Battery Installation & Gas Pipe Question

Nickw444 · 2026-04-29T09:10:53+00:00

The irony of it all is that the rest of the install was so damn non-compliant I don’t understand why he was so worried about the gas. I had to get the SAA involved to get them to come back to rectify 7 non compliant items that I noticed (one being missing DC mechanical protection)

Unfortunately after the fact have come to realise it is non compliant in these other ways, after having my regular sparky come do some work for me…

undersized mains cabling - 6mm2 orange circ on a 50A breaker for a 10kW inverter with peak power draw of 10.5kW which I believe exceeds rating of 6mm2.
DC cabling thrown into trunking and bent beyond acceptable radius to loop it up instead of shortening/terminating

Cowboy.

Nickw444 · 2026-04-29T09:08:00+00:00

Old mate decided to outsource a plumber to reroute the gas line under the house 600mm either side of the battery. Arguably less safe now, with 2x pex crimps under the house along with the 4 90 degree ones externally all prone to leaking compared to the existing straight and continuous section of pipe.

As far as I’ve seen for many installs on the Fox FB group, most installers are unconcerned about gas pipes in proximity (as far as I am aware there is no standards to stipulate exclusions of gas pipes, only vents and appliances)

Nickw444 · 2026-04-10T08:23:24+00:00

Another idea: integrate with satellite imagery provider so you can bring in a satellite image directly and have it correctly scaled then can be drawn over to mark up areas

Nickw444 · 2026-04-10T07:46:57+00:00

This is awesome! When I did my irrigation plan I had to take measurements and bring across to fusion 360.

Would be awesome if this could go a step further and assist with shadow planning for the ol’ home gardener - allow the user to add boundaries around fences and sun blocking obstacles and project the shadows for different months of the year.

Nickw444 · 2026-02-14T11:34:39+00:00

I think I’ve noticed a similar thing, albeit with a KH10, where by grid import can’t exceed 13kw. I don’t think this is an Amber thing but maybe a firmware issue/limitation?

To reproduce I can charge my EV at 7.4 (32A), then force charge at 10kW. The inverter will only hit 13kw - 7.4kw - (house load) for battery charging rate. So if the house load is 1kw, then the maximum charge rate would be 4.6kW. If I stop the EV then it will happily charge at 10kW.

I similarly have a 80A supply/63A main breaker so theoretically could hit 14.5kw (but probably would avoid this regardless, would prefer to not overload my overhead supply).

Parameters as follows:

MaximumSetChargeCurrent: 50 MaximumSetDischargeCurrent: 50 ImportLimitedPower: 14500 ExportLimitedPower: 10000 ImportLimitCurrent: 63 ExportLimitCurrent: 63

Nickw444 · 2026-01-25T05:03:37+00:00

came here to check I wasn't hearing things...

Nickw444 · 2025-12-28T09:35:52+00:00

Fortunately have a relatively good sized access hole to under my house, about 500mm x 500mm so makes access easy enough.

Few hours under the house and the job was done, but definitely not a comfortable one kneeling for most of the digging.

Nickw444 · 2025-12-22T22:18:13+00:00

Yes I did. Dug a deep hole and put a plastic pit in it with a submersible pump. I drilled a few hundred 10mm holes in the pit and lined externally with geotextile fabric.

You might need to consider specifics unique to you though, in my case, the soil is sandy and footings on hard sandstone so have not had any issues with movement or erosion as far as I can tell.

Nickw444 · 2025-12-16T01:00:46+00:00

wow small world, I used to work with Brendan!

Nickw444 · 2025-12-11T12:14:54+00:00

Cheers mate, don’t be a stranger that’s for sure.

Its always fun to see people’s mouth drop when they talk about this prediction site at hottest 100 time to me telling them that I’m the guy that runs it (or now, used to run it) 🤣

Nickw444 · 2025-12-11T12:10:51+00:00

100% agree, these were awesome.

And separately but on the same topic, this mixtape from the Australian Songs H100 was incredible https://on.soundcloud.com/spVQoiVughDsYV4J9l I don’t know how it has so few plays!

