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Gone Solar
Apr. 20th, 2025 09:58 pmSeeing as it’s been four months since I last posted here, I thought it was time to bring you up to date on the solar panel and battery installation, and the results.
It didn’t get off to the best of starts – the scaffolders turned up on 26 February, took one look at the house, sucked their teeth and went “It’s taller than three meters, innit?”. This being the case, they put up what they’d bought to halfway up the first floor and left muttering dire threats against surveyors who only use Google Bloody Maps. I didn’t point out this was slander against the surveyors, who turned up in person with a drone and a laser thingy that does those trigonometry problems you got in school to find the height of things like, you know, houses. Anyway, the scaffolders came back a couple of days later to finish their part of the job (and did it well, to their credit) in time for the actual installation on 1 March.
The installers told us to expect them between 9 and 10 AM, but must have had a headwind up the M1 because they turned up at 8.45. After showing them where the mains switch and fuses were, and making some suggestions where to fit the inverter and battery outside (current regs require indoor fittings to be in a room with two exits, and the old coal hole in the cellar didn’t count), we left them to it. They finished by 1PM, handed over some paperwork, and left to go back to London.
Here’s some photos. Click to enlarge if you feel so inclined.
Panels on the South roof. That’s a lot of scaffolding.
Panels on the East roof. If you click to enlarge, you can see the anti-bird mesh between the panels and the roof. This stops anything nesting or sheltering under the panels, which does them no harm but can leave a lot of guano on the tiles.
The battery (10kW) and inverter (3kW).
Where the power goes into the house, near the mains switch.
All the electrical gubbins. There’s a smart meter at the bottom and a comms box on the right. I’ll post again on how they’re working when they’ve been running for while longer.
After running the setup for about a month, our electricity bill has come down by just under a half of what it had been the previous month. This isn’t just due to the days getting longer: we had an exceptionally good spell of fine weather and clear skies which gave us a 10-day period where the panels and the battery supplied all the electricity we needed. Among other things, this let us do a serious amount of washing and dry it on the lines in the garden rather than the rack in the kitchen, and still leave the battery topped up at 100% at sunset.
A system graph from 10 April. The pale blue line on the top graph is the solar power collected, the red line power consumed. You can guess when we ran the washing machine. The bottom graph is the state of the battery, which starts and ends the day at 60% or thereabouts.
So other than the scaffolding, everything went exceptionally well, and I’m glad we eventually decided to do it. As I’m typing this up at about 10PM, the battery’s still reading over 80% full which will take us well into tomorrow morning. There’s some heavy clouds and rain expected here for a couple of days next week, but this was never going to be a fully off-grid setup. If nothing else, we may soon be selling our surplus power back into the grid – not a lot daily, but it will all add up.
Oh yes – the scaffolders took nearly two weeks to take it all down again. I have a sneaking suspicion we were being used for temporary storage…
Gazing, perhaps too long, into the Abyss
May. 19th, 2024 01:05 pmA quick spoiler-free recap for those who haven’t seen it:( if you have, feel free to move along )
The Abyss marks the start of Cameron’s love of all things aquatic, which led to Titanic about eight years later and gave us Avatar: the Way of Water in 2022. Not yet in possession of a budget that cost more than the Titanic itself, or the long-term loan of God’s 3-D IMAX cameras, Cameron had to be content with building a set at the bottom of a power station cooling tower, flooding it, and spending an incredibly unhappy time with the cast and crew in it. Yes, everyone had underwater and safety training. Yes, there were rescue divers for when things went wrong. Nobody died. But there are several moments when the actors were called on to show fear, and they were not acting when they did so.
The result, on-screen, is a very good action film until the last half-hour with some SFnal overtones: all of the tech was either in use in the real world or was prototyped and looked feasible. The last half-hour is a good film with some incredible ideas, but not as well presented as what went before, and definitely on the fantastical side which does not mesh with the harder SF of the earlier part of the film. This is a lesser disappointment in the Special Edition of the film which fixes the main problem with the original release: that looked like they just ran out of money and had to wrap it up. However, it’s still a bit of a let-down; there are some model shots in there which would have been much better if they’d been replaced by modern CGI, and heaven knows Cameron’s had enough time to do that.
