electricity supply is regulated in the UK to the extent that companies cannot make money while fully complying with Ofgem rules, that have matured over the past 40 years or so.
They will either make no profit at all, or end up paying the regulator large fines all the time. I’m fine with this.
No, they need to be made to put it right. But that requires a strong regulatory framework, sustained pressure from government backed with expertise and oversight from a capable civil service and it will take years.
Or we can burn it all down and get faraj who will not give two shits about water quality. The choice is ours.
100% I’d love to see nationalised utilities more than anyone else but we need to be realistic that the choices are:
I guess my solution that would be a UPS that detects the power outage, provides 1-2 minutes of power while a connected controller (a raspberry pi or similar) forces the inverter into off-grid mode. When power is restored, a connected current clamp/CT sensor can tell the raspberry pi to cancel off-grid mode.
A bit complex but I suppose the other option is relay isolators / mains contractors which are a bit too “high voltage” for me
this github has some good tips and a kit list for an example modbus setup with an ESP32. I know you can also make more advanced ones with a Raspberry Pi and Home Assistant.
Discharging when the grid is down I’m now so sure about. The inverter has an “off grid” mode but you’ll need to check the regulations about having a live connection since it might be dangerous to have your property and cabling still be live when there is an outage - you might injure someone trying to repair the damage at the other end.
I have had a 2.4kWp system for two years. Solis inverter, Pylontech batteries and a Myenergi Eddi.
The good: charging the batteries up at night (on an Octopus two rate tariff) means never paying more than 7p for electricity. In summer I maybe import 3kWh per day. Because the solar energy heats the hot water (via the Eddi) the gas bill has halved. The system I expect to last for >20 years and I expect full payback in around 7 years. A good investment. Since the inverter is chinese made they will probably remotely disable it before they invade, so I’ll get some advance warning and can brush up on my mandarin.
The bad: almost everything else I have installed (car charger, heat pump etc) has been more painful and required multiple visits from an electrician to sort out - I don’t want the solar batteries to discharge into the car when I charge it, and I don’t want the heat pump to drain the battery either. The installer was terrible and it took ages to get it all right. I had to hack the inverter with a modbus bypass to get it to work with Homeassistant. Thinking of getting aircon upstairs and dreading the conversation with the installer.
Overall: 10/10 recommend, wish the government would force everyone to have solar panels.
Solis inverters work with HA via modbus.
Tor operator here.
If you don’t have a second IP for your relay, don’t host at home. You will have CAPTCHAs everywhere, many sites will block you and your ISP will eventually contact you to stop degrading their IP space reputation.
Most website owners don’t discriminate between Tor exits and relays. They subscribe to block-lists that include all known Tor IP addresses. Major online services will make your browsing experience really shitty and once you’re a “known Tor IP” it will take months to remove that reputation.
You can run a Bridge instead, but you will eventually have the same problem.
Exertis, Midwich, ProAV will all help you get hold of a commercial display. You’ll pay more because the screens are rated for 18/7 operation, but you’ll get no OS and a single HDMI port to connect your shit.
NEC, Phillips, Sharp and BenQ are worth looking at as alternatives to the mainstream brands.
Can confirm times are hard. I work at a tech company and every role in engineering gets >100 applications the day it goes live.
My advice - go to events hosted by those companies, get to know the people who work there and find ways to help them. Then get them to refer you for roles.
Twingate is another option if it’s just device to device networking and you trust all the devices that are in your network. It’s free for personal use and peer to peer so no issues with TOS if you’re streaming.
it’s all a big ploy to give the US bargaining chips when negotiating with the UK for trade agreements.
“well we’re going to tariff the shit out of you unless we can sell chlorine washed chickens in your country”
“oh also fuck your publicly owned railways and roads, you’ll sell them to us at a discount or you’ll be sorry.”
“by the way we’re still going to endorse and fund far right parties and destabilise your democracy - that’s just what allies do, right?”
jupyter notebooks, or if you’re super trendy give zerve.ai a try
you’ll put those savings into a stocks and shares ISA where any gains from stocks are tax free guaranteed.
If you have more than £20k a year to put away into stocks and shares then yeah you need to pay some tax bruv.
I have a Hasselblad 500 and I like to fill the whole frame with interesting architecture at odd angles. 1920s and 30s art deco is especially good to photograph.
yeah. That kind of money is top 5% of homes in most of Europe outside very wealthy areas and districts like Zurich. In the UK the average house price is about £300k ($400k)
I agree.
But the realist in me knows it is unlikely to be allowed to happen.
I know that the government will have to service a £15bn debt through borrowing, which will raise interest rates, mortgages, rents and require cuts to public services to pay for. That is on top of the investment needed over the next few years to stop sewage leaking into rivers and leaks of millions of litres a day.
In addition I know that pension funds and large investors will lose substantial sums of money and will look to divest from similar risks, which could lead to more utility companies becoming insolvent. A snowball effect.
Finally, I know that international investment in the UK will be seen as more risky.
What the government will be doing now is weighing up those risks against the cost of raising bills by the 59% that the water companies and industry bodies are asking for. If the worst should happen, will taxpayers be better off with a couple of hundred extra £ on their water bills to pay, or potentially a lot worse off with a rapid nationalisation of multiple firms.
me typing “sudo !!” instead of rewriting the shell command undoes this.
cool but then all the energy companies will be able to do that, so they will: