The Week #121

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  • 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 🙌🏻. 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.