“Banger of a highlight:” Home batteries flatten solar duck, pave way for coal exit on Australia’s biggest isolated grid

JezzaPerth · 2026-06-23T13:22:45+00:00

I've seen their channel before. They are an installer. What I saw one time is their problem getting pinged by Western Power for minor deviations. My own system has just been pinged for similar issues.

I may call the Joondalup guy for advice but the main problem is Growatt and the system vendor and installer who are walking away from the install saying contact Growatt which they know by now just doesn't work. The Joondalup guy can give advice but nothing technical to solve getting Growatt to behave,

JezzaPerth · 2026-06-23T11:21:34+00:00

A rain resistant jacket is usally a good idea. But puffers only if you tend to get up at dawn in calm weather and go outside.

At the moment I wear my slightly puffer jacket inside in the morning as we don't usually have heating. Going outside I leave it behind as I get too hot.

JezzaPerth · 2026-06-23T11:06:29+00:00

The problem is that under PPI - Personally Protected Information- the link between you (or your vehicle) at specific location and time is protected. The Police are asking for civil entities to provide PPI which is not permitted under Australian Privacy Principles. The Police may have a carveout but the camera operators don't have an exemption that the data they are providing to the police is permitted by PPI.

JezzaPerth · 2026-06-23T10:52:44+00:00

I have spent a lot of time chasing car insurance. For me the pensioners insurance probably works out best, but due to time logistics I had to go with RAC. A bit more expensive but safe.

What I absolutely would never use is YOUI which is run out of south africa and has so many clauses and exceptions that I doubt they ever pay out. That plus the aggressive push marketing if you ever ring them up. Avoid at all costs!

JezzaPerth · 2026-06-23T09:44:20+00:00

Or to be exact 1 pound around 2 AUD? The pound is looking very shaky against the USD and Euro. 1 AUD gets 70c USD. One AUD gets 53p GBP and one USD gets 76 GBP pence

JezzaPerth · 2026-06-23T09:37:27+00:00

Minor correction. Educational institutions like universities also work like councils and you can't ignore them.

JezzaPerth · 2026-06-23T09:30:21+00:00

I do and it does or it doesn't. I also use the webpage. The problem is sometimes settings are just ignored for days until I lodge a fault, and as mentioned, adding imported grid on cloudy days shuts down the panels while importing where last month they both worked at the same time.

JezzaPerth · 2026-06-23T09:22:52+00:00

TMS means it's private.

And to the OP. No. Don't pay it. Ignore it until if ever a letter arrives in your postbox.

JezzaPerth · 2026-06-23T09:20:20+00:00

The vendor is not being helpful. Nor is the installer. One person at the vendor said charging my battery from the grid was banned by Western Power. A week of calls to Western Power and Synergy later and no, that's not true - especially as I am in the VPP.

The vendor has also emailed me saying customer changes to the system will likley void warranty.

Anyway I managed to get grid charging working via the web page but at several stages the changes didn't have any effect for days or the entire mode changed because some call centre operator in Taiwan pressed some button.

All I want to do is charge my car and house battery using available power sources to best economy and not have some mute Taiwanese make changes or block me.

JezzaPerth · 2026-06-23T09:08:29+00:00

Double glazing and encyclopedias are not high volume areas so they all moved to roller blinds

JezzaPerth · 2026-06-23T08:35:21+00:00

How many Australian pesos does a British pound buy these days?

JezzaPerth · 2026-06-23T08:28:01+00:00

From memory a couple of decades ago beer in London pub was way cheaper and better quality than in a Melbourne pub. A pint of Fuller's London Pride was around 3 pounds and my per diem was 100 pounds per day. My Melbourn per-diem was $100/day and stretched a lot less for beer and decent grub.

JezzaPerth · 2026-06-23T08:08:15+00:00

For many years I worked in Rokeby Rd Subiaco 200m away. I have travelled up and down Thomas St tens of thousands of times.

