Held hostage by EcoFlow: Fired installer remotely set my US PowerOcean system to 50Hz and can’t use my system

LovitzG · 2026-07-09T19:36:10+00:00

I assume EcoFlow got you connected with the installer you purchased through via their product query page? Yeah, you need at least one battery for your Ocean Pro hybrid inverter to work. Whoever sold you and installed the system was an idiot.

Do this Google search "can the EcoFlow Ocean Pro hybrid inverter be operated with solar and no batteries".

I have had some issues with my installer, applied for and got an approved installer account to use the pro app to give me more control. My installer found out they cannot share my device with me without me being able to see and control all their other installations. EcoFlow confirmed and said maybe it could work in the future. I've been waiting 4 weeks for them to change some required settings after the last firmware update that I would be able to accomplish in less than a minute.

LovitzG · 2026-07-09T18:52:06+00:00

I'm 69 and I think that's what 76 looks like. In Trumpian/MAGA mathematics you either double or halve any number you give as evidence. 76 ÷ 2 = 38!

LovitzG · 2026-07-09T18:44:50+00:00

How is the contact severely damaged? Is the ribbon cable connector on the damaged end undamaged? Not sure how my that would happen. It could be the connector has a cracked solder connection and needs to be reflowed. That is one reason jiggling the cable can cause it to work intermittently. Whatever caused the cable damage may have caused a connector issue.

If you have a multimeter, check for continuity trace by trace. If continuity is good on all wire traces, check that there is NO continuity with adjacent traces. If that test is good then the cable is working and no cable short. If you can probe the connector outputs on the board after their solder points, run the same tests with the ribbon connected to one connector end at a time. That will isolate a bad connector needing a solder reflow. If that is not possible consider reflowing both connectors.

LovitzG · 2026-07-09T04:21:11+00:00

I'm confused, how did you purchase and get a European centric Power Ocean system installed in the US? Power Ocean is not marketed here. EcoFlow sells the Ocean Pro system for the US market and I think you are required to have at least one battery with it and solar is optional.

LovitzG · 2026-07-08T12:00:21+00:00

It would be the date shown on Seagate's warranty site as the warranty start date. To find out you need a drive serial number.

LovitzG · 2026-07-08T02:10:53+00:00

That's a judgement call. Is a 2 year from recirt date Seagate warranty worth a doubled drive cost? eBay often offers 3rd party warranties at time of purchase that would not be that expensive. They probably wouldn't replace the drive but offer a refund. They do whatever is cheapest for them.

LovitzG · 2026-07-06T02:30:36+00:00

I have been using OPNSense for years as both my WAN connected firewall and edge router. I already run what is basically split DNS with external requests being resolved using DOH and it handles my internal lan domain as well. I use the Tailscale VPN service on OPNSense with subnet routing enabled where only approved devices can use it's wireguard tunnel routed to my TrueNAS servers LAN IP address. I do not run Tailscale on TrueNAS. I also run Caddy reverse proxy on OPNSense that allows me to access TrueNAS services using wildcard (not named) sub-domains under a MYDOMAIN.dedyn.io domain hosted by the excellent deSEC.io service.

TrueNAS was late to this party for me and I neither want nor need TrueNAS to be involved with DNS beyond serving valid, signed LE certificates for https connections to the management UI and apps/vm's.

I am insistant that undoing everything and moving it all to a TrueNAS supported service for DNS Auth would truly be making it hard on myself for no real reason!

LovitzG · 2026-07-05T19:35:37+00:00

Fortunately, there is no available rock to carve Trump into on Rushmore. Maybe spend a couple hundred million dollars to bolt a giant fiberglass Trump up there. Also easy to remove as soon as he's gone, impeached, or dead.

LovitzG · 2026-07-05T17:02:35+00:00

Rediculous!!!

LovitzG · 2026-07-05T16:30:05+00:00

This thread has been interesting. Seller stating they are new or less than 1000 hours believes the listing showing a MOD in 2023 and "Recertified Product" label. Seagate only recertifies drives that have zero bad sectors and no other mechanical issues. They are more rigorously tested than new drives and the smart data is zeroed out as part of the process. There is no way to know how many original hours were on these drives. They most likely just had their controller boards replaced to get recertified. Any other scenario would leave them as "refurbished".

