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by JamesSunbottle is on its final domain, solar.jamesvandyne.com. I've also open sourced it, but it needs more work before it's ready for others to use.
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Checkin to δ»η°ιζ°΄ε°
At the park with Sophie and the gang. -
Checkin to Single O Hamacho
Getting my Vegemite Jaffle fix. -
by JamesGreat twitter thread about the cost of running some beefy Intel NUCs at home vs the cost of a server in the cloud. I wonder if I couldn't just host my blog/services at home like I used to...with solar/battery I've got power backups too :-)
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The Week #121
by James- The installer finished setting up my panels and battery. One of the reasons we went with the installer that we did was because they tried to get us the most possible generation on our roof. Most of the installers we chatted with put square panels on our roof. But these guys used the non-square panels as well to completely cover our south facing roof. Not only does it look nice and clean, it generates more power, and reduces maintenance on an entire section of our roof.
Edge to edge panels - One of the last things they did was setup the app that would allow me to monitor my generation etc.. directly from my phone. Problem is, it's slow and clunky. So I did what any programmer would do and spent a few hours this week reverse engineering things, so I could make a tool to record my data and display it how I want.
I've tracked most of the progress in this twitter thread. When this is done, I should back-fill this thread into Tanzawa (but I don't support videos yet...?)....But the basic idea is I want to show my generation/state in plain English and in terms that make it easier to understand just how much electricity my little system has produced. I plan to integrate this with the Octopus' api so I can build a proper "payback" page based on my tariff and so forth. Most people use excel. I make a website.Bottling the sun
If you have any ideas for factoids to display at the bottom, let me know! - Sunday was a beautiful warm autumn day, about 24 degrees out. As we dropped by the in-laws, I decided to take advantage of them being closer to sakai-gawa and go for a run along the river. My goal was to run for 40 minutes and 5k, both of which I managed ππ». Lately when I've been running I've been trying to focus only on time and forgetting pace and distance. It makes running a lot more enjoyable, at least at first.
- The installer finished setting up my panels and battery. One of the reasons we went with the installer that we did was because they tried to get us the most possible generation on our roof. Most of the installers we chatted with put square panels on our roof. But these guys used the non-square panels as well to completely cover our south facing roof. Not only does it look nice and clean, it generates more power, and reduces maintenance on an entire section of our roof.
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Checkin to Single O Hamacho
Sketching out the UI for SunBottle. -
by Jamesβ‘οΈIβm amazed. Even on this mostly cloudy day it looks with my small panels and small battery (which I didnβt even fill up) will get us to over 80% self-sufficient electric.Β
Caveat being it wasnβt super cold today and we still cook / heat water with gas, but better than expected. Canβt wait for the first full sunny day.Β -
Checkin to Starbucks
Soy cafe-misto and plant ball sandwich. -
by JamesMy house is now putting green electrons into the gridΒ (when itβs not using or storing them) πβ‘οΈ. Kinda cloudy today, though.
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The Week #120
by James- What a week. PyCon JP was held over the weekend and Kraken had a booth. I've been help coordinate and did the final setup of the booth before day-1 and it was a lot of fun. Besides working the booth, telling people about Kraken, what we do, and that we're hiring, I also got to chat with a number of former co-workers. I also got to meet an old teammate that I'd never met in person before, though we worked together for about a year.
A co-worker and me workin the booth - On Saturday we went camping for the first time with some friends in Nishi-Tanzawa. This too was heaps of fun and I look forward to going again.Β We had a bit of bad luck with our location because it was mostly covered in rocks. I learned two very important lessons with this trip: the pegs and hammer included aren't worth the plastic they're made of and sometimes you need to muscle things together.
The river along the campsite
The plastic pegs and hammer issue was mostly (I believe) a bad luck of the draw for location. It was non-stop rocks so everywhere I'd try to put the peg I'd get rock. Eventually I found it worked better to dig a bit, clear the rocks and continue. Was it the "right" thing? Not sure, but it worked. So next on my list things to buy for camping is some proper steel pegs and a heavy / fat hammer for getting them into the ground.Β I also learned that Workman, a store that specializes in work-wear and such in Japan, also has camping gear. Coleman steel pegs were about Β₯400 each last I saw them, and they're about Β₯100 from workman. Doable. ( I just checked their site and they have some that you can screw into the ground....seems very convenient,Β but I'm not bringing my drill-gun β feels like cheating.)
The other lesson was that, when building the dome of our tents that you're not going to break it when bending the dome to get the roof in place. I think we maybe bought too much tent (a 2-dome tent), but I reckon we're going to always want to some kind of shade to hang out in when we're not sleeping, so it saves us from building 2 different things.
The mountains and river were beautiful. Definitely looking forward to a second trip, maybe in spring. - A year after starting our initial quote requests and 7 months after signing a contract, we finally got our solar and battery installed! As of this writing it's still not 100% finished β everything is installed, but I think there's still a bit of work to do around the breakers.
When we discussed the layout of the panels, they'd said that the panels would come to the very edge of the roof β and they weren't lying. This is only possible because Sharp makes non-rectangular panels. I'll make a separate post my panels when they're all hooked up and running.Panels right to the edge of the roof
- What a week. PyCon JP was held over the weekend and Kraken had a booth. I've been help coordinate and did the final setup of the booth before day-1 and it was a lot of fun. Besides working the booth, telling people about Kraken, what we do, and that we're hiring, I also got to chat with a number of former co-workers. I also got to meet an old teammate that I'd never met in person before, though we worked together for about a year.