The first hint that this film might get a better release than the 4:3 “letterboxed” DVD from the early 2000s was Cameron announcing in 2016 that he’d done a 4K scan of the original negative and would be working on it sometime. Seven years later, at the end of 2023, it looked like my very own White Whale would be in my grasp, with release dates announced for early 2024. Then the British Board for Film Classification pulled the plug.
There’s a scene in the film in which, in the words of the BBFC, an animal is subjected to on-screen cruelty. This is true: in the words of the animal’s handler, “she ain’t digging it”. Previous UK releases either cut the scene or focussed away from the animal so you just got the human reaction shots. Cameron refused to change the film, and the BBFC refused a certificate, presumably still content with the earlier films such as The Charge of the Light Brigade showing horses being hurt or killed retaining theirs (do a web-search for “running W” if you want to. It’s not pretty.). Anyway, this is where the package from France comes in.
Not having a 4K player or TV, I watched the Blu-ray version of the Special Edition. Sound was through a Roku Streambar. Both picture and sound were excellent quality. The picture’s been digitally processed to enhance some of the darker scenes and provide more background detail, but not at the expense of the original film shoot. There’s still some film grain, and faces clearly show lines and pores, unlike other restorations (looking at you, True Lies). The soundtrack was clear and crisp, and handled overall changes in volume with ease. Best for me, I could hear the dialogue, which is a welcome change from having to turn on the subtitles as i have to do with far too many more recent films.
Unless you dislike SF or action films, or have an aversion to animals being handled poorly, I’d thoroughly recommend adding this film to your collection. It’s nowhere near as bloated as Titanic or the Avatar films, the storyline’s tight up till the end when it relaxes just a bit too much but it’s still fun, it’s beautifully shot, and the cast gave it their all despite the set conditions. As for me, I’ve crossed off a long-outstanding entry on my to-do list.
And then the raccoon fursuits burst open and a horde of beetles falls to the floor and scurries around in all directions...
Because the entity in the trenchcoat was old, and loved, though perhaps of late that love was not as well deserved as it should have been, and by and large did a good job. Or at least we thought it did.
But time has done its thing, and now there's just a trenchcoat and a pile of fursuits, and oh dear lord the beetles. Why didn't we know about the beetles? Did we not want to know?
Time to consider who, if anyone, can replace it all.
Leaving Eccs
Nov. 18th, 2023 10:32 pmEveryone has their limits, and I've reached mine. Elmo's overt support of Judenhass (as Anti-Semitism used to be called before the Viennese got all prissy about it) is something up with which I will not put.
I may post more stuff here. It depends on how many spoons I have and whether I think I have anything worthwhile to say.
You can also find me on:
An Archive Of Our Own: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Murphyslawyer - yes, I occasionally write fiction. You don't have to go there.
Bluesky:
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murphyslawyer.bsky.social - an acceptable Twitter substitute for me, for now. I know who put it together, I know where it can go, but as of today, it's okay. Except for those who seem to delight in shouting about or at Mastodon: block, mute, byeeeee.Mastodon: https://mstdn.social/@murphyslawyer - interesting and okay for now. Except for those who seem to delight in shouting about or at Bluesky: block, mute, byeeeee.
Tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/kawaiibarbariansublime: light-hearted bantz and reposting things, which is how Tumblr works. Still works, even.
Neither sex nor gender are binary in humans, let alone the rest of nature; and "cognitive bias" is a better term for "common sense".
But I'm not here to reason with Rishi Rich or his chums. I'm here to say to all the trans folk I know if you say you're a woman, or a man, then that's what you are to me irrespective of whatever you were assigned at birth or the state of your plumbing.
And that's not just because once the bigots think they've eliminated you from society they'll come for the bisexuals and the rest of the LGBTQ+ folk, the athletes with too much testosterone, or anyone who doesn't present as Ayran Barbie. It's because you're human beings and deserve better than being pointed at by people who, if they know more than how to hate others, are doing a damned good job of hiding it.
Where to find me (August 2023)
Aug. 21st, 2023 03:19 pmmurphyslawyer.bsky.social - just a holding page for now.Mastodon: https://mstdn.social/@murphyslawyer - the (more) serious postings site
Twitter: https://twitter.com/murphyslawyer - holding out because some contacts can't or won't migrate elsewhere.
