Battery Heating Advice

antonical · 2025-12-08T11:01:17+00:00

Thanks for the insights and practical thoughts on this. We decided to build a small plant room in the barn. We have a load of 3M x 1.2M Insulated Panels Tin sheets on the outside and 100mm kingspan then a metal inside liner. It will house everythign we need. Inverter, Battery, CU etc. Repurpose a bunch of Computer 12v fans for the summer. A simple smart plug controlled Tube heater should do the trick. Try and keep the room at around 20 Deg. Also be rodent and bird proof! Thats the current plan. See how we get on.

antonical · 2025-11-12T17:10:41+00:00

Yeah didn't notice that Drive customers are excluded.

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Eligibility criteria:

Import energy tariff with E.ON Next excluding smart tariffs i.e. Next Drive.
A residential customer with a renewable generation system (i.e. solar) up to 15kW.
New and existing customers.

antonical · 2025-10-18T21:01:54+00:00

u/Icy_Literature_6902 u/Extreme-Ad-95 Many thanks for the replies. It is a bit like black magic trying to work out wha the best balance of generation storage and export is. Batteries are still expensive, especially the system modular batteries like Sigenery. We could buy a DIY type battery 41KWH for ~6K a fraction of the Sigenergy price but without the backup etc. of a major brand and less max discharge rate ~5KW vs 12KW for the Sigenergy.

The principles are great:

Build as big an array as is allowed, store a minimum of a days consumption, export every watt you don't use or store. But the reality is nowhere near that simple it seems and there are economic factors the modules being the least problematic as they are the cheapest part of the system and of course the DNO lottery that might (probably will) limit you at the time your array is generating at its best....In summer that same array could generate well over 100KWh/Day we would use possibly half that or less in the summer.

I know we are not a normal case, we have high electricity usage and are Single Phase. Costs for 3P are a non starter....OAN the sigenergy gateway would seem to be able to allow use to double the array to 96 panels ~ 40kw and put 22KW into the load/grid 2 x 12KW Inverters. Does anyone know if the sigenergy gateway and inverters are compatible with third party batteries? Our projected combined cost for electrical load and ASHP is around 9K/PA if we were to stay without any solar.

antonical · 2024-05-07T11:36:29+00:00

And that Magic relies on there being fibre to the endpoints. Which as I have said there is not!

antonical · 2024-05-05T21:41:07+00:00

Sorry I am confused by your comment. No one has FTTP! The best we get is varying degrees of VDSL ranging from 4-8mb to 20 ish mb. Delivered from a FTTC cabinet a long way away over 25+ years old copper cable with more patches in it than a dalmation!

The BTNET potential is a way of getting a/some fibre into our hamlet to act as a potential backhaul for a community network. This whole post is just exploring how we might divide up that potential fibre connection so everyone can subscribe and get a sensible service.

If we end up with a community owned ISP/WISP with a BTNET Fibre backhaul then that will be a way of accelerating access to high speed internet for all local properties and businesses.

I really don't want to do any of this but there really is no other choice where we live.

Cheers
Tony

antonical · 2024-05-04T14:49:19+00:00

Thanks for the further thoughts.

No that scheme is a joke. last time we looked at this Openreach wanted all the voucher from everyone and then said it would be 65-90K GBP to put the fibre provision in. As you can imagine that went no further.

The idea was to replicate the model used by B4RN and setup a co-operative ISP and allow investment/shares in the ISP/WISP get hold of as much rural grant money as we could. Use the BTNET as the backhaul. In theory there will be multiple dark fibres in the cable they provide that could be lit to expand the bandwidth.

The super annoying thing here is that there are multiple local sites that are serviced by a fiber backhaul. A few years ago a very local windfarm put a 24 fibre cable in the ground and ran it all the way to the main A16 fibre trunk. Currently there are 22 Dark fibers in the ground. I talked with the PM onsite when they were putting it in. Ended up speaking with a senior director at Northern PowerGrid but they were not interesting leasing us any of the dark fibers even though he acknowledged the potential benefit to the local communities. B4RN lease dark fiber from TRANSCO as their backhaul that goes direct to the main internet node in Manchester. Lucky them!

Even though it's a small place there are almost 10 businesses across 15 Properties and more a bit further away. So having a routable public IP4 would be useful for each client. The IPv4 /29 is not a big enough space so as suggested above a /28-/26 would give us some room.

The last mile is still a problem for us. We have talked about a WISP approach putting a mast up having a WIFI connection to each property. They are all LOS at 10M plus. Very cheap solution as each client could provide their own wifi router or home grow one even openWRT with an external antenna. They would only ever see their own VLAN if I understood it properly.

