It's been a while eh!

I seem to be following my normal pattern of blogging for a bit, and then forgetting to update it for months at a time cos I don't think I have anything fun, interesting or blog worthy to report.

Anyways, living in the country has been OK. We got the insulation and double glazing finished up in early spring, and we had a few cold (0°C overnight, top of 9°C) days, and the diffrence was pretty astounding. The kitchen felt so warm we thought we'd left the oven on accidentally. We eventually got the fire managed so that we were maintaining ~20°C on those colder days with it damped almost all the way down, which is a big diffrence from not being able to sustain more than about 18°C with the fire on full blast previously!

We have the Solar and battery installed, ended up with 12.7kW of panels, and a 22kWh battery backing it, with lights and sockets being powered in a grid down event, so far we've been effectively off grid since it was turned on! Hasn't been without hitches though, the Zappi car charger we got was tripping the breaker after ~40 minutes of charging. Discovered that the terminals on the breaker weren't ever tightened properly, causing it to overheat and trip. Then it worked for a while, charging up at full speed from excess solar, decided to check the terminals inside the thing and they also were not tightened down properly :( And once we put it back together, it no longer worked. It's being replaced by MyEnergi (the manufacturuer) but I'll have to get a sparkie to install, and that's not going to happen before Christmas I don't reckon.

Additionally, I noticed in the manual for our inverter, that it is not compatible with the 8 battery modules we got, the system designers got it wrong! We've communicated with them and they've admitted the mistake, they're going to make it right and pay for all the required labour to do so. We will need some new equipment which we'll have to pay though. And I think we'll boost it to ~30kWh of storage at the same time.

I have had great fun integrating the whole system with HomeAssistant, have all the stats! Have also done some ESPHome things with an LCD to display the stats, and yesterday I got a little battery meter going with the same sort of setup,

My new study is is also done, and I've moved my desk in, it's pretty sweet, a much nicer view of the property and the trees next door, more sun, and a much warmer room, might even need air conditioning for the hot summer days. Still lots to sort out, haveto build the soldering station, a shelf for the printers (paper and 3d), move the filing cabinet in, and get my radio shack back up and running, but it's a much nicer place to work than the old space.

That space is still in a bit of a state, it needs some insulation in the cieling and a good coat of paint, and then we want to build a proper library, with shelves covering every wall, it's going to be a bit of a job and won't actually be started until we have our shed. Which is still around 6 weeks away, council can't make up it's mind about what documentation and forms it needs from us. But the builder dude reckons it'll happen early in the new year.

Work is starting to get a bit ridiculous with its governance ond policy for no apparent reason, and as an external contractor I'm limited in the scope of what I can actually do. But hey, it pays well and my boss wants me to stay around, so that's something.

I did finally get my k3s based kubernetes cluster up and running, which was a good learning experience and a bit of fun. Bought a few Lenovo ThinkCentre M73s and a cheapo netgear switch, built up some ansible to deploy it easily and went nuts, has been a lot of fun learning those bits and pieces! I'll be pulling it down and doing somethign similar with RedHat's OpenShift soon, it's the way work is heading, so will need to become familiar with it.

Anyway that about catches us up I think!

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