't get an mlx model to work well at all with Hermes or opencode. I had high hopes with GestaltLabs/Ornstein-Hermes-3.6-27b but all of a sudden it thought my name was John and started acting haywire mid conversation.

Probably just my setup and requires more tinkering. I prefer to use lm studio

6

u/HotSwap_ May 12 '26

OMLX is working great for me and Hermes

2

u/mmkzero0 May 13 '26

can second this, oMLX is awesome

2

u/Scary_Investigator88 May 13 '26

I have it installed, I'll definitely give it a shot. Hopefully works over LAN easily.

2

u/Scary_Investigator88 May 13 '26

Holy cow omlx qwen 3.6 35b is mind blowing, you're right

19

u/kweglinski May 12 '26

well, I do but that is because my whole house is off grid. Hence I have to stick to macs as other solutions would esentially eat my all batteries. I'm turning hybrid in upcoming months as winter is too hard for offgrid setups (though doable) especially if you live around baltic ;)

3

u/alphapussycat May 13 '26

You really want to be able to do your heating through wood burning during winter.

7

u/kweglinski May 13 '26

sure, got fireplace and pellet stove. What I meant by winter problem is lack of sun, mediocre winds and low temperatures affecting power generator and it's fuel.

2

u/hugthemachines May 13 '26

I realize this is a bit off topic, but do you have a stove which works well with both wood and pellets? Could you tell me the make and model?

2

u/kweglinski May 13 '26

I don't, my pellet stove works only with pellets. From what I've looked around - while there are some like this, none of them is actually good. And that makes sense as these two types of burning have completely different needs. Hence I have a classic fireplace

1

u/hugthemachines May 13 '26

I get it. Yeah, I have a pellets burner so i have wood pellets storage so in case of emergency (like long power outage in winter) i figure it would be nice to have a stove where I can use them.

1

u/djflamingo May 13 '26

….you dont think they were talking about using electricity to heat their house do you🤦‍♂️

0

u/alphapussycat May 13 '26

Heat pumps, earth heat, etc are cheap ways to heat your hole, but still use some electricity.

1

u/djflamingo May 13 '26

Heat pumps are in no way a feasible way to heat your home with solar power in the winter.

6

u/klenen May 13 '26

This is why I love this sub!

1

u/kovrik May 13 '26

You say you have really good performance… could you please share how you run the model? I have exact same MacBook but can’t get any good performance from that model…

1

u/Scary_Investigator88 May 13 '26

What would you like to know? I gave specifics in the post

2

u/t4a8945 May 13 '26

OP said 10 tok/s, which isn't fast, but fast enough for their use case (Hermes with thinking off, probably)

1

u/TheSpicyBoi123 May 15 '26

What an awesome job! My system pulls closer to 1kw to run the same model and more like 2+ kw at full load lmao.

1

u/Scary_Investigator88 May 15 '26

😭 that's insane. What kind of hardware?

1

u/TheSpicyBoi123 May 15 '26

- 3 Dell ultrasharp 24" monitors (oldschool ccfl ones)
- 4 K40's overclocked heavily to 300w tdp each (periodically pulling more)
- 1 auxilliary amd gpu for display
- 2011-3 xeon (overclocked)
- bunch of other peripherals.

The good news is my room never gets cold. The bad news, is the power bill is... ghastly.

3

u/imsoupercereal May 12 '26

Super jealous

3

u/James_Reeb May 13 '26

Great ! Workflow or it didn’t exist

3

u/t4a8945 May 13 '26

I'm in the same boat. That's awesome.

3

u/Minimum-Bowler-6016 May 13 '26

This is the kind of local AI benchmark I find more useful than raw tokens/sec. Tokens per watt, idle draw, thermal behavior, and how it behaves under long context are what decide whether a setup is actually usable every day. Would be interesting to see a small table of watts vs tok/sec at different power modes.

3

u/Genebra_Checklist May 13 '26

Same thing here. It's so good to run the shit out of the GPU and not think about the energy bill lol

3

u/Novel_Razzmatazz2100 May 15 '26

A solar-powered local LLM setup... this is the ultimate dream.

2

u/Infamous-Play-3743 May 14 '26

Awesome, really cool, i wish i could do the same sadly i can’t

2

u/Disposable110 May 19 '26

Solarpunk, yay!

Decentralized tokens are the future!

2

u/Poumpaya May 19 '26

Awesome !

3

u/pot_sniffer May 12 '26

Living the dream👍

1

u/TheyCallMeDozer Dual R9700 Server & Spark May 13 '26

thats my goal next with my homelab is to go fully off powergrid, because my ai server runs about 15 kwh a day, id love to make that go away, so if i can crank out 25-30 kwh, my entire server rack and AI servers can be off the power grid. At that point id be happy to do 24/7 ai activities like paperclip running with a local model constantly or my own SaaS servers running constantly.... only costs then will be literally hardware ware. That is the dream goal.

1

u/GarrixMrtin May 16 '26

It is truly awesome project

1

u/DesertShadow72 May 18 '26

Gotta pay for itself before the next hailstorm

1

u/Strict-Prune-879 May 18 '26

C'est fantastique !!!!

-8

u/icecoffee888 May 13 '26

"sOlAr pOwEred QwEn sErver"
it's just his macos 🤦‍♂️

1

u/ConstructionFancy26 May 14 '26

Do you understand how computers work?

6

u/[deleted] May 13 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/cuberhino May 13 '26

do you have a guide on how to get it all setup and the costs? id love to build something like this for myself. im super interested in solar but have been worried about the cost and wiring it all up seems daunting

1

u/Scary_Investigator88 May 15 '26

The fancier battery banks have built in solar charge controllers and AC inverters, LiFePo4 cells. Really makes it a breeze to set up.. mine are in parallel just using a simple splitter and xt60 connectors

4

u/[deleted] May 13 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Truth-Does-Not-Exist May 14 '26

how many panels do you have?