The Green Man's Gift
Oct. 6th, 2022 12:30 pmThe Green Man’s Gift
By Juliet E McKenna
Wizard’s Tower Press
Daniel Mackmain, a dryad’s son, lives and works in two worlds. One is ours, the other is older, where forgotten history and those who lived in it sometimes really wish ours would go away. Or decide to hunt us. Or in this fifth volume of Dan's adventures and misadventures, something perhaps worse than that. Many of us were raised on stories which told us it’s unwise to mess with the Fair Folk, as they’re diplomatically called. But when they decide to mess with us, what are we to do?
In this case, Dan has a posse of wise women and some men (or perhaps he’s their on-call contractor) who would really like vulnerable young men not being kidnapped and used as elfin chew-toys. This takes him to Wales, which is carefully and lovingly presented, and absolutely not another part of England but is polite about it. There Dan must find the latest missing man, try to get him out of the Fair Folk’s clutches, and then try to work out how to stop them taking anyone else.
The first part is relatively easy thanks to the help of a local who we very quickly find out is not exactly what they seem. The second part is more difficult and is an excellent catch-up course in being very, very precise with a race who probably taught human solicitors everything they know about bargaining. As for the third part, our Dan has a criminal past, and if he’s not careful, or unlucky, that may just come back to place the long arm of the law firmly on his shoulder.
All of this makes for a delightfully entertaining read which ties nicely into the end of the previous book in this series, so while it’s not for newcomers to Dan’s tales, it’s a worthy continuation which shows Ms. McKenna’s writing off to really good effect. Recommended on those grounds.
You can find out how to get the Green Man’s gift from the Wizard’s Tower Press site here.
Essential (but boring) stuff: Backups
Feb. 21st, 2022 11:41 amMy home NAS (1-disc Synology) has started throwing up hard drive bad sector reports, and as the drive’s around 5 years old it’s time for a new one. This is the perfect time for a full backup of everything on the drive and not just the essential stuff that’s also backed up online. A bonus incentive is that Synology’s OS had a major version upgrade last year and I’ve been putting off installing it waiting for the early adopters to find out the bugs, so this is a good opportunity to:
- Backup the data and the configurations offline
- Replace the NAS drive (with a bigger one because why not?)
- Install the new OS on the new drive then reinstall the data and the configurations so if that all goes horribly wrong we still have a backup as well as the old drive which still works for now.
I checked the USB drives I use for the NAS backup and as the youngest of those is getting on for four years, decided to get another one because if nothing else I really need to keep to my quarterly offline backup regime. The new drive arrived yesterday (and much praise to the delivery person who was out in that). it’s a 5GB port-powered USB3 HDD in a case roughly the size of a pack of cigarillos. Plugged it into the NAS, set up the Synology USB Backup routine, and away…
we…
go…
Three hours and 30 minutes later, I’d backed up around 8300 files totalling 37.5GB. That’s around 23Mbps which would be embarrassing for USB2 let alone USB 3. Off to the Synology forums, where I discover people have been complaining about this for years. No joy there, so let’s run a little experiment: same folder subset, same files, USB drive plugged into a USB3 port on the PC. Synology’s app won’t work this way, so I fired up Teracopy which does, and has the added feature of running checksums on copied files: a really useful thing if you’re after good backups.
45 minutes later and we’re done. That’s just over 110 Mbps, which I’m very happy with given the data’s travelling over a contended LAN and being verified which takes nearly as much time as writing it in the first place.
Now, other backup methods are available, as are other copying programs. This one, however, works for me and if anyone else finds it useful, so much the better.
A small spoiler for Evangelion 3.0+1.0
Aug. 18th, 2021 08:20 pm
He certainly knew his stuff: used the existing copper cable (still used to run the phone) to pull the fibre cable along to the house, then ran it up under the eaves (a good job according to herself who was taught how to do it at college) and drilled through the study wall on the first floor so there's a direct LAN link from the modem to the hub. No more feeding DSL up through a phone extension cable with filters hanging out of every socket. Hooray.
Speeds are as promised around 150Mbits down and 30 Mbits up. Going through my VPN of choice, they're slightly reduced, but still far in excess of what we were getting on the copper line.
With me likely working from home for the duration, and all of us gaming and / or streaming, I think we're going to make use of the new speed.
Now to set up the wi-fi mesh that came with the hub, and see how that works.
