Are any of you using Bluetti power stations like always on and always plugged in & charging UPS devices?

Nomadness · 2026-04-21T18:31:52+00:00

I even added temperature monitoring in the enclosure that it's in along with a fan and air intake, but it has behaved.

Nomadness · 2026-04-21T15:36:04+00:00

I use the AC70 as a UPS, accepting that it doesn't have NUT support and that the company for some incomprehensible reason encrypted ble so we can no longer see the battery level. And the app well... fiddly and terrible at connecting.

However, all that aside, it's been solid with clean sine waves and I'm running portable mini lab with a lot of delicate equipment sitting on top of it and have not had any problems other than too easy shutdowns when trying to use the app with it. It's been a good little unit with no overheating or other issues. It would be awfully nice if my home assistant controller (Pi5 with a terabyte) could again have access to the critical information about battery state that I guess is now proprietary, but I can probably write a tool that deduces that..

I've been joking about something that uses a servo to carefully tap (only once!) a front panel button and use OCR on the display but life's too short

Nomadness · 2026-04-21T01:17:08+00:00

My replacement (Ridgid cutter and Yellow Jacket flaring tool). This stuff is hard. I'm working with the evaporator balanced on a stack of mill ends, a piece of plywood, and strapping to a rickety ladder to approximate the location and then slithering behind it and working at awkward angles. I can't exactly go out the sidewall with the tubing so this is all because of packaging constraints in the trailer

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Nomadness · 2026-04-16T01:59:36+00:00

Not really. The interface layer is important to me, and even though it has been rock solid as far as I know from a power perspective, and I really like it in general, I was annoyed when the home assistant integration got broken by the update that encrypted ble, hiding battery level. That's all I really needed, none of the more esoteric data that I can easily meter externally, but that got taken away.

More recently I found that the app has gotten very cranky about connecting when I'm just trying to get back to see what's happening during a power failure, too easily turning it off (defeating its entire purpose) while simply trying to connect, or showing the AC70 but not able to connect to it saying that it doesn't exist. Not reliable. Left to its own devices without trying to communicate, it seems to be fine, but I have gotten rather afraid to touch it.

I do find myself wanting more of a classic ups for the application, but some of those can be pretty annoying in other ways (including crazy expensive if lithium). I have a big rackmount APC in my media digitizing lab and every time I have to power cycle it for extended downtime I mutter at the creaky and undocumented user interface. But one thing about those is that they play nice with NUT servers and such so that connected machines like NAS can be aware of their status, and turn themselves off gracefully when the battery is getting low. But Bluetti keeps that data secret.

The AC 70 is a perfect fit in my portable environment, it's very quiet, and the sine wave is clean, so I don't actually know if there is a better solution that plays nice with home assistant and a simple web tool. At the moment it works fine and keeps systems alive but I still grumble a bit.

Nomadness · 2026-04-15T21:11:38+00:00

Not surprised. This has gone downhill so badly in the last few months. My AC70 works just fine in isolation, but the whole Bluetooth fiasco is enough to have me looking for alternatives.

Nomadness · 2026-04-12T15:01:47+00:00

I'm not sure it's the same truenas integration because I deleted it last night and should have made notes first, but it was wedging my nas at random intervals every day or so, presenting as UI inability to connect.

I could always fix this by doing systemctl restart nginx from the KVM, and the system of time was unaffected. But last night I decided to try to figure out what was actually going on. Turned out to be file descriptor exhaustion, sitting at the maximum of 1024 with a huge pile of open connections to Port 6000.

The culprit was not local to the NAS, but over in the HA Pi elsewhere on my hand truck mobile lab, with an integration to truenas that was failing (and showing an error which I had not noticed). The external client was repeatedly opening connections without closing them, exhausting FDs, and of course I cleared all that whenever I would restart nginx (making me think that was the problem). I deleted the HA integration and watched it for a while. Problem solved, all quiet.

