u/Zestyclose_Map_3710

A guy in my local club has been printing custom road names and car numbers on blank decal paper with a UV printer instead of ordering sheets. The detail looked really clean, even fine HO reporting marks.

I go through maybe 20-30 custom sheets a year which probably doesn't justify the cost of a printer. But I'm so tired of waiting two weeks every time I need a sheet, and half the time I need to re-order because I got one line wrong. The idea of just reprinting at home in five minutes is pretty appealing.

I have a Brother SE1900 and was 2.5 hours into a large custom floral design on the back panel of a quilt I'm making as my daughter's wedding gift. It's a design I spent weeks digitizing and the stitching was looking beautiful.

Power flickered for maybe half a second. Machine turned off, turned back on, and the design was completely gone from memory. The needle was still in the middle of the fabric and when it rebooted it lost its position with no way to recover it. I tried to realign and restart the design but the registration was off by about 2mm, which doesn't sound like much until you can see it, and on a wedding gift you can absolutely see it. Had to pull out all the stitching and start over. 2.5 hours of embroidery plus 30 minutes of seam ripping and a lot of frustration.

Most home embroidery machines have zero power loss recovery. Once they reboot you lose your needle position and there's no getting it back.

Someone in my quilting guild mentioned she runs her machine through a portable battery (anker solix s2000) in UPS mode so power flickers don't reach the machine at all, and I just set one up this week. The machine only draws about 50W during embroidery so the battery is massive overkill, but I genuinely do not care. That quilt panel is a wedding gift and I am not doing that seam rip again.

£130 a month on electricity in a two-bed flat. South-facing balcony that bakes all day in summer.

The DESNZ plug-in solar thing caught my eye. 800W per household, no permanent modification, take it with you when you move. That last bit is what matters, got about two years left here and I'm not investing in anything bolted to someone else's building.

Renters Rights Act should cover it too, balcony panels are reversible. Haven't mentioned it to the landlord yet though, wanted to understand the numbers first.