Improvements in and around my home
May 2025 updates May Electric: I managed to maintain a 6% Peak/Off-Peak ratio, which is huge improvement on last month’s 12%. There were 3 days that were overcast, and on the rest I managed to have only minimal peak usage. The Peak usage on the sunny days is largely balancing the load between solar and…
The parts for the new cluster nodes came from a number of suppliers, including Ebay, Amazon and CEX. Below is a picture showing all of the parts for a single node: First the Dell m920q tiny server needs to be opened and then a number of parts removed Disk caddy and SATA cable removed Front…
My current Kubernetes (K3s) cluster consists of 12 nodes: 3 x Dell M92p Tiny control nodes, each with an Intel i5-3470T 2.90GHz (2/4) CPU, 8GB of RAM and a 120GB SSD 9 x Dell M92p Tiny worker nodes each with an Intel i5-3470T 2.90GHz (2/4) CPU, 16GB of RAM and a 120GB SSD I am…
My solar and battery system went live on 14th April 2024 so it has been active for just over a year. In this post I will concentrate on the generation purely from that initial configuration and make a later post that addresses the East and West arrays and the wider system when they have also…
I ordered three balcony privacy screens to cover the frames I had built for my batteries from a seller on Amazon. 2 x 120 x 180cm screens and 1 x 80 x 120cm screen, I also made use of a discount code that the seller was offering which gained me £5.76 off the total pice…
This month marks 1 year since I turned on my Solar and battery installation and I will add commentary regarding this in a separate post. April Electric: I managed to maintain a 12% Peak/Off-Peak ratio, which is an improvement on last month’s 24%. There were only a handful of days that were overcast, and on…
Well I finally decided to order my fourth battery to take my storage from 15kWh to 20kWh. It will make no difference to my DNO agreement as I limit my import to 60A and my export is already limited to 36A via the G100 policy setting on the Enphase Gateway. The extra 5kWh will give…
The next phase of the project for covering the batteries was to make a roof This is about 3,700mm long and 400mm wide, so cannot be made from a single length of board, as these have a maximum length of 2440mm. I was originally intending to make it from a sheet of 18mm OSB, but…
I have known since I put the batteries on the outside of the house that having them in direct sunlight for even part of the day was less than ideal. I looked at various options for covering them, but most ended up being a little too expensive for my liking. I ultimately settled on using…
There were a number of Saver Sessions during the month of March, but more on those later. March Electric: I managed to maintain a 24% Peak/Off-Peak ratio, which is an improvement on last month’s 39%. Electricity costs for the month of March: £148.76 for 2025, £438.81 for 2024 and £676.87 for 2023 – some great…