Category: self sustainability

I lost the solar monitoring for a few days. While I do have a backup for everything that gets us electricity, I don’t have a backup of the monitoring system. And I’ve gotten real used to watching these graphs. It’s very much second nature these days, much like keeping an eye on the weather to adjust your day.

On top of this, I have scripts that will turn on and off the inverter based on that monitoring data. It makes my life easier for automation to keep watch and make decisions. And so for a few days, I was flying blind. Well not entirely, I still had the one voltage indicator with busted segments.

And really it’s not too bad, I’m so much better today at knowing where things are and where’s they’re headed with just that information. But I still missed the automated decision making.

Anyway, this Phidget part is busted, and it took a few days to get another one from Canada.

I might have to get an extra for backup, but they’re pretty pricey. The previous one lasted 7 years, and died for no particular reason, having gathered 16,719,281 data points. It’s a bit of a shame, and my readings are a bit off now, I’ll likely have to recalibrate the sensors.