welshpixie

@welshpixie@mastodon.art

she/they/fae, demifemme, not cis or het, AuDHD, chronic illness.

40s, Welsh but living in South Africa. Racists, TERFs, and other bigots: fuck off.

Anti-racism training available via https://rage.love/@perigee at http://bit.ly/3Iokb7L

#MastoAdmin @Curator

Header image: Clips of various people saying various 'bad' things about me or .art, including Gargron saying "I do not recommend mastodon.art" (yes these are all real)

Avatar: my face, with blue-green hair and glasses

#nobot

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welshpixie, to random

I kinda want to start a MC server for my fedi pals but I'll get bored of it in five minutes

welshpixie,

@loke That's a kind offer! We (might) have a dedi that our other big MC server was (is?? XD) running on - it's a weird thing where I was doing some work for a MC server hosting company and they just gave us a dedi and we've never paid for it and this was years ago so it could vanish at any moment XD Will let you know though!

welshpixie, to random

A fly agaric, and some very very weird Pisolithus arrhizus / dyeball fungus / dead man's foot ( :hammyeyes: ) seen on recent wanderings.

Had never seen the dyeball fungus before, it's so weird.

Marked as sensitive because weird spore fungus thing.

Two egg-like spheres on the forest floor. They're a mustardy yellow with dark brown striations.
A puffball-type fungus on the forest floor. It's like a chunky conical shape in orangey-brown, with a thicker outer skin split and peeling back at the top, revealing a spongy spore-filled innterior. There are orange spores scattered over the ground.
A fly agaric mushroom on the forest floor surrounded by dry leaves. It has a creamy white stalk, and a flat red cap with white spots. It looks fake, as if it's made from clay.

welshpixie, to photography

Swee waxbills! They're very cute and small, and 'swee' is the best name for anything :D

Nikon Z6, Tamron 18-400mm, processed in Darktable

A swee waxbill - a small grey bird with olive-green wings, a red rump, and a red beak, posing on a sheaf of grass against a blurred brown and green background
A swee waxbill - a small grey bird with olive-green wings, a red rump, and a red beak, posing on a sheaf of grass with its chest facing the camera, against a blurred brown and green background
Closer shot of a swee waxbill - a small grey bird with olive-green wings, a red rump, and a red beak, posing on a sheaf of grass against a blurred brown and green background. In this one you can see that its iris is red.

esther, to random

The plants are being mean again today 🤧

welshpixie,

@esther They were to me yesterday :( :bear_hugs:

welshpixie, to random

Made the bees a little bee pebble dish with sugar water and they like it :artcataww:

welshpixie, to random

Look dis sphere

welshpixie, to random

Done!

They arrived about 10am, and just left now about 6pm. Four guys doing the install. We have 10 panels, five on the front and five on the back of the roof so should get good coverage, and a 5.5kW lithium battery. Alas they finished as the sun was going down so there was barely time for it to charge, but the battery did charge to 20% while they were hooking things up to it. We also have an app to check everything.

(cont)

The battery, inverter box, and circuit breakers in a clean, neat installation
Close up of the screen on the front of the inverter, showing four graphics for metrics; one for how much the panels are producing, one for how much draw from the grid, one for the charge on the battery, and one for house power consumption

welshpixie,

Had the hot water heater on for an hour and it drained the battery to 75%, then turned it off and the battery recharged to full in 40 minutes ^.^

welshpixie,

So the hot water heater took about 1h30m to fully heat the tank, at which point it stopped drawing power. During the first half of that it drained the battery to 75%, but then the clouds cleared and the battery recharged back up to 100% for the last part. We know it keeps water hot for 2-3 days, so we can just have it on for two hours during the day when it's sunny and that's our hot water sorted \o/

welshpixie,

Fun statistic that's shown on our solar graphs: 'trees planted'. We've planted 0.5 trees today :D

welshpixie,

An interesting thing has happened. There's still sun on the back panels but it has stopped producing, more or less. The battery is staying full, though, and our consumption is a stable 400W. So it must be something that just stops it pulling in when there's excess that has nowhere to go, since it doesn't go back into the grid.