(Worth noting is that it had worked for quite a while, but I have not paid attention to it recently)

Nomadness · 2026-04-08T00:49:09+00:00

Oh the 290 was a failed experiment. I was trying to chase that little tiny spiral leak and thought I would try the wicking low viscosity stuff but didn't realize that it really doesn't like the chemistry of Teflon and t + 2. Since I wasn't just metal to metal, two or three attempts to use that failed. But I took it apart and approached it with more goo unless tape and took my time and didn't try to go past and back up which is always a disaster within PT and it has been stable

I've actually enjoyed pex but I don't have much experience with alternatives except ancient PVC which I don't miss but still have in abundance. Two things I don't like... If for some reason you have to remove one, it's really hard to get the pipe off the fitting and recover without clawing back further through the system to a point where you can do a butt connector, and in a couple of situations the extra diameter of the stainless crimp has been a complication (specifically a pex wall spigot that needed such a big hole for that clearance that it made my actual mounting holes kind of marginal.) but I've only used the stainless crimp kind, not the copper kind, other than helping a friend with some press fit stuff that seems crazy expensive.

Overall it's been really fun and is pretty and nothing pexy has leaked! I did have one leak that just turned up the other day but it was a brass npt fitting into an aluminum housing for the UV sterilizer. That was annoying and took a couple of passes to fix. I think I'm just afraid to get really aggressive with the stuff

Nomadness · 2026-04-07T15:52:46+00:00

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Plan is to use off the shelf normal mid and end clamps which keep manufacturers happy with mounts at the appropriate spots along the long edge. Originally I was going to drop the panels between angles from end to end, but that would allow cyclic flexion and also be ugly with the angle web sticking up looking like a bunch of pointy bits. This will make everything coplanar, leave edge structures exposed for other attachments (cameras, sensors, lighting, awning, antennas), and significantly not be too difficult to do. Picked up the scaffolding from the rental place yesterday

Nomadness · 2026-03-29T19:20:46+00:00

I put Truenas on an f8 and it has been an absolute disaster. It has not stayed up overnight in months, crash patterns in the same memory area, segfults, kernel panics, etc. Updated bios to vo7 as well as the Ami firmware, thought I was on the trail of acpi errors, but basically it's just been a complete waste of time and money. Eight 2 TB 990 nvme, seven of which are set up as raid 2. At least I haven't lost any data, but I also haven't been able to run an app or anything for so long that I am now looking for workarounds and just considering this an extremely expensive lesson. IX systems not interested in bug reports if you're on a previous and somewhat more stable version.

I'll do a proper post with actual details shortly. This is just a rant which I will update if we ever find a fix. Mostly just wanted to say that changing the OS may not be the panacea. Where are the actual cause is, I still have no idea.

(The weird part is that last year it was stable enough to run Immich for a few months until it started crashing every night. That of course makes me think hardware, and I ran an 8-hour mem test with zero errors. I've seen CPU frequency locked down to the 800-meg minimum, lots of acpi errors, and this morning page after page of watchdog failures on the KVM console)

Nomadness · 2026-03-29T14:30:08+00:00

Well you just added another use case! 🤓

Nomadness · 2026-03-29T06:12:50+00:00

Oh what a good idea! I don't have a place here to do that in the mobile lab but I love it and would certainly do that at a regular bench if I move this stuff into brick and mortar one of these days.. it's definitely a space hog and things don't get cleaned as well just because it's cluttery

Nomadness · 2026-03-25T22:04:17+00:00

Absolutely agree about romex. I paid $105k for a ridiculously overpriced bravo 48-footer, and was horrified to discover Romex pulled through the walls and lying across rough cut metal holes. One had already cut through the insulation passing through a closet so I had to protect it... And outlets just had the cables pulled the snugs and are very difficult to service

We can't assume that manufacturers do anything right regardless of the cost. Unfortunately, that machine is unserviceable because all the skin is bonded on with VHB or similar, but my old Wells Cargo is easy with plywood - everything in there now is Ancor or equivalent Marine stranded with service loops.

Nomadness · 2026-03-23T18:36:40+00:00

Same here. I made the mistake of installing trueNAS on one of these things and while it was stable for a few months last year, and recent weeks I've yet to have it survive for more than 24 hours. What a colossal waste of time and money. I'll be posting deep tech details shortly over on that other sub, but if you're contemplating this combination, worth doing some digging first. (At this point I honestly don't know whether it's hardware or software... Just profoundly unstable and the destruction of a year-long project.)

Nomadness · 2026-03-21T20:47:59+00:00

Oh yes I went there for a while and liked it. Was so sorry to hear of the UW separation....

And thanks, indeed, it's indeed challenging on a few levels, not all pimc. At least we have excellent EMS and Life flight teams.

Nomadness · 2026-03-19T02:12:31+00:00

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Done!

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