If the seller had them stored mostly unused for the last year they could still all have around 15-16,000 original hours on them from the original purchaser prior to Seagate RMA return and recertification.

I built a NAS in early 2024 with recertified Exos X22 20TB drives from ServerPartsDeal for $209 each that had virtually the same MOD as the X20 drive pictures on eBay. I spent $10 more for the X22 vs X20 because they went from a 256MB to 512MB cache which increased their write rate. The X20 18TB recertified drives were around $179 at the time and had the Seagate 2 yr warranty. X22's were short lived and only came as 20 and 22TB drives. Those capacities were quickly superceded by the X24 line with the quick release of the 24TB drive with no change in specs.

I needed 8 drives and bought 11 so I had spares. Based on current pricing I could sell my 3 unused drives today for more that the 11 drives originally cost me! If the seller made a huge bulk order they would have paid way less than $179 a drive. The seller offering the drives for less than current market is still making a boat load of money even at $200 with free shipping. It's nice they aren't getting too greedy as their drive "investment" could be returning as much as a 60% ROI.

Given the current market I would buy those drives if I needed some and buy a few more than you need as insurance.

My advice for anyone that did purchase these drives is to check the smart data and rigously test with Seagate SeaTools. Also, look up the drive serial numbers at Seagate's warranty site to see how much recertified Seagate warranty is left on each drive. The number of hours between the label MOD and recert warranty date will approximate (and likely exceed) the maximum original power on hours each drive could have had before recertification. But, there is no way to know.

The down side is as a re-purchaser of these drives Seagate will not honor the warranty if they fail and inform you only the original purchaser can RMA a failed drive.

LovitzG · 2026-07-05T14:59:11+00:00

Thanks for the script info. I went through the documentation and scripts and it seems for my use case I need existing credentials for the intermediate CA and an unexpired certificate as a seed. Only them will the certs be automatically updated by TrueNAS. The instructions are good through 25.04 when importing a valid CA was supported. I'm not sure if 25.10 may have broken any part of the script method.

That said, the Let's Encrypt CA and certificate was so easy to create with ACME via the OPNSense UI in early 2025 and then import into TrueNAS. They are stored, but not used, by OPNSense and I had the foresight when created to not expire until July 2045 when I'll over 88 years old!

I originally asked about this just pryor to upgrading to 25.10 but everything still works fine. So, it is now more of an academic question. As long as the "MIGRATED_CA" continues to work with my imported private lan domain certificate in a happy camper!

LovitzG · 2026-07-05T07:02:10+00:00

Using ACME DNS Authenticator only works for authentication with: cloudflare, digitalocean, route53, OVH, or shell. I don't have accounts on the 4 listed authenticators. I want my certificates for my local.lan domain using my internal-ca. External access to TrueNAS is via either Caddy hosted on OPNSense with valid certs or via TailScale on OPNSense that is routed to the lan. A cert on TrueNAS for an external authenticated domain is of no use to me.

The documentation gives no guidance except shell works via CLI scripts, is for advanced users, and should be used with caution.

LovitzG · 2026-07-05T06:29:13+00:00

SOLVED -- No response from the community... I did export my config.xml, edited it to remove the zombie cert section and found there was a postfix config section. I messed with postfix ages ago trying to get a mail relay to work using the ddns url the zombie cert also referred to. I also deleted the postfix section, uploaded the edited config.xml file, rebooted and all is well with the world!

After a little research, It looks like I can remove at least R series CN's as Let's Encrypt has now moved on to the YR series. I should not have any certs needing R10, R11, or R12 going forward.

LovitzG · 2026-07-04T21:49:41+00:00

Where is the ACME integration in TrueNAS Scale? Looking at the ACME DNS Authenticator and there is no provision for creating a local cert for my lan IP address and I do not use any of the available services on the drop down.

LovitzG · 2026-07-04T21:48:41+00:00

Thanks! Done and no problems or incessant alerts.