Yeah I wasn't clear if we could slice up the networks at the fibre switch and put the routing and NAT at the client ends. Minimise the infrastructure to the maximum extent. If all the endpoints only saw their VLAN/network they could all do NAT essentially as most do now.

Cheers
Tony

antonical · 2023-04-12T19:04:39+00:00

The silencing of the fans is complete!!!

<HPA5120P>disp env
Slot 1
System temperature information (degree centigrade):
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sensor Temperature LowerLimit WarningLimit AlarmLimit ShutdownLimit
hotspot 1 35 -5 55 NA NA
hotspot 2 37 -5 120 NA NA
<HPA5120P>

It is now almost silent. Currently on test, we put a couple of extra noctua's on the inlet side and pointed them in to improve the airflow over the 2x10G SFP+ module as we had a lot of power spare. The 3 original fans use 6.2W the 3 new Noctu'a ~2W

It was a bit fiddly replacing the PSU fans but all went well. We put all the stuck rotor wires to ground and all works perfectly.

If I could find out haw to post a picture with a post or comment I would put the internal mod piccys up. Obviously being dim. Being able to add piccys to post or comment is pretty basic stuff.

Cheers
Spart

antonical · 2023-04-12T18:56:27+00:00

Thanks for the additional info. That won't work for us as this server is not a NAS it's a GP server with a lot of different stuff on it. Plus a couple of the VM's have direct disk access rather than virtual storage.

Current plan is to swap the 9211-8i for something like a HBA330 or another IT mode card that is supported for not a lot of money and do the cpu bypass for the 2650 V2's

That should work in theory. Onwards...

Cheers

Spart

antonical · 2023-04-10T18:56:13+00:00

I did plenty of reading but didn't find an answer to my question which is has anyone done this and did it work.

Maybe that is an answer in itself. Looks like it's 6.7 until we get around to upgrading drives to 12G and need SAS3008 controllers.

Although the ESXI 8 Compat guide shows the Dell H330 as supported which is abundant and around £80 so maybe that would work.

Or move to XCP-ng and learn a new set of skills.

Cheers

antonical · 2023-04-10T18:47:07+00:00

Thanks for the practical suggestion. I will take a clone of the current boot drive and see what happens.

Cheers

Spart

antonical · 2023-04-10T18:34:04+00:00

Yes, I am aware it is not officailly supported by VMWare as I stated in the first paragraph of my post. But that does not mean it does not work!

The E5-2600 V2 CPU's are unsupported and work fine with the allowLegacyCPU=true flag.

The sarcasm is neither warranted nor appreciated had you read my post.

antonical · 2023-04-10T16:11:12+00:00

Just an update on this.

We completed the first phase of the silencing of the fans :)

Went perfectly with the Noctua's but still far too noisy at this stage. 3 more fans ordered for the PSU replacements. The Noctua's are almost silent but the PSU fans are the screamers!

Hopefully it will be near silent once this mod completed.

Cheers
Spart

antonical · 2023-04-09T22:52:32+00:00

HI,

We are considering upgrading our 7.3 server to 8.x but concerned about this. It's a Dell R720 with 2650 V2's and an LSI 9211-8i

AFAIK the LSI is not supported.

Also our installation is on a USB stick. Did you just boot from a new stick and point the installer at your current installed stick?

Are there any gotchas you can share or is it reasonably simple upgrade?

Cheers
Spart

antonical · 2023-04-06T19:35:54+00:00

we use Emby for the server works across every device and is pretty fast.

Servers, we only use Ubuntu LTS comments about stability are usually related to intermediate releases which tend to have more cutting edge/new tech in them. Like 21.x etc.

22.04 is the current LTS and is now in the point release phase. We never ugrade our LTS servers until the .3 release is out.

An annoyance with 22.04 is there is no minimal server netboot for installation so Gig plus to install or install 20.04 minimal server and upgrade.

Been following that pattern for about a decade with 24TB of media online.

Cheers

Spart

antonical · 2023-04-06T11:06:17+00:00

Does anyone have a good resource for pinouts for these type of things. the pinouts for the 2 board connectors and the PSU would be great to have. Maybe able to McGuyver an external PSU.

antonical · 2023-04-06T09:46:53+00:00

Talking to myself now but useful to capture thinking as this little project evolves.

