Tales from a down-shifted family
- Making the most of modest means
It was the coldest day of the year so far today. A chilly -5.6ºC was recorded on the weather station at 6 am this morning. It did rise to above freezing, but only just, topping out at 3.8ºC this afternoon. It’s quite nice having remote climate control in the car on mornings like that. I...
Swimming Goggles with a heads-up display, Bluetooth connectivity, live metrics and automatic interval detection – whatever next! Yep, smart swim goggles are here and they’re better than I was expecting. The Form Swim Goggles have all of this and more. They work well and are actually useful rather than just a gimmick. I wasn’t sure...
We’ve had just about a year of solar generation now. Time to take a look at the stats. That’s easy to do thanks to the solar stats pages I built on this website. The solar generation overview page shows today’s solar generation, along with some charts of generation over the past month, and some totals....
During this recent heatwave we have had clear skies all day long. This gave me a chance to notice a dip in our solar production that seemed to follow a very simialr pattern each day. The following sequence of photos shows four days of solar production during this time. As you can see there is...
Just a quick update on ‘the solars’. As expected, both average daily production and total production from the solar panels has been increasing throughout the year. The graphs of these therefore look pretty good. There was quite a jump between February and March and then a gradual increase throughout March, April, May and June. We’re...
How exciting can a roofrack be? Well, my new one from DropRacks is about as good as they get. The Roof Rack Challenge Having a van as a vehicle and needing to get long, heavy, difficult to handle and often expensive toys such as surf ski’s and canoes onto the roof isn’t easy. I’d managed,...
I’ve had someone ask how to set things up so that their Solax Battery will force charge from cheap rate electricity overnight. So, rather than just reply to their question I thought I’d post a quick instructional blog post here with step by step instructions. The Solax App So, we generally do this using the...
Seeing as we don’t get paid for any energy that we export to the grid, we’ve been on a mission to use all of the solar power our panels are generating. We’ve taken a step further towards this goal with the installation of a MyEnegri Eddi. This is a clever device that diverts surplus solar...
I’ve recently updated the solar monitoring app that I built. It started out as a monitoring app for the solar panels and can be seen on this website from the link at the top of the page. The app/plugin currently consists of a couple of pages: The Solar and Battery Overview – which shows the...
Another quiet weekend here for us. We had some good days on the ‘solars’ though thanks to the blue skies and cool temperatures. There was barely any import from the grid. Just a little here and there for things like showers because that draws too much power for our inverter. Otherwise we were using solar...
Fitness / Technology / Triathlon
Fixing the Altimeter on my Garmin Forerunner 910XT
Monday, March 17th, 2014
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