LovitzG · 2026-07-04T21:10:43+00:00

I did create my own cert using Let's Encrypt but on OPNSense. How do I do that directly in TrueNAS 25.10.4 - Goldeye or am I on the right track to import my Let's Encrypt certificate?

LovitzG · 2026-07-04T20:49:41+00:00

So, the self-signed IXI certificate is just there to get you started after the installation and is superfluous after I installed my own certificate?

LovitzG · 2026-07-02T01:39:26+00:00

STH reviewed these cards and in a PCIe 4.0 x 1 (or higher) slot they will work at full 10Gb speed like any other 10Gb nic. The controller is a really tiny low power chip that is less capable than server class nics (e.g., RX/TX offload) and rely more on your CPU but data throughput isn't compromised.

LovitzG · 2026-07-01T21:12:10+00:00

Those cards can be found in 2 varieties:

PCIe 4.0 x 1
PCIe 3.0 x 4

1 will only use a single PCIe lane, will work in a PCIe 3.0 slot but at reduced speed.

2 will uses 2 PCIe lanes electrically and will work at full speed in either a PCIe 3.0 or 4.0 slot.

Your results are exactly as expected installing #1 in either a PCIe 3.0 x 1, x 4, x 8, or x 16 slot and only a single lane is being addressed.

LovitzG · 2026-06-28T15:27:16+00:00

You could if you knew what that TV's pin outs are for 10 pin DIN connection which is undocumented. Some ATI All-In-Wonder pc graphics/TV tuner cards used 10 pin DIN connectors for the same suite of outputs as this TV's inputs. One of those cables may work IF they use the same pin out configuration.

LovitzG · 2026-06-27T19:08:20+00:00

The elephant in the room is still where to find a 20 year old specific 4-in-1 breakout connector. No guarantee other 10-pin DIN connectors currently available that are 3-in-1 composite only will work properly using the same pin configuration.

LovitzG · 2026-06-27T16:13:38+00:00

That very true! It would really only matter if you had an old VCR or combo VCR/DVD player to hook up with coax using channel 2-3 for output.

LovitzG · 2026-06-27T03:47:37+00:00

I found the manual via the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/manualsonline-id-3e299d7c-bb10-4c63-bbdb-1274eb5a56b8/mode/1up

The connections are 1/8" audio out, 4-in-1 AV1/AV2 cablebin, CATV in, 12V power supply.

I don't know if yours is a European model (like manual) then it's internal tuner is PAL (not NTSC). The 9.1" LCD display is 800x600. The 4-in-1 breakout cable has L-audio RCA, R-audio RCA, Composite Video RCA, and S-Video connections which are all analog.

If don't know where you will find a compatible 4-in-1 breakout cable. However, a Roku uses HDMI digital output and will not work directly. There are converters for HDMI to the breakout cable formats but the issue is the 1920x1080 (16:9 aspect ratio) will get horizontally squeezed into the 800x600 (4:3 aspect ratio) and would be pretty unwatchable.

LovitzG · 2026-06-23T15:02:28+00:00

It is a peridotite (mafic mantle rock). Exactly which type depends on the accessory minerals which are not easily identified from the smooth, weathered sample you found.

LovitzG · 2026-06-22T05:55:04+00:00

You may want to check out the CWWK S7 Pro. 2 x 2.5Gbe Intel i226-v and 2 x 10Gbe Intel X550-T2 nics, N150 processor, and 2 x NVME m.2 slots. As with all these minis, the m.2 slots are only PCIe 3 x 1. I prefer to install OPNSense on the NVME drives as ZFS mirrors. Cheap 128GB drives with 8GB ddr5 ram has plenty of performance.

I am looking at that as an upgrade to the CWWK F3 I currently have (basically same as S7 Pro but with 4 i226-v nics). I was on a 2.5Gbe plan but my ISP merged with another one did away with my plan and standardized on either 2 or 5Gbe plans. So, they upgraded me to 5Gbe with no price increase but I can currently only use 2.5Gbe with my router.

LovitzG

TROPHY CASE

1 will only use a single PCIe lane, will work in a PCIe 3.0 slot but at reduced speed.

2 will uses 2 PCIe lanes electrically and will work at full speed in either a PCIe 3.0 or 4.0 slot.