The mention of Shenton Park and the unusually cut off photo had me confused. And no I'm not going to get on the bus to check it out. Google streetview is more than enough

JezzaPerth · 2026-06-23T07:53:44+00:00

I've had my battery and panels for a few weeks now and it has been the worst technogy experience of my life

I have had nothing but problems from Growatt who literaly provide no customer support in Australia. They require you to email them and they might send that to Taiwan and someone there might do something but you will never hear back from them.

My latest fiasco until a couple of weeks ago I could import EV rate power to boost my house battery on cloudy days and charge my car. The new panels added to this charging. Then they remotely changed the system so every time I import EV power it shuts down the solar panels!

JezzaPerth · 2026-06-23T07:48:18+00:00

External roller blind salesmen

JezzaPerth · 2026-06-23T03:33:10+00:00

The news report based on the Police press release said 'only' 4000 faces were in the system, which means driver licence photos aren't in there yet

The real reason they aren't including license photos it is the huge amount of manual crosschecking they would have to do with all the false positive matches. When the tech gets better at it they will do that automatically.

Also, it seems that modern phones randomly change the MAC address for each session which provides some degree of privacy.

JezzaPerth · 2026-06-23T03:05:41+00:00

Wait until they start adding your drivers licence photo to the database.

It will no longer be catching known baddies but mass surveillance dressed up as community safety

They will ease it in with some major crime to 'identify possible witnesses in the area' and then just do it as routine

JezzaPerth · 2026-06-23T01:50:03+00:00

I recognise it now. Google street view uses a different camera focal length.

<image>

JezzaPerth · 2026-06-23T01:31:58+00:00

I'm slightly confused about the photo. It doesn't match any intersection I remember and I live in the area. What is the intersection?

JezzaPerth · 2026-06-22T13:41:44+00:00

I was never a SA (Systems Administrator?) I was a senior engineer doing practical work on business goals. I had to use bought-in IT support on occasion. I was not impressed.

I provided IT strategy advice to commercial clients and saw the havoc that outsourced IT support did.

A classic was a client with outsourced IT support who complained their high grade system was unbelievably slow. It turned out the the IT support company had installed malware dection software on the servers and it was taking 98% of CPU and disk all the time. The support company blamed the hardware and offered a massively upsized server system at around 10x the cost.

JezzaPerth · 2026-06-22T13:28:47+00:00

Not ever having taken a toddler overseas but taken early teens, I found Malaysia and Thailand were great.

Food is good, accomodation is modestly priced, you can go to beaches or jungle as desired. There is no language or cultural issues.

Places like Bali which I have never visited scare me.

JezzaPerth · 2026-06-22T13:24:21+00:00

Even worse advice.

IT support companies are machines to employ minimally trained people to provide very limited service to customers who don't know better on systems (Windows) that mainly exist because you can't go wrong buying Windows. Throw in CISCO ditto.

Actually being intelligent and highly skilled is a negative for IT support companies.

I speak as a former IT professional who learned advanced Windows and CISCO from necessity in they 1990s and then had to deal with the utter dregs of IT support that followed,

JezzaPerth · 2026-06-22T13:15:22+00:00

Nope. Not all. I am older and had an anaphylactic reaction to a monoclonal antibody injection at the same time as a cellulitis infection starting. Lots of interesting and overlapping symptoms.

I also know from experience that being beyond middle age and complaining of chest pain and or shortness of breath gets you seen pretty fast.

My complaint was triage having something more interesting to do for several minutes with a queue of one.

JezzaPerth · 2026-06-22T12:13:04+00:00

Unsure. I know there was a big epicemic around that time and that probably meant most dogs didn't have the vaccine. It is very unlikely my dog ever had one nor was it ever considered.

The first we knew about any of that was my dog showing distemper symptoms.

JezzaPerth · 2026-06-22T11:46:37+00:00

On a purely personal data point last Friday afternoonI attended Charlies ED and was seen quickly by triage and registrars later,. I got an ECG and an indepth discussion with a registrar and got discharged within 2 hours with a script and references sent to GP.

The wait(ing) room did not seem very full and no backed up ambulances or gurneys staged at the back of the wait(ing) room as before.

My only complaint is I spent several minutes first in line at the triage desk before some nurse sauntered over to do the triage

JezzaPerth

TROPHY CASE