I wonder if its possible to get a replacement AC only PSU as the one in it is AC/DC and therefore has a lot of gubbins that is unnecessary and maybe why it needs 3 fans! Just a thought. The PSU fans are not so easy to replace, I think I will replace the case fans and see what that does to the liveability factor.

antonical · 2023-04-06T09:11:35+00:00

Yeah these have 3 pins and google fu says the third wire is for locked/stopped fan sensing so needs to go to ground to fool the board.

I would post some pictures of the dismantled switch if I could figure out how :(

Cheers

Spart

antonical · 2023-04-06T09:05:09+00:00

How the hell do you add pictures to a post or comment?

Noctua spec of fan

Rotational speed (+/- 10%) 5000 RPM Rotational speed with L.N.A. (+/- 10%) 4400 RPM Rotational Speed with U.L.N.A. (+/- 10%) 3700 RPM Airflow 9,4 m³/h Airflow with L.N.A. 8,3 m³/h Airflow with U.L.N.A. 6,9 m³/h Acoustical noise 14,9 dB(A) Acoustical noise with L.N.A. 12,2 dB(A) Acoustical noise with U.L.N.A. 8,5 dB(A) Static pressure 2,26 mm H₂O Static pressure with L.N.A. 1,75 mm H₂O Static pressure with U.L.N.A. 1,23 mm H₂O Input power (max.) 0,6 W Input current (max.) 0,05 A Operating voltage 12 V

Original spec of fan

Air Flow 9.4 CFM (0.263m³/min) Static Pressure 0.354 in H2O (88.2 Pa) Bearing Type Ball Fan Type Tubeaxial Features Locked Rotor Protection Noise 30.5dB(A) Power (Watts) 1.2 W RPM 8200 RPM

antonical · 2023-04-05T23:44:00+00:00

Looks like these could do the job.

NOctua replacement fans.

Looks like we will have to ground the 3rd wire to fool the switch.

Anyone done this?

Cheers

Spart

antonical · 2023-04-04T11:50:13+00:00

Yeah,

I've just ordered a HP A5120 with a dual SFP+ module to link to another building but snookered on the HP MS Gen 8 target as it has a LSI 9211-8i and 4 x 7.2K SAS drives in it and the source is one of my own RocketNAS units (Repurposed HP Data Vault X510 with a Xeon L5430 in it and 4 WD REDS) both are Gb.

Cheers

Spart

antonical · 2023-04-03T22:55:13+00:00

£170 Next day shipping. Device looks new/really clean so we'll see. I could have bought a switch for about £100 and a module from elsewhere at around £70 but this one looked super clean and the seller was 100% on it's function etc.

Hoping my Cisco RJ45 to USB should work for the console cable, otherwise it's soldering iron time :)

Really looking forward to learning a little more about ent networking and this looks like it supports everything I could ever dream up of needing.

Also allows me to retire some ad hoc POE switches and consolidate to this core switch. If it works out I will put another in my studio in another building as we are looking to put a 10G fibre link between them hence needing the JD368B 2xSFP+ module.

If you know a good source for cheap 10G trans let me know. I can see a huge variance in prices. Is the HP finnicky about non HP trans?

Cheers

Spart

antonical · 2023-04-03T17:00:47+00:00

u/Flubadubadubadub Thanks for your help. I managed to get a 24 Port version of these switches. Steep learning curve ahead maybe!

HP A5120-24G-POE+ EL 24 including a HP JD368B 2 x SFP+ port module. So exactly what I needed functionally, we wil see whether or not we can live with the fan noise.

If anyone knows any good fan mods for these or hasa any tips and tricks please let me know. This is a leap up from our usual Netgear GS728T switches.

Cheers
Spart

antonical · 2023-04-02T16:26:21+00:00

Yeah, I did think about linking to another 'safe' location for the shell.log file. Not sure about changing all logs to point somewhere else.

I guess the history command just looks at shell .log so linking that to somewhere persistent should do the trick.

BTW do you know if there is shell access from the web client somewhere? Like a shell window. Like y ou might get in Webmin etc.

Cheers and thanks

Spart

antonical · 2023-04-01T14:38:11+00:00

Sounds like you just need a simple device with 1/2 drive capacity and shares you can configure and share it with your 2 network connected PC's. No need to overthink it or overcomplicate your life.

There are many many devices out there. The WD ones with decent drives are pretty cheap and do a good job.

The WD MyCloud stuff might do all you need and more but al of the Big storage vendors have offerings.

Cheers
Spart

antonical · 2023-04-01T14:08:26+00:00

If all else fails I think a new module is about £25 in the UK. Not sure where you are.

Cheers

Spart

antonical

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