Earth Notes: Diarycast - Year In Review (2023)

Show Notes

That came out rather more "me me me" than the abstract EOU roundup intended. A consequence of trying to do it in a bit of a hurry, I think...

Full diary notes:

• 2023-12-31: starting to do year-end stats. With the unplanned assistance of the boiler being broken half of this month, annual mains gas use is down from ~3MWh 2+ years ago to ~1MWh this year, as aimed for with the Thermino heat battery. (In 2007 gas consumption was ~9MWh/y.)
• 2023-12-30: I have been powering/charging the Wonderboom from the off-grid system, which seems is convenient given where the 12V USB chargers are on my desk, and energy demand is very modest.
• 2023-12-29: I have just seen again that there are now peaks of battery discharge/use in Mar and Oct shoulder months, ie twice yearly, since AC Battery expansion and heat battery installation. This might deserve some sonification!
• 2023-12-28: I have updated grid carbon intensities to be used from 2024 for interconnectors to BE (NED), DK (VKL), FR (IFA, IFA2, ELEC), IE (IRL, EW), NL (NEM), NO (NSL). Generally lower, FR a bit higher. (Computed intensity made a small step-change at over midnight on the 31st from 101 to 90 gCO2/kWh.)
• 2023-12-21: my paper preprint is up / out / at large! I am still grotty. Boiler man here, hurrah! He quickly diagnosed two separate faults, one easily repaired leak and a more unpleasantly expensive probable control PCB fault which would be our second swap-out, which may happen in the new year. But more or less immediately after he left, the boiler stopped firing again...
• 2023-12-20: in bed still. Took call in afternoon from Octopus checking eligibility: one question was about how much microbore pipework we have, another about where we would site the external and internal units and the DHW tank.
• 2023-12-19: I have lots of chores to do that I had been putting off while working on my paper, but I am also somewhat giving in to the mild/annoying flu/covid/plague that has finally made itself properly felt with a runny nose, etc, and went to bed. We did work out where the roof leak was though, down the side of the old flue.
• 2023-12-18: I requested an on-line Octopus heat-pump quote (valid for 30 days) for our address; just short of £2,700 including VAT after the BUS grant, but we would need to get an EPC (£60) and maybe planning permission (~£270). Having spoken to the helpline Octopus cannot do heat only, but can integrate with a solar DHW system. I have put down a £500 deposit to probably get a survey/install in spring, but we can cancel up to right before install and get all our money back. This would work out cheaper than the the extra electricity to run a simple electric boiler for ~5 years, which is how long we may have before demolition. No gas used for a week! And several kWh went into unblocking the kitchen drain today!
• 2023-12-17: I have just had to take a layer of clothing off as feeling too warm at a balmy 18°C inside (~10°C out)... Heating not yet back on. Working on my paper again, and listening to NTS.live "4 to the Floor" Infinite Mixtape.
• 2023-12-13: joy — the combi seems to have leaked and shut itself down — it is at least not providing DHW on demand though the Thermino is empty — so I have put the system back on emergency electric DHW mode (POLICYMAINDHW="true"!
• 2023-12-11: paid my university tuition fees today; I have been plodding on carefully revising my research paper.
• 2023-12-09: made a brief visit through drizzle and a little sunshine and blue sky to the King Athelstan fair and said hello to a couple of people and enjoyed a mulled wine. ... And I have just received a discounted (43p!) Cadbury chocolate advent calendar, so nine to find and responsibly dispose of while I work on my paper! Also, it is about 12°C outside and our heating has not needed to come on unlike previous days, supporting use of HDD12 for heating stats! (Ignore the temperature spike each time I change the batteries...) Meanwhile there is lots of wind power so grid intensity is low (~100gCO2/kWh) and our heat battery is being kept topped up...
• 2023-12-08: posted Fairphone 5: Keeping it 10/10? to Hacker News; I received a nice email from the mod (dang) saying that he liked the piece and had put in the "second-chance" pool to get more attention; it seems to have been on the front page all night and is sitting at #2 and at over 270 points at ~7am! Still at #3 at ~11am, 370 points, 367 comments! #18 at ~1pm (~16h), 395 points, 400 comments. Off the front page ~2pm (~17h), 410 points, 418 comments.
• 2023-12-04: while performing my CPO (Chief Party Officer) duties for my postgrad colleagues this evening (good pizzas and Irn-Bru, and nothing wasted!), apparently I won an award Collaborative Teaching 2023 Winner as part of the Hackathon team at Surrey!
• 2023-12-03: did GitHub release in my repo linked to Zenodo and — lo! — a new DOI was generated very quickly (in less than a minute?). (Sometimes stuff works!) Now waiting to see how long it takes to appear via DataCite in my ORCID record.
• 2023-12-01: It's Alive! The heating started at 07:29... (Within about 10 minutes the boiler seems to be cycling — it cannot modulate down far enough even for a cold house (~13°C, deep frost and below freezing outside) and all radiators on. ~10kWh gas was used in the first 1.5h run by 9am, ~20kWh total by 4pm (3h run), less than another 10kW (including a shower) by 9:30pm (2.5h run).
• 2023-11-30: it has been below freezing outside and ~3°C noon-ish, and ~14°C inside at my desk all day since we have resisted putting the heating on yet, so I have used this morning multiple clothing layers and my housecoat and fingerless gloves and heated insoles and coffees! The heating will likely be going on tomorrow, when the first person gets up...
• 2023-11-29: went to York with my daughter for an open day in the university chemistry department; also visited the tiny house where I was born on School Lane! We covered about 400 miles round-trip, including well over 10 miles on foot (18.22km according to a phone app) it seems; we are tired.
• 2023-11-25: an Ultimate Ears (Logitech) Wonderboom 3 (Small Portable Wireless Bluetooth Speaker, Big Bass 360-Degree Sound for Outdoors, Waterproof, Dustproof IP67, Floatable, 40 m Range - Black) arrived this morning while I was still snoozing. I warmed it up with some of my sonification tracks on SoundCloud, starting with a variant of the mains water temperature track that I use as a ringtone!

  Product: Wonderboom 3

  

  Portable Wireless Bluetooth Speaker

  • Brand: Ultimate Ears
  • Colour: black
  • Weight: 420g
  • Height: 10.4cm
  • Width: 9.53cm
  • Depth: 9.53cm
  • SKU: B07W5JHF97
  • MPN: 984-001829
  • GTIN/UPC/EAN: 5099206103764

  • InStock
  • GBP69.99 valid at/until: 2023-11-25

  Review summary

  • Wonderboom 3

  • I have just received this today. I wanted something with a little more bass response than my laptop or headphones for music, including my own generated tracks.

    Connects via Bluetooth and just works.

    I can walk at least a room away and the connection and music continue.

  • Pros:
    • good sound, particularly bass
    • small
    • works out of the box with my MacBook Air M1
  • Cons:
    • USB charger cable is a bit short
  • Rating: 4.5/5
  • Published: 2023-11-25
  • Updated: 2023-11-27
• 2023-11-24: after more discussion, central heating on times will be nominally 07:30 to 08:59, 13:00 to 15:59 and 19:00 to 21:29 (7h total). GB peak space/total heat demand is at ~6pm and peak ramp rate is at ~7am [watson2019peak], so both are avoided.
• 2023-11-23: though it is not on yet, after discussion the heating start time has been pushed back from 06:30 to 07:00.
• 2023-11-20: my joy is unconfined for I have bonus brought-forward root canal work heralded at 8am by a giggling call from the dental surgery... Not exactly a barrel of laughs, the work but took an hour and essentially no pain or mess; nicely done. Will need a new permanent crown from my own dentist in a month or so.
• 2023-11-18: got an indication today that our phase of CRE redevelopment is now expected to be 2030 or later. Went to the IgNobels and BAHFest!
• 2023-11-14: VIDEO: Kingston community climate group making a change, featuring yours truly... And watched Unix time roll over to 1700000000... s1G7 no problem...
• 2023-11-12: Google seems to have become more picky about schema.org/Dataset HTML metadata, so I have spruced up my bibliography page insert code. I also connected GitHub and Zenodo to get a repository release of TRVmodel V0.9.4 as DOI 10.5281/zenodo.10116281.
• 2023-11-11: my first BarCamp London today and I gave 1.5 unplanned talks: a repeat of Thursday/9th, and half a talk that I made up on the spot ("URLs, DOIs, and starting my PhD") because "the grid" was looking a little bare.
• 2023-11-10: coming up to 7pm and I am due to sit in on a 2h Webinar; it is below 17°C at my desk and ~7°C outside, and the heating is not on yet, so I have deployed my USB foot warmers!
• 2023-11-10: I hear that the GLA estimates Kingston borough to have ~22MWp of rooftop solar generation capacity.
• 2023-11-09: gave a 30 minute talk with one slide to the Carbon Co-op EcoHome Lab online.
• 2023-11-08: in the Carbon Brief quiz we got 34/100 and came =38 / 53, much much better than I expected! We beat both the DESNZ teams and at least one Met Office team.
• 2023-11-07: I found out that my first DOI 10.5061/dryad.wstqjq2t6 [hart-davis2023central] was published (yesterday)!
• 2023-11-06: I have submitted what I hope will be the final final v5 really final version of a tiny open dataset to DataDryad, resulting in myFirstDOI!
• 2023-11-05: energy storage nightmare today: two showers and one bath drawn on a day with only a few minutes' grid electricity intensity low enough for unforced top-up, and the store started only 2/3rds full and ended negative, ie below 50°C, so too cold to supply hot water directly... (The grid-attached Enphase battery has been mainly completely empty, though some careful timing of the dishwasher along with a morning burst of sunshine kept a maintenance wash mostly off-grid.)
• 2023-11-03: have been in an interesting Elexon workshop (issue 109) about netting of import/export for domestic customers. Then had long hot bath. Then investigated roof leak. Then entered an open research competition. Then made update to another international heat-pump competition with friends. Then off for drink with another, and rock/metal late night with another. Repair Café tomorrow morning may finish me off, but the heat-pump competition needs more work!
• 2023-11-03: the bowel cancer test results came back negative.
• 2023-10-26: Rand Fishkin's post-startup story resonates with me, even though my efforts were far punier than his! (I basically had two start-ups die at once in October 2021.)
• 2023-10-24: lowered off-grid system usable SoC (above 50% absolute DoD discharge limit) reserve threshold from 40% to 30% since I think that the dump load is coming off prematurely and is thus not being run enough to make room for new charge, rather than there being a shortage of sun yet. New reserve should still cover ~1W of RPi3B.
• 2023-10-24: did the pesky bowel cancer screening test and my six-month PhD progress review. Some similarities spring to mind — slightly annoying but useful prophylaxis.
• 2023-10-23: today I discovered that I remember more than 256 (~45%) London Tube/TfL stations...
• 2023-10-20: today I have done several hours of stats lectures and workshops (Social Data Analytics), and feel nearly comfortable with R and RStudio! (Proficiency level: beginner.)
• 2023-10-19: attended Energy Modelling for All workshop.
• 2023-10-18: today is organising a solar PV working group, a quiz team, meeting new PhD students, making the departmental coffee hour happen (must remember to buy some snacks) and the inventors' club. Oh and some research/writing!
• 2023-10-17: filing broken; double fleece, double socks and thermals leggings on; bowel cancer screening kit glaring at me: what a time to be alive!
• 2023-10-16: below 16°C inside, so double fleece and socks this afternoon!
• 2023-10-15: below 10°C around noon, so bathroom MHRV turned on as a test.
• 2023-10-13: I have received an NHS bowel cancer screening kit*, and also ought to work on my LaTeX journal paper title and abstract ... Decisions decisions... *Finally done 2023-10-24! I also started started taking D3 again.
• 2023-10-10: my response to proposed boiler upgrade scheme amendments by the UK government; note that the basic grant has already been lifted from £5000 to £7500. I had put off upgrading to macOS Sonoma 14.0 until Al Dente 1.22.3 emerged which fixed some issues reported by users...
• 2023-10-08: slightly sweaty outside in t-shirt and shorts at 3pm in Kingston...
• 2023-10-03: the morning has an Autumnal chill (<15°C by 9am), the off-grid dump load dropped out in the wee hours, I am wearing a long-sleeved shirt for the first time in a while (though I soon overheated!), and I have resumed taking vitamin D given that sunshine on my skin will be a rarer thing...
• 2023-09-29: after waking up in the wee hours feeling really ill, retched, fainted, the works, now a little before 11pm I have woken to a (rare) power cut that seems to have started here at ~22:40 (BST)! We became aware of a power cut at 18:22. ... 105 customers affected ... We're investigating an electricity cable that has been damaged, causing a power cut in the local area. ... We estimate your power will be back on: 30 Sep 01:30 - 02:30 ... Sent by Aaron at 23:08 - We're very sorry we've had to switch off your electricity. Our engineers have turned off the power in the Willingham Way area for safety so they can repair an underground cable, damaged by a third party. ... This was a result of working on the gas leak in a house in the next street (~20m from us at closest) that SGN has been at for the last day or three with that house and a neighbour evacuated... which may be connected with the gas main disconnected from the now-demolished buildings another ~10m away... The 16WW Internet and servers remain powered off-grid for now! Power back 23:14 announced by various beeps and squeals around the house.
• 2023-09-26: sparrows tweeting and feeding, though relatively quietly, in the thorn hedge outside my window this morning.
• 2023-09-25: our kitchen tap has just ruptured in an unexpected way, near the base of the rotating stem, at the back. We are taping over the crack with brown packing tape so that we can at least get some water out of it... That tap seems to have lasted ~10Y.
• 2023-09-24: on my way home took a bit of a wander to my two old schools, old house, etc. The corner shops near the schools and the one at the bottom of Lee Green are now just houses. There's a lot more solar PV on homes than in London which is worse than the UK average of 1/25 (NL 1/4, AU 1/3). There is a fair amount of infill house building. My brother's old primary school seems long gone. The "big house" behind our house where my brother and I had dogs set on us when we went to ask to collect conkers seems to have turned its grounds into several houses... There were and lots of people out walking their dogs! Oh and I was sweating — it is far too warm for late September. And another thing ... while I am reluctant to take buses in remote places because I feel that I cannot be sure where I am or if we have been diverted etc (though clear announcements on eg TfL and Tokyo buses help with that), using Google Maps to plan a route and then track in real time makes a huge difference, and I happily got between Mirfield and Wakefield without worrying (or probably higher-carbon taxi), and indeed seemed to have better info than the locals that I cross-checked with! And another another thing: seeing local phone numbers up on buildings, my 1980s home phone number suddenly popped back into my head!
• 2023-09-23: first call for space heat from the boiler from Radbots today this autumn, though the boiler is set to DHW-only, so is ignoring the call...
• 2023-09-23: at the 40-year school reunion tonight I discovered that my favourite teacher Derek Fry died in 2018; strange that no one returned any of the cards and photos that we sent him...
• 2023-09-20: early this morning (~7am) the dump load came off for a little while after several gloomy days as we hurtle towards the solstice on the 23rd. Also the Enphase battery was empty by a similar time, though the Thermino was full having been topped up with low intensity (~80gCO2e/kWh and below) grid juice. And the dump load (ie the router) was back on mains by ~21:00Z. Gave a slightly off-the-cuff talk about heat-pumps, TRVs and UK home heating decarbonisation to Kingston Invents! in the evening.
• 2023-09-18: after a week of the gas boiler being 'on' for DHW we are back to ~0.5kWh/d gas consumption even though Thermino has not been empty, showing the tap-on 'leakage' in the current setup.
• 2023-09-17: gloomy and relatively chilly (~21°C), so trousers, t-shirt and fleece for me in the afternoon... A taste of the next six months.
• 2023-09-16: making a little progress on my working paper, had a simple pleasant lunch, my daughter is going to start some maths tutoring from a friend, and I did not quite get round to organising getting to my school reunion! At ~27°C this may be the last day that I am wearing a tank top this year...
• 2023-09-11: it is 25°C at 9am (so I am in tank top and shorts already!), but it is overcast and it will be colder with some sort of rain tomorrow, so the boiler will be back on for DHW support this evening...
• 2023-09-09: anticipating solid sunshine (and ~32°C later) I put the dishwasher on at ~9am (as PV generation passed 1kW) for a 65°C intensive wash, as possibly one of the last maintenance washes of the year, fully covered by PV and battery!
• 2023-09-05: Google AdSense is insisting on cookie pop-up permission requests being shown by 2024-01-16, even with all ad personalisation disabled on their side, so I have gone for a minimalist EU/UK GDPR approach on all three domains where I have ads and explicitly disabled all third-party ad 'partners' and anything that requires permission for 'legitimate interest'. Which is what should already have been happening to preserve privacy, even though that will probably nuke my remaining ad revenue! I will have to decide what to do about the Californian and Brazilian equivalents, since they operate differently — personalisation is already disabled where I have the option in AdSense.
• 2023-09-03: I was a "waste marshal" (with a green hi-viz tabard!) at Kingston Carnival this afternoon, trying to ensure that a substantial amount of waste will be properly recycled. I was not expecting nearly 3h of compulsory dancing from being next to the community sound stage!
• 2023-09-02: the router did not stay off grid all night overnight for the first time in many months, though I think that this is mainly due to the server crashing frequently. We had a little rain to send us on our way from the campsite!
• 2023-09-01: I have so far run up over 114h online time since the 19th (at maybe ~500MB/day down, 10% of that up) on the free campsite WiFi. The site WiFi annoyingly blocks ssh so I have to switch to my phone as a hotspot for such normal holiday things as GitHub and svn commits, as well as to ssh home.
• 2023-08-28: the first reasonable version of an EOU offline archive now exists, of the main pages plus embedded images; videos and audio still need connectivity, and some edge cases will be broken, but for ~8.5MB and ~1 day's effort, that is not too bad.
• 2023-08-27: torrential downpour overnight on our campsite holiday and through this morning: grim for anyone in an actual tent on the ground...
• 2023-08-25: sweating half to death and sleeping badly several nights in a row after daytime temperatures in the high 30°Cs suggests that cooling to ~24°C during the night allows comfortable sleep under a sheet. That is also a bearable daytime temperature in light clothing.
• 2023-08-24: I discovered myself listed as an environmental scientist amongst some rather grand and famous names!
• 2023-08-23: getting to 37°C here (near Perpignan) today...
• 2023-08-08: I had a decent windfall apple from our tree, others have fallen, lots left on the tree; this is the second year in a row that we have had a crop of more than one apple! I suspect that having had had a lot of rain over recent weeks has helped.
• 2023-08-07: I put in a bit of effort to reduce the number of tabs I that have open in my browser to reduce my background anxiety levels and time scrolling back and forth (they all fit on screen now with no scrolling) which meant reading several papers that have been pending for weeks! It sounds silly, but I think it will help get things moving!
• 2023-08-05: Ecotricity's latest bill for us is projecting import of ~1.1MWh electricity and ~1.8MWh gas per year (a bit over £800 total).
• 2023-08-03: added INTVKL (Viking Link) 3 months ahead of expected go-live, with a static grid intensity copied from INTNSL.
• 2023-07-31: a full month with zero gas use!
• 2023-07-27: today back from Broadstairs for a brief family holiday, and pushed V5.2.7 of statsHouse.
• 2023-07-20: today someone on the train said that I had a very "warm" voice, which was interesting! Got mildly underfoot at another day of heat-pump install, also interesting!
• 2023-07-17: today in at the start of a heat-pump installation in north London, including learning about multi-layer composite pipe (MLCP). Now having a cheeky early beer waiting for a friend...
• 2023-07-16: today I should catch up with over a week's worth of volunteer group emails, make sure that I'm ready for a day on-site at a heat pump installation tomorrow, take my monthly mains water temperature reading (I forgot yesterday) and finish off a bottle of wine...
• 2023-07-13: an unexpectedly high response (27 reactions from 846 impressions) a few hours after posting on LinkedIn I've started work on a PhD at University of Surrey, for anyone who doesn't already know! (Up to 38 responses by Sunday morning!)
• 2023-07-12: a very kind and charismatic prof at UCL spent more than an hour today giving my daughter (and me) a tour of the Chemistry labs etc. Obvs I may have to disown her if she now does not do that at uni!
• 2023-07-09: at 5pm the oven is on (and thus switching a ~2kW load on and off) and the sun is bright but with the occasional cloud passing, so the Enphase ACB is switching back and forth between charging and discharging, and the eddi/Thermino is topping up in some of the gaps. The wonders of autonomous systems! Also released V5.2.0 of statusHouse with an initial JAR.
• 2023-07-07: today has in store: a board meeting, domain renewal, a long European webinar, some research talk, and maybe some actual research work and/or music fiddling!
• 2023-07-03: given Twitter's continuing instability and inaccessibility to anyone not logged in, I am steering hashtag links and the footer 'sameAs' link to mastodon.energy.
• 2023-06-30: talked to my accountant and updated a legal document, visited a church that I am helping get solar PV, participated in a shareholder meeting, and am now fiddling at the edges of my research. Lots of coffee has suffered to get this far...
• 2023-06-29: avoiding doing my music side project by doing some of my main research project — so confusing!
• 2023-06-25: working on my data sonification to house music stuff again in part because it's silly hot outside (>30°C). I may possibly also have discovered a bottle of pre-mixed espresso Martini that requires responsible disposal...
• 2023-06-19: gas consumption since the 10th has been zero, and no one has run out of hot water, hurrah! The experiment continues for now, maybe until September? (We only imported 2kWh of electricity for the whole week, too.)
• 2023-06-18: today is fathers' day and I see that I have been bought beer and snacks. I am working on my music project hoping to get a working 'spike' today, and listening to nts.live, so pretty much all is good with the world.
• 2023-06-11: my son has been worn out with the Surbiton Trophy finishing today. Andy Murray won the the men's singles.
• 2023-06-10: as an experiment for a week or so now that the Thermino is unlikely to empty, the gas boiler is now turned off to avoid the unnecessary brief ignition when a tap is turned on hard.
• 2023-06-09: my son is a ballboy again (on centre) at the Surbiton Trophy with Andy Murray playing, and the following day held an umbrella over him during a spot of rain...
• 2023-06-07: my son is a ballboy on centre court at the Surbiton Trophy with Andy Murray playing!
• 2023-05-31: I think that we are now the lowest-even-numbered standing house on Willingham Way, given the CRE demolition works...
• 2023-05-30: entered an Innovate UK competition!
• 2023-05-26: the (rechargeable) batteries inside the SunnyBeam appear to be dead: I had to reset the time just now. Also, the Ethernet connection to the hub from the Thermino RPi needed to be reseated after connectivity was lost; that connector does not have a clip.
• 2023-05-22: today feels more like June on its way rather than the extended March we have been experiencing. Doing research today, and planning for a possible heat-pump installation enquiry visit this week...
• 2023-05-21: now autogenerating and publishing the 'house' sonification style for the energy data series. I have also installed the SuperCollider package on both RPi server and Mac, though I think it will be a while before I do anything much with them!
• 2023-05-20: KEHS went well!
• 2023-05-19: put up a KEHS temporary short-cut for the full Kingston Efficient Homes Show page for tomorrow, to help people typing in URLs.
• 2023-05-17: interesting chat with chap doing his viva today who says that we can get to (net) zero aviation, including some growth in passenger km/y, by 2050; encouraging since broadened minds and global commerce are public goods.
• 2023-05-15: at of about 22:15Z the server is back up; this may be the longest continuous outage (nearly 4 days) since it started.
• 2023-05-12: slightly unexpectedly got to meet Rob Hopkins of Transition Town and walk him across Kingston (from Canbury Community Gardens to Hogsmill Community Gardens). Also my RPi server seemed to take a lie down just before 10am (09:00Z) as Rob arrived; indeed the server and its power supply both seemed to have died (though the SD card content appears to be intact) so replacements have been ordered... I am paying something over £10 in excess of the official distributors' price for the RPi3B (~£54 vs ~£42 including VAT).
• 2023-05-11: with my footwear seemingly disassembling faster than Musk's rockets I basically ended up getting three new pairs today, which may be some kind of unwanted lifetime record. (I will try to repair some of the older ones for fall-back 'seconds' and recycle the previous generation which have been seconds until now.) Some Karrimor Mount Mid Snr 00 waterproof walking shoes, some Slaz Ember Sn23 black 'trainers' for everyday use though first use was a drum-and-base night with a fair amount of walking to and fro around it, and some soft shoes for holiday in hot weather.
• 2023-05-09: I now have the very beginnings of a bass track for "gentle" data sonification.
• 2023-05-06: noon-ish and a shower was just taken when the Thermino was hovering just below 50°C so just not hot enough to supply DHW directly. I manually forced the Eddi to boost for the duration of the shower (~10 mins) which draw ~3kWh/~500Wh more or less equally from the PV directly, the Enphase battery and the grid (at an intensity of ~200gCO2e/kWh), ie about 1kWh each. Gas will probably have provided 75%/9kW.
• 2023-05-05: went and watched more of the demolition of our estate and chatted with the site manager. He made an interesting point that complex mixed materials in newer builds are harder to fully recycle. I now have to write a 10-minute talk on home batteries!
• 2023-05-04: I estimate that there is ~50Wh/day from the unused 100Wp panel I added back to the off-grid system, because there is a daily load of ~300Wp but generation from the primary panels of ~50Wp less than that. This also implies that I ought to be moving a bit more load to the off-grid system now, eg laptop, to make use of that potential. Since the last tweak to powermng thresholds the router/dump load has stayed off-grid almost continuously.
• 2023-05-01: testing a "Jester" hop homebrew courtesy of MW at uni — for science of course! (Thank you!)
• 2023-04-29: today and tomorrow I am helping out at the Hackathon at Surrey University.
• 2023-04-25: slightly in despair about government advertising seen today in Surbiton suggesting turning down boiler flow temperature to save £100 per year on heating bills. Should have happened in September ... or the previous September...
• 2023-04-24: I now have V4.0 of the sonifier for the consolidated kWh data, which may now actually be creating "correct" format 1 MIDI files!
• 2023-04-23: test of the new UK emergency warning system using mobile phones; my 2G/3G/4G Fairphone 3 responded, my old 2G/3G old Fairphone 1 did not. I did not hear a cacophony through my open window as I expected. I did not expect a synthetic voice reading the text of the message. I did expect the siren noise from my FF3 to be louder. Others reported on Mastodon the test starting early for them; mine happened pretty much on 15:00 BST I think. Lots of people report that their phones did not respond at all; my children's did not, nor did my partner's, so 1/4 in this household that might have reasonably been expected to.
• 2023-04-20: lots of reading today, including GB NG ESO Summer Outlook and Elexon's response to Ofgem's consultation on Data Best Practice Guidance and Digitalisation Strategy guidance. I know how to live.
• 2023-04-18: Google Search Console seems finally to have read each of the partial Gallery XML site maps completely (1k, 2k, 5k, 10k, 20k entries), and the complete 36,772 sitemap. I am removing the partial maps now.
• 2023-04-17: the Piper Hall came down today. I had a nice long chat in the sunshine with the affable demolition site manager about the order in which they are bringing buildings down, etc. I'm hoping to see a little of the buildings of the same structure as 16WW coming down in the next few days, to understand 16WW a bit better. Asbestos soffits have already been removed in readiness, and the old asbestos-lined boiler flues are known about. (And I'm getting to run my laptop off-grid!)
• 2023-04-11: with (Surrey) University being nominally shut, I actually had to use my student card for almost the first time, twice, to open doors!
• 2023-04-10: using my Mac, streaming some music, etc, the consumption difference (as measured by my Satechi USB power monitor) between AlDente's Discharge mode (~1.4W) and paused above the charge limit (7W) is enough to eat into battery life and indeed incur a significant round-trip energy penalty, so I'm reverting to "set limit at 40%" rather than "discharge to 40%".
• 2023-04-09: made a mini house-style sonification, and then woke up in the wee hours and remixed it as a podcast episode with intro and outro.
• 2023-04-07: looks like the final EOU automated Tweet went through today, ~3pm BST. This is from my logs: ERROR: could not send tweet: winterwell.jtwitter.TwitterException$E401: code 32: Could not authenticate you. So I posted 2023-04-10 and pinned It looks as if that was my last automated tweet to go through. I joined Twitter in June 2009 to provide this as a public service, and no longer can, here. @AJPPoole very kindly said Thanks for doing that. You were first to make me aware how much the carbon intensity of electricity varies by time. I've been setting washing machine and dishwasher to run overnight since, unless it's exceptionally sunny (we have PV). Fairly small saving, but easy change. USENET served me well for many years, then Twitter; these things come and go.
• 2023-04-07: experimentally strengthened the AlDente ~4pm action to "Discharge to 40%" (on weekdays). This will cycle the Mac's battery sacrificially, so I will probably revert to just setting the charge limit to 40% soon.
• 2023-04-02: stopped taking D3 today.
• 2023-03-30: Twitter Dev says Today we are launching our new Twitter API access tiers! which looks like unless I rewrite code for a "v2" Free write-only access I'll lose the ability to tweet grid intensity in a month. How good a bet does investing effort in a volatile platform seem?
• 2023-03-26: recovering from Whirl-Y-Gig spent most of the day in bed and — horrors! — failed to take my vitamin D pill!
• 2023-03-25: went to my first Whirl-Y-Gig — huge fun!
• 2023-03-23: interesting data glitch from about ~4pm onwards as the Thermino heater relay is off (the store is full) but the Eddi report of cumulative energy continues to rise. This seems to be because the Eddi server was not accepting data earlier and this is from data held locally being played into the server and it catching up...
• 2023-03-20: ~2pm: we're having a Heisencut... UK Power Networks has apologised for our power being out and that it should be back on by 7pm, and indeed our neighbour's is out, but ours is running on fumes or something... And at ~5pm our power goes, with WiFi and laptop still running... (Allegedly, while doing work on the gas system related to the CRE regeneration, electricity cables were damaged. Possibly just one phase was impacted, as initially ~35 addresses were off, which rose to ~105 as a fix started.) Back on a little after 6pm.
• 2023-03-16: I created a SoundCloud account, and within minutes, before doing anything substantive with it, had a SPAM follower offering hot sex talk. In the old days you at least had to have music and be touring to get groupies, I thought...
• 2023-03-15: the weather and forecast have warmed to the point (~12°C during the day) where I have turned the heating off tonight (~21:00Z) to save gas/money/carbon. Meter readings taken.
• 2023-03-14: an interesting blend of diversion and grid top-up for the Thermino this morning... and the Thermino actually filled (over 100%, heating relay off) early afternoon!
• 2023-03-12: just signed up as a supporter of NTS.live: the music is good!
• 2023-03-11: AlDente 1.21 now has timed tasks, so I have set one to lower the charge limit to 50% just before 4pm daily, and raise it to 80% just after 8pm.
• 2023-03-03: had a ~290-point ~120-comment Hacker News hit with Cool URIs don't change...
• 2023-03-02: latest (duel fuel) energy bill predicts our annual imports of electricity 1MWh and gas 1.749MWh.
• 2023-02-28: I did a completely dry January, and a largely dry February. It was OK. There were a few evenings where a beer or a G&T would have hit the spot, but whatevs...
• 2023-02-25: TTK Energy Group submission to the RBK Local Plan consultation [PDF].
• 2023-02-23: my submission to the RBK Local Plan consultation [PDF].
• 2023-02-23: Warmlite replaced the failed triple-glazing unit quickly and efficiently (~10 minutes).
• 2023-02-21: attended an event at the Royal Institution, which involved networking with some old planet-saving friends and some new ones, then went on to catch up with some 'design' friends old and new!
• 2023-02-21: tree to south-east of house is being trimmed this morning (~9am); solar generation should improve on less overcast mornings than this one.
• 2023-02-19: apparently getting a tiny amount of diversion as well as low-carbon grid top-up at around noon today.
• 2023-02-18: very pleasant couple of evenings with friends and clubbing, so not getting much work done, not even poking through an interesting pile of data that I recently got my hands on. But I think that that's allowed!
• 2023-02-15: I submitted a response [PDF] to the UK government boiler standards and efficiency consultation [govUK2022boiler].
• 2023-02-13: Twitter API still working for EOU as of 3pm GMT. Free API removal seemingly delayed again by a few more days as of ~9pm...
• 2023-02-11: according to this online (Swiss-German!) calculator, with some help from Google Translate, I am told that I have a "C"-rated 4300W lifestyle (EU average is ~4200W, UK ~3300W) against a 2000W goal! None of my actual usage figures were asked for, however.
• 2023-02-09: there was some low-carbon grid top-up around midnight to the heat battery, and the sun is strong enough around noon that there is some PV diversion over and above charging the Enphase. Also, I re-bodged the off-grid power connection for the router, since good off-grid generation is otherwise going to waste.
• 2023-02-08: I am waiting to see if the EOU Twitter grid intensity feed gets broken tomorrow (now the 13th) in one of the Musk thrashes. I joined Twitter as @EarthOrgUK in June 2009, 140.6k tweets ago, to distribute that info, initially hoping to make use of the free tweets over SMS that Vodafone was offering then. Today there are 2,013 followers, and the account is following 1,289. (I have operated various other accounts, eg for me personally and for the OpenTRV project.) I have now written a Twitter kill switch into my code to make it easy to avoid wasting CPU and bandwidth on even attempting to tweet, and everything that I was tweeting already works better as Mastodon toots (larger posts, easier and more robust code)...
• 2023-02-08: the outer pane of the large fixed light in the master bedroom (front) window imploded!
• 2023-02-07: I got the first reasonable (though thin) cut of my state of UK homes wrt heat-pumps 'paper' to my supervisors. Basically we need to replace ~20M gas boilers with heat-pumps in the UK by 2050, some more than once.
• 2023-02-05: started with the Friends of OpenJDK (aka "Java") track. After lunch I switched to the lightning talks. So as not to breach the alcohol minimum in Brussels I had a Leffe Blonde while waiting for the train (with no connectivity).
• 2023-02-04: doing the whole Energy track. Suspended my extended Dry January for a Kwak Rouge in the Grand-Place.
• 2023-02-03: off to FOSDEM today! (Also deleted the now-unused Google Analytics 'property' for the Gallery.)
• 2023-02-02: attending University of Surrey Open Research and Research Culture event 2023 and later my son's GCSE options meeting.
• 2023-02-01: survived Dry January; may extend it a few more days...
• 2023-01-31: I got myself a second-hand Dell UltraSharp U2415 external monitor; first time that I have used such a thing almost since City days I think! I'm using it in portrait mode to make better use of my small desk space. Also, when I need to work on one of my RPi servers directly, I will no longer need to take over the home HDMI TV...
• 2023-01-28: it is sunny enough near noon that I am at least briefly running my laptop off-grid. (The router-as-dumpload is currently not available until I fix a flaky power connector.)
• 2023-01-29: there is lots of wind energy on the GB grid and so (with a strategically-timed weekly bath, after a few days' lull) ~13kWh had already been into/through the heat battery by early afternoon (and ~16kWh by 10pm, ~17kWh by midnight)! A big grid-import day, possibly the biggest ever, at ~23.6kWh (24.9kWh consumed). I note that tomorrow National Grid is calling a DFS (Demand Flexibility Test) between 9am and 10am (~200MW), so I am feeling good about my heat-battery top-up lockout ('H') that covers