Finished bringing up the first part of my ground mount array.

It turned out to not be too hard to get the panels installed in the Powerracks, only needed a few inches of movement to align things and that was doable without help. I think it's a good system.

wow, this turned out to be an out of date /etc/hosts data (somehow set by networkmanager) plus a misunderstanding of address= in dnsmasq.conf which combined to make another local host respond to a ping of the car when the car was not at home

full egg on my face here: this turns out to be my home automation turning it off despite it not being home

I thought I had protected against this by pinging the car but apparently that doesn't work

good old testing in production!

Citrumelo harvest at Dad's

Frogging

had to write a shell script to make my car keep restarting charging since it fails out every half hour or so. grid power wtf?

Onward thru the climate sacracrifice zone

incredibly civilized for Johnson City to have a DC fast charger a block from 3 cafes and downtown.

it is a pie shelf, right?

Dumped the house battery into the car, put the pie in the built-in pie shelf and set off... Could have made it to Asheville, but stopped on the other side of the mountains to charge and have some surprisingly fun food.

nice day just hanging out, enjoying the sun, and when I get a little bored, running another wheelbarrow of gravel up the hill

Just finished filling the second one, which means I'm 1/10th done with this project already

My first month of charging my electric car #offgrid from 4.5 kw of solar. About how I expected it to go. I did start low after a road trip, and was able to dig out of that hole, only DC charging once to get home after a day trip.

Hoping to get above 80% before I leave for thanksgiving, but we'll see. December will probably involve more charging away from home, until I complete the rest of my upgrades.

started the next phase of my #solar install

It did work on the first try though!

Definitely gonna tune it to not bother starting when the house battery is not full and less than 1kw is being produced though.

spotting all the bugs in this code left an an exercise to the reader I suppose, but my favorites so far have been:

* minutes actually start at 0 don't they? my FRP represenation of a minute hand was actually buggy and started at 1
* this stopped the car from charging when it is not at home too, which would be a bit surprising

Finally sat down today and wrote some code for controlling my EV to charge when there is enough #offgrid solar power.

full snowglobe out the windows AND 3 kw from the solar fence? yes please

Not uncommon for modern large MPPTs to use 50 watts when idle. These 4 Epever Tracer's use < 10 watts combined.

by the way, these Tracer MPPTs have kind of a reputation as not great, and indeed they track a bit slowly and are underpowered compared with modern gear. But they're also *silent* and consume very little standby power.

My first one has been running for 7 years without any problems, so I decided to buy more.

I suspect that, since this was the cheapest decent MPPT for a long while, a lot of DIYers messed up the wiring enough to fry a lot of them, and so they developed a reputation.

They output close to the same voltage, but whichever one picks the lowest output voltage tends to get clipped first.

I have 4 MPPT #solar charge controllers now, and such interesting graphs.

These controllers don't share any communications, behavior is based only on observed voltage and there is some emergent behavior when there's not enough load for them all to run flat out. It's neat that this works.

In a situation where USB daisy chaining would be super useful. Thing is, I came up on the Atari SIO bus, that had daisy chaining, plug-n-play, etc. My 1984 computer was peak in this regard.

good day to install an outlet for an EV charger

welp, my EV does not provide any way to set the clock or time zone, it's all full auto... So I can't do anything to make it display my personal time zone, which of course remains DST year round

Gonna fix this with electrician's tape on the screen I expect.

More annoying is this means that a configured charging time swings out of alignment with when the sunlight is actually available. I will eventually fix that by controlling time in the EVSE, rather than the car.

Right now I'm feeling like it should prioritize charging the car, if heavier clouds moved back in, maybe give up after the house battery drains down 10% or so in an hour. That's only a small amount of cycling of that battery, well within usual amounts.

If the car were 75% charged rather than the current 40%, I'd have a different opinion, so I've added that to the data collection.