Edit: confirmed with solar peeps, yeah, if there's no load and the battery is full the panels won't produce ^.^

A graph showing daily production power with a line increasing through the day then decreasing into the afternoon, withj a sharp drop-off to zero near the end.

welshpixie,

We went to bed at 10pm-ish, at which point the battery was 70%. At 7:30, when I got up, it was at 51% and the panels were just starting to produce again. ^.^

So - yay! We've got some leeway to do some extra stuff in the evenings, or on cloudy mornings :)

welshpixie,

This is fun, these are the fridge-freezer spikes :D

I had turned the temperature of the fridge-freezer colder to compensate for being off for a few hours several times a day during loadshedding (and stopped keeping things in the freezer entirely) - it was nice being able to turn it back to normal yesterday, AND now I can start keeping things in the freezer again: O

welshpixie,

Much cloudier day today than yesterday, and a power hungry morning with the garden here running the strimmer which used up to 1kW-ish, in bursts. We've turned the grid trickle on to compensate just to help charge the battery until there's loadshedding at 12, then we'll turn it off and rely on solar.

We're producing about a third to a half of what we were yesterday with the extra clouds.

welshpixie,

Despite it being much cloudier overall today, we produced more solar energy o.o It cleared up pretty well in the afternoon and we were almost producing at max capacity for a couple of hours.

As Jaco pointed out, this graph also nicely shows Eskom the middle finger XD

welshpixie,

Heavy rain overnight, and as the sun came up it was still drizzling a bit. We went to bed an hour later last night, and the battery was at 60% compared to the previous night's 70%, but getting up at the same time this morning, the battery was 45% so it drained less over night.

Not much production this morning due to the cloud, but we were still out-producing the house's baseline needs (idling fridge/freezer and the air purifier) - consuming 34W and producing 50W :D

welshpixie,

And now at 8:40am we're producing 130W, which is just barely enough for the fridge/freezer, air purifier, and one of the desktop computers.

We've turned the grid trickle back on as it's forecast heavy cloud all day, just to recover the battery and while we make morning coffees.

welshpixie,

@loke yes and I am loving it XD

welshpixie,

@stefanf28 Oh interesting! I wonder if the smog in Cape Town is having an influence - when I walk on the beach here in the mornings there's almost always a layer of smog over CT and I can't imagine it helps solar production :/

welshpixie,

@stefanf28 dataaaaa 〽️

welshpixie,

Our morning graph. Started rainy, the clouds have been gradually clearing up, but that spike at 10:40am there was direct sun on the roof for a bit and production soared to 2.54kW, which is a good indication of what we can expect to be generating on clear days :D

welshpixie,

Trying something new today. Instead of only running the hot water heater to heat it up fully then turning it off until the next day, we're keeping it turned on, because when it's not heating it actually uses zero electricity.

Points described in the alt-text. You can see that once the water is done heating the heater doesn't use power, and now our production (blue) is high above consumption. Need to see how often the geyser turns on to heat the water again, and how long it takes.

welshpixie,

Forgot to include the reasoning and I just replied this to someone else so I'll put it here too -

My thinking behind doing it this way is, if it needs to stay on for 1-2 hours to fully heat the whole tank from cold, the high power usage outstrips what the solar can manage. But by keeping it constantly on such that it only needs to reheat for brief bursts, it's a more manageable power draw that the solar can cope with.

welshpixie,

For the second day (since last Thursday) we've reached the point in our production again, with a battery that's been at a stable 100% for a few hours and the panels producing far more than our consumption, where the panels have gone 'Eh, you got this, we're gonna sleep for a bit'. ^.^

welshpixie,

@ifixcoinops :D

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