Improvements in and around my home
September 2025 updates September Electric: I managed to maintain a 17.6% Peak/Off-Peak ratio, which down on last month’s 6.98%. There were a quite a few days that were overcast, and on the rest I managed to have only minimal peak usage. Electricity costs for the month of September: £149.85 for 2025, £151.93 for 2024 and…
Since the last network update post, I have added a couple of additional items to my office rack. I moved the Unifi US-XG-16 switch from the garage to the office and removed the Unifi USW-Flex-XG switch – this will move out to the garage when I finally configure the new storage server. The Home Assistant…
August 2025 updates August Electric: I managed to maintain a 6.98% Peak/Off-Peak ratio, which up from last month’s 8.93%. There were a quite a few days that were overcast, and on the rest I managed to have only minimal peak usage. Electricity costs for the month of August: £107.10 for 2025, £123.22 for 2024 and…
Some of the technologies that will be used on this installation: Kubernetes or K8s (K ‘8 letters’ S – pronounced ‘cates’) is a container orchestration system that automates the deployment, scaling and management of containerised applications K3s (K ‘3 letters’ S) is a lightweight version of Kubernetes designed for IoT and Edge Computing…
July 2025 updates July Electric: I managed to maintain a 9.01% Peak/Off-Peak ratio, which down on last month’s 4.88%. There were a quite a few days that were overcast, and on the rest I managed to have only minimal peak usage. Electricity costs for the month of July: £120.07 for 2025, £110.63 for 2024 and…
June 2025 updates June Electric: I managed to maintain a 4.88% Peak/Off-Peak ratio, which is another improvement on last month’s 6%. There were 2 days that were overcast, and on the rest I managed to have only minimal peak usage. Electricity costs for the month of June: £98.90 for 2025, £161.98 for 2024 and £452.38…
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…