Improvements in and around my home
It’s the start of another year, so I have decided to change my updates slightly and only compare to the previous year I will still detail my savings compared to my pre solar costs, although I will ignore the gas comparisons, as there were a few months in my pre solar times that had silly…
This is my second year with Octopus Energy, and the only significant changes I have made was adding a fourth Enphase battery at the end of April and few additional plug in batteries at the end of November. This first graph shows my electricity demand by year broken down by source (off-peak, peak and solar).…
December 2025 updates December Electric: I managed to maintain a 29.11% Peak/Off-Peak ratio, which is an improvement on last month’s 32.67%. This is largely due to the purchase of some additional battery units – more on that later. Much of the month was overcast, and/or had minimal sunshine, but an average UK December. Electricity costs…
November 2025 updates November Electric: I managed to maintain a 32.67% Peak/Off-Peak ratio, which is down on last month’s 31.15%. Much of the month was overcast, and/or had minimal sunshine, but that is an average UK November for you. Electricity costs for the month of November: £217.98 for 2025, £260.03 for 2024 and £455.33 for…
October 2025 updates October Electric: I managed to maintain a 31.15% Peak/Off-Peak ratio, which is down on last month’s 19.29%. 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 October: £216.17 for 2025, £198.76 for 2024…
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…