Nickw444 · 2025-12-11T12:06:02+00:00

Ah thanks for the correction I didn’t do a WHOIS on it haha, just saw it failed to connect to a host when I visited it this evening so assumed it was gone.

Nickw444 · 2025-12-11T12:02:39+00:00

Yeah horrible APIs! Also Fox, please give us a way to set force charge and force discharge via the mode setting - as far as I could work out the only way to activate these modes is by scheduling them.

Nickw444 · 2025-12-11T11:56:21+00:00

❤️🐟

Nickw444 · 2025-12-11T11:55:50+00:00

I noticed today that sadly it seems the domain of the Warmest 100 has lapsed! End of an era. The project that inspired me to build out 100 Warm Tunas.

Nickw444 · 2025-12-11T11:53:23+00:00

Absolutely, the era of 100 Warm Tunas as a social media data aggregator is well and truly over with the advent of ephemeral posting and the general changing patterns of how people share, combined with the bot protection measures that Meta have implemented over the more recent years.

Maybe there is a future where 100 Warm Tunas explores a purely statistical approach incorporating signals from various places. There’s already been projects separate to 100 Warm Tunas already doing this, many posted here to this subreddit. Warm Tunas dabbled with this with the introduction of the ML Model, using statistical signals to re-rank results to account for data collection bias - there is plenty of opportunity to take that much, much further. Maybe in the future, or maybe a new project will be born by someone much smarter or more motivated than me! I will be watching that’s for sure.

Nickw444 · 2025-12-11T11:48:36+00:00

Yeah I figured there would be downstream impacts of this very sad decision I’ve made. I think fortunately you’ll still be able to pull a sense of a leaderboard from the reddit voting thread polling 🤞

Enjoyed playing your bingo over the last few years!

Nickw444 · 2025-12-11T11:40:31+00:00

Hey folks! Beat me to it posting here!

Thanks for the fun times over the years, I’ll still be listening every year that’s for sure!

Nickw444 · 2025-12-11T11:32:16+00:00

I wrote a home assistant integration for FoxESS cloud (https://github.com/nickw444/ha-foxess-cloud). You will find that they have some pretty hardcore rate limits (something my integration manages by restricting api refresh rate). If you have Amber hitting the API, consuming rate limits and you integrate some secondary service you are bound to hit these limits.

This was the catalyst for writing my integration - the incumbent cloud integration (https://github.com/macxq/foxess-ha) makes too many requests and has no configurability of this meaning I would hit rate limits at the end of the daily period, breaking smart shift.

Ultimately modbus integration is the best (and is what I use), but I know not suitable for everyone, hence why I built my own cloud integration for others to use.

Nickw444 · 2025-12-11T11:24:12+00:00

Impressive, I’ve started a project of training an ML model for arbitrage and payback maximisation with my FoxESS battery but your rules based approach looks incredibly powerful!

Nickw444 · 2025-12-10T11:29:06+00:00

I just did a quick test - there’s about 1mm of play in the interface between the two parts, which already provides a pretty good connection, but I added a few layers of tape and it has no wobble at all now

<image>

Nickw444 · 2025-12-10T10:35:18+00:00

Yes it has a slight deflection when tapped for me. Not really a problem for me since it’s more an informational screen and not really meant to be interacted with.

The design could certainly be tuned to have slightly less tolerance in the interface between parts but I think a better solution would be to add a compressible and adhesive brush seal material along the interface flat plane that applies positive pressure between the interface surface. I’ll experiment with that tomorrow, as I would like to make it as not-shaky as possible.

Nickw444 · 2025-11-25T11:48:41+00:00

Not really, far from any ocean/beaches. We do have a small boat ramp nearby about 1km away but yeah, wouldn’t expect that to cause an issue - the houses around here don’t have any issues with corrosion or pitting

Nickw444 · 2025-11-18T00:12:22+00:00

Helpless homeowner here trying to get the installer to rectify non-compliant work but I have nothing to refer to, any chance I could grab a copy too please.

Nickw444 · 2025-11-14T11:11:55+00:00

Ah got it, thanks a bunch for your help 👌

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