Nick Thomas

@PeterWHah, yeah, the only saving grace about that cabling is that it terminates in a 13A plug in the garage which is very much never plugged in. Came with the house like that. Accidents happen, but it must have been a very solid bump to move it like that. No ill will though, the insurance system prioritises liability and it'll be someone worked to the bone as an "independent" courier, most likely. For the brick-by-brick approach, my angle grinder is sadly out of commission at the moment , so I was looking at alternatives. Apparently you can get diamond chains for chainsaws; and hand saws that cut through concrete. All very exciting, but maybe it's better to just let it take out the decking?

Thanks; I guess that's referring to the switch from wall to gate? I found https://www.planningportal.co.uk/permission/common-projects/fences-gates-and-garden-walls/planning-permission which kind-of suggests it's fine without. Still need to figure out the takedown though.

This morning I noticed something a bit... off about the rear garden boundary wall. it's a low brick wall with these high pillars (3x2x18 bricks) at regular intervals, with the spaces between filled with wooden panels. This one is no longer connected to the course below it; pushing it is like worrying a wobbly tooth. Chatting to the neighbours, they remember a van backing into it recently, which is probably the cause. I've poked the insurance, hoping they had a builder on retainer who could come make it safe, at least, over the bank holiday. Waiting for a callback, but not holding out a great deal of hope at this point. I've slapped a warning sign and some hazard tape on it to cover liability, at least, but thinking about how I could make it safe without killing myself. I could get a rope around it and pull from a distance, but there's decking in front of it inside the garden, and a public road outside, so it doesn't seem like a good option. Start at the top and take it down brick by brick with a mortar rake or something? Once it is down, I've been thinking about putting a gate in this wall anyway (there's no access from the back at the moment) so it'd be an opportunity to make it so. Would that need to be run past the local authority first?

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It's a single Greenlinux 3.2kWh attached to an LXP hybrid inverter. I don't have battery temperatures exposed AFAIK, just inverter temps. Probably not what you're after. I assume that if it were conservatively specced, you wouldn't see the same voltage peak at 90%+ nominal SOC (since that would actually be 80%+ real SOC), but don't actually know ^^. They do claim "100% usable capacity", i.e., they're happy for you to take it to 0%, so maybe 100% is the real 100%, and 0% is really 10% or something 🤷‍♂️

Have some graphs of an LiFePO4 battery charging from 15-100%:

It is an active topic of research. https://earth.esa.int/eogateway/news/long-term-satellite-data-show-wind-farms-can-affect-local-air-currents, for instance, or https://phys.org/news/2016-11-solar-island-effect-large-scale-power.html for instance. As with the car parks in a previous thread, it's almost like we might benefit from planning some aspects of this transition.

My understanding of the 70s "new ice age" stuff is that popular culture was all over it, but actual science - including climate scientists - very quickly established it was not happening. "Science journalists" have always had a lot to answer for on this front. Fringe opinions often get preferential coverage simply because they're exciting. Hence Betteridge's law.

Mebbe stop listening to fascists, flat-earthers, "wokerati", the others, and listen to, uh, climate scientists, about it instead? Just a thought.

Interesting thread, thanks for starting it. The house up in Shetland has A2A. It really needs airtightness work to keep the warmed air inside the house, so isn't exactly a "plug and play" measure. The noise may put some people off too - it's definitely "there", but I managed to get used to it. Nice to have the air-conditioning functionality in summer, too! The UK trails much of the rest of Europe by quite some way in terms of heat pump installations. Much of the problem is political, rather than technical, so I'm skeptical that trying to avoid the political considerations will lead to a formula that will increase the installation rate significantly. Right now, the fight is very much to preserve that measure to ban new-build gas boiler installs by 2025, never mind retrofit.

Octopus Flux gets you a cheap rate at night (2-5am) and an expensive rate during the day (4-7pm). The export payments mirror that, and are absolutely worth it, since they're enough to buy a unit in (over winter, say) for every unit you export (in summer, for example).

If it's anything like the "rigid core" floating LVT tiles, scoring it didn't work well for me with curved cuts. I just used a jigsaw 🤷‍♂️, and a dremel on some particularly awkward bits. As the cutting blade heats up, it can start melting the vinyl and get gummed up, but not the end of the world for a few small cuts in inconspicuous areas.

My inverter also takes ~five seconds. It has a register for "Fast zero export", but doesn't permit it to be set. Regulatory stuff, maybe?

A chance for a bit of press coverage, if you've not noticed it yet: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/apr/14/tell-us-have-you-been-affected-by-insolvencies-of-uk-home-builders

https://source.thenbs.com/literature/are-our-car-parks-fit-for-the-vehicles-of-the-future-a-sika-specialist-report/siARj8goNrz3DLsDsZzfnV/xswQvwsBWw6hZqvgHdGuuN It's almost like we might have to... plan... some aspects of this transition.

