After some deliberation we eventually put together a sibling frame for a second set of 4 solar panels for the yard to go with the four on the shed installed in April. We invited back our musician friend Vlad, who helped with the first array to again drag the panels into position over the yard shelter. With both now in place I was left connecting up to the second Ultra unit in the breakfast room.
Each set now harvests as much as 2KW/h in full sun, though that works out more as a combined average during daylight. Panel energy is cabled to EcoFlow Ultra X MPPT/battery device on the fridge which simply plugs into the ring main to feed electricity 24/7 for household uses up to 800w. Thereafter the grid supply is called on to safely meet our higher energy needs, dishwasher, washing machine and most importantly tea kettle! Monitoring in the EcoFlow app is ok but we created a meter of our own called Chillum, a touch screen fridge magnet Raspberry Pi!
During this summer we almost completely covered our power use and even as the daylight hours reduce, continue to do so. What amazed at first and now frustrates, as on sunny days the batteries are full by 1pm, so much of the afternoon 5.6KW/h capacity is lost. We are researching alternative storage options, flywheels or water heating before buying another Ultra.
We do not as yet have a feed-in tariff with Octopus energy, they suspended that option earlier in the year due to unstable wholesale energy rates and haven’t yet resumed but offer a new product ‘Outgoing‘ for just this purpose. They may well refuse our surplus without a commercial installation certification so we are researching the options! rather than just buying more batteries perhaps flywheel spinning or water heating is the answer?
There is a balcony solar revolution in progress as people have jumped on as we know electricity prices are set to continue rising for the foreseeable. This incredibly sunny summer has fixed the option in everyone’s mind, so let’s hope there is soon a suitable response from them to match our enthusiasm.
One of the many motivations to get this all sorted now apart from rising prices, is that as a homeworkers we do run local data storage and energy intensive graphics processing, not least as we increasingly experiment with and rely on local AI tooling and wireless network hardware 24/7.
The scope of local AI integration here restarted in the spring after earlier progress with local AI became tiresome at the end of 2025. Now somehow returning to the subject, it’s more responsive and feels more compatible and useful.
A self imposed restraint to utilise available compute capable hardware, instead of shopping for the latest Nvidia GTX or Apple Studio or submit to the command of Claude, has taken us on a meandering pathway to solutions.
Cranium is the main PC system sporting two vintage 6GB GPU and a Hermes AI harness. This unit has become core to our recent embrace of automation and augmentation. Its very useful for network hardware maintenance and creative project development. We now also have a fleet of reanimated legacy PC’s and small board computers that increasingly look after each other!
Of the many threads to have reopened is SDRX which pre-pandemic explored the use of low cost RTL RF scanners to map radio noise in our environment.
Back then we had a surplus of Raspberry Pi small board computers and a bag of DVB receivers from MAZI and a trio of Bitscope blades for single dual and quad PI power deployment.
All sport B3+ Pi’s that PXE boot from Cranium to support add hock experimentation with SDRX. Cranium help with the redeployment of the first of these as controller for the wideband Adalm-Pluto and Classic RTL DVB that monitors RF noise using classy spiral antennas!
Techno Tom as he is known to many, visited recently to check on progress and help troubleshoot a solar cable fault, expressed much interest in set up of Icecast audio relay so that he and his housemates could begin broadcasting.
Volumio sprung to mind as an all in one resolution of his expressed needs so we set one up on a spare raspberry PI whilst refurbishing his old laptop and have since added one for ourselves to run Tallbastards random live stream!
All this reminded me of the FM transmitter that Tetsuo Kogawa gave me at supper after we recorded this transmitter build performance in Tate Modern.
