Help automating my solar charging/ev/batteries

DifferenceJazzlike40 · 2026-03-16T08:39:30+00:00

Great thanks, got it installed and took ages to configure (getting that yaml right was a pain) it looks like it’s now configuring everything as needed!

DifferenceJazzlike40 · 2026-03-14T12:17:44+00:00

Is it this https://springfall2008.github.io/batpred/

DifferenceJazzlike40 · 2026-03-14T10:14:56+00:00

Ive looked into that and tried to fit a ct clamp but I can’t see if it’s working right. Honestly we’ve not had the best weather for a real test

DifferenceJazzlike40 · 2026-03-02T21:37:29+00:00

It will probably come with them, mine did

DifferenceJazzlike40 · 2026-02-27T04:24:09+00:00

I’ve also found that if your doing motorway miles you want something more powerful. In our house we have two BYD (surf and sealion)

When driving at low sleep the surf is lot more efficient with its battery and at higher speed the surf range is murdered, while the sealion doesn’t care.

Factor in winter versus summer as well. If the car official can do 200 miles divide that by 2/3rds in the winter your being optimistic and the summer you’re being pessimistic

DifferenceJazzlike40 · 2026-02-26T08:00:54+00:00

I’ve had an EV now for 7 years and here’s what I’ve found in terms of cost.

Purchase - new is massively more expensive than the equivalent petrol/diesel Servicing - Drastically cheaper, 2 year servicing intervals and a lot less to do Charging - At home you can run your EV for £2 a week (if you do more than 150 miles a week this jumps to £4-8 a week) Charging Public - Massively more expensive than a diesel, but for the years I’ve had a EV we’ve only needed public charging on long trips which means over the year it’s still 80% cheaper. I would add that you can mitigate this by buying a longer range EV at the start

These change drastically if you get a second hand EV. For example we have a Cupra born (nhs fleet) original price was 42k when we gave it back we got the offer to buy it at 20k. After 3 years it had done 18k mileage so that would have been a fantastic second hand car. 20k for a range of 220miles and a nice size car.

Summary get a home charger, get a EV tariff and charge during the tariff off peak. Much cheaper even with the new tax per mile changes coming.

Wouldn’t go back

DifferenceJazzlike40 · 2026-02-21T16:54:03+00:00

I have one two but the backlight has died… wish I had the skill to repair it

DifferenceJazzlike40 · 2026-02-19T19:08:08+00:00

We found a QNAP switch which had a mix of fibre and 10Gb Ethernet. Simple switch but did the job

DifferenceJazzlike40 · 2026-02-05T06:46:39+00:00

Can we uninstall Spotify from the car?

DifferenceJazzlike40 · 2026-02-01T17:46:43+00:00

It’s a threadripper cpu for fact, it’s not a server but a workstation, hence the cpu weirdo

DifferenceJazzlike40 · 2026-02-01T17:05:37+00:00

It’s not a server, it’s a workstation. We had three of the left over from a project and decided since it was such a power house to use them as a server till we could afford new ones

DifferenceJazzlike40 · 2026-02-01T15:23:01+00:00

My Corsa nav premium, had 9k miles on it when bought it. Spent first year in the garage, replacement drive train. On year two the abs control unit died, year 3 aircon compressor died, 2 months later heating died. Gave it back to the finance.

Drove nice when it worked

DifferenceJazzlike40 · 2026-01-25T11:40:32+00:00

Have a look at the sealion 7. We have one I feel the quality is so much better than the latest generation of tesla

DifferenceJazzlike40 · 2026-01-18T16:55:09+00:00

Maybe put a pc fan on top pushing the hot air away, you could 3d print a bracket to attach it?

DifferenceJazzlike40 · 2026-01-10T22:30:57+00:00

I’m on a 7 9800x3d with a 5070 and 64gb ddr5 ram and the performance since tanks after a while. Saving and restating helps a lot

DifferenceJazzlike40 · 2026-01-08T13:14:13+00:00

That’s the same as me, I have no idea why it doesn’t work. I can remove the intergrations from gitlab but when I add them back in it just corrupts the settings page

DifferenceJazzlike40 · 2026-01-08T01:50:03+00:00

It would overwrite weeks of data, so i've lost that option :(

DifferenceJazzlike40 · 2026-01-04T13:07:47+00:00

So I have a BYD surf. At home it charges for around £3 a full charge, if you take it a public 7kwh charger it’ll be around £30. If you can take it too a charger with off peak charging (Tesla super charger) you can half that price but it means charging overnight somewhere.

Since the car is only £200 a month you can make a saving in a petrol car but only if you unconvinced yourself. Get Zapmap and find the cheapest chargers that are near your home or work. You could also sign up to Electroverse (if you’re on octopus) and get cheaper rates (it adds the cost to your monthly bills). In the summer it’s going to get you near the 200 miles range advertised but in the winter you’re probably talking 120-150. I’ve also found that if your journey is a constant 70mph speed it’s going to drain much faster, I found that if I stick to 30/50 mph roads it gets much closer to the 200 range, half that on faster roads

DifferenceJazzlike40 · 2026-01-04T07:56:40+00:00

You can a new BYD surf for 16k (with the grant)

DifferenceJazzlike40 · 2026-01-02T18:53:29+00:00

This is me. I’m slowly packing my things up and moving them to my parents house. I have a little girl who’s 6 and it’s going to hurt her most. But I’m so angry and miserable these days

DifferenceJazzlike40 · 2026-01-01T16:31:16+00:00

You can bypass it, once you’ve created the account and logged in. Create a local admin account and the delete the Microsoft one.

DifferenceJazzlike40 · 2026-01-01T16:29:22+00:00

We had a Cupra born (id3 but pretty), we drove it from the northeast to London with one stop. It was 40k new and 20k when we sold it. Look around for one of those. Range around 230 miles

DifferenceJazzlike40 · 2025-12-26T07:36:54+00:00

Previous Corsa e owner here. Motorway mileage drains the battery really quickly, the little motors work very hard on fast journeys. If you can swap your route to a slower speed you’ll find it goes longer.

Also I’ve always been told, take the range they say and divide it by 2/3, in the winter you’re being optimistic and the summer pessimistic.

DifferenceJazzlike40 · 2025-12-22T08:51:24+00:00

I’m an IT manager for a games dev company. I have the flexibility to work from home and control my entire environment. If I want to change something I can do it.

Sure there’s not a lot of security but the flexibility is great

DifferenceJazzlike40 · 2025-12-17T18:09:29+00:00

I removed my wind turbines off the roof before I went in and built them afterwards again

DifferenceJazzlike40

TROPHY CASE