#Batteries

I bought a pair of cheapo outdoor solar lights from Amazon. One is on my shed round the back of the house, the other is on the shed at the front of the house. Yes, I have a bit of a shed obsession. After a few days the front one stopped working. I took it apart to find out why…

I have a whole house battery solar system with 3kW of roof mounted panels and 9.6kWh of battery storage. I can monitor this using Home Assistant and it’s interesting to see my power usage and generation stats. Interesting, but not that relevant to daily life.

What is relevant is knowing how long the battery has left, especially now we’re in autumn/winter and the typical British weather is in full effect. As I look out my window right now it’s misty, yesterday it rained all day.

Some more stats on my home solar setup now it’s autumn and daylight seems to be a distant memory.

Here’s how my solar panels and battery system have been performing this month. I might do this more frequently, it’s hard going back in the historical data in my monitoring software and these posts are easy to find.

It’s a crappy cloudy day today. There was about enough sunlight to power the house, but not enough to also charge the batteries.

I replace the noisy fans in my hybrid solar inverter with quieter ones.

So I joined the Ryobi battery cult, but since their batteries are expensive I did the obvious thing and bought some off Amazon from random third party companies. The batteries seem to work well.

Our energy prices are ridiculous and even taking into account recent “world events” I find it hard to understand why electricity is so expensive. So I figured I’d try to do something about it by installing my own battery and solar system on my shed. The idea being to power my servers from the sun.

I think I’ve managed to make Home assistant tell me how much money the solar power I’m generating would be worth from the grid, and how much running things off solar/battery instead of the grid is saving me.

After a week of testing and tweaking, my DIY solar shed upgrade is complete. And it seems to work pretty well!

Last week I bought a solar panel, inverter and some lead acid batteries and set up a solar system in my shed, with the intention of powering my servers. It seems to work pretty well and I have it all integrated into Home Assistant. I’m going to do a load of videos on it and Home Assistant in general.