It does have some effects. Just not enough in the time we have. Cap 'n trade was introduced in 2005, the UK's Carbon Price Support thingy in 2013. They've both gotten stuff done at the institutional level, including helping to drastically reduce how much coal we burn for power. But we're still really, really far away from where we need to be.

Yeah, I probably should have included "cheap" in my list as well 😅. Or do a Luxembourg and don't bother charging at all. About the only train that makes sense for us here is to a pleasant town ~30 minutes away by car. It's slightly faster by train, and costs bus fare prices to get there and back. Of course, the first time I tried it, two trains in a row were cancelled, then the one that arrived was almost full. It doesn't have to be like that.

I admire the optimism, but sadly, individual change is not sufficient, even in the presence of well-intended nudges, even in aggregate. What we actually need is systemic changes - and lots of them. Trains that run reliably, frequently, and generally on time, should be a bigger priority than EV rollout, for example. In my own case, it's very sad that I can't rely on public transport to get us where we need to go. Relying on high fuel prices to push people into inadequate public transport immiserates people, rather than improving things. I might put "ban private jets" on the list - that would have a ridiculously outsized impact compared to the number of people it would inconvenience. Although you can get (very) short-range planes that run on batteries now, which is a bit of a wonder.

Huh. Having said that, maybe the new Twizy is *just* about capable of doing what I need on the small side. Ugly as sin though. Hah, it'll have to wait, since the only suitable car seat is for babs 3 and older.

After a bit of a palaver with different people wanting to be in different places over the easter weekend, I've been browsing for an EV for a second car. The current car is a mid-size Mazda 3, and we can't really fit the whole family (including pets) in it, so I was thinking we should supplement with either a tiny runabout that can just about do 100km with a couple of people in; or something huge (seven-seater?). So far, I've come to the conclusion that there are lots and lots of second-hand (and even new) EVs that are affordable in the mid-size sort of bracket, but very little going on in the tiny and huge brackets - it's really just Citroën at the moment. The Ami is just a bit too small, sadly, or I'd have been unable to resist one. I just can't see it on rural single carriageways though (we have a 100km round-trip we do pretty regularly, including a hill with a very steep gradient). The electric Fiat 500 is ridiculously expensive. On the big side, the e-Berlingo with 7 seats would do the trick if we accepted a charge midway through each leg of our semi-annual long trip (not the end of the world, although missing the ferry is a real possibility in case of delays). It's just very expensive new, and not really available second-hand. The book (and associated game) Half-Earth Socialism goes into some detail about what staying below 1.5'C of warming might actually look like from, uh, a certain ideological standpoint. They're (unfairly, IMO) biased against nuclear, and even more so against meat, but food for thought nonetheless. As mentioned upthread, the gap between what politicians are willing to publicly advocate for, and what we actually need to do, is huge.

We've been chatting about Flux a bit here: I recently switched to it, enjoying it so far.

Sure, it's not perfect, but it's hard to beat it for simplicity. No idea - it's just a number the inverter provides. I often graph these things during discovery to try to work out what on earth they represent. This one has been 1 since I started graphing it in November. https://github.com/celsworth/lxp-bridge/wiki/Inputs says "grid power factor" (register 19). Poking https://luxpowertek.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/LXP-3-5KHybrid-NS-SettingGuidance.pdf I wonder if it's actually the inverter's output power factor, or even the configured pf mode. I did read somewhere that inverters can "correct" the power factor for the whole house somehow, but my physics isn't up to it. edit: register 18 looked related so I added that to the graphing. It gives me a consistent value of 0 🤷‍♂️

Life is suffer The µblock origin and "improve youtube" extensions combine to make it vaguely usable if you turn off almost everything. Or there's always invidious.

I had similar ambitions, then realized that what I wanted was a window. Sun is shining = probably time to do some laundry. Although nowadays I might want to ensure all that happens at 2am (20p/kWh) so I can export the solar (22p/kWh) in regular hours. In terms of visualization, HomeAssistant's energy dashboard has a nice widget showing flows between sinks and sources, but does so in kWh rather than kW. Suitably rejigged it could be handy for those times where a window won't cut it.

One thing rrdtool did well early was downsampling, making it easy to store time series data for long periods. Storage is so much cheaper than when it was created, though; I'm just not sure it's worth the effort to do it to collected points any more. I just store every data point at the highest resolution it can be produced at. For instance, all the data about my house, stored in victoriametrics, takes up ~50MiB for the last 6 months. Applying aggregations and rollups at query time is fast and flexible. Mostly, drool at it 😅. You can generally do without it, but then you don't get to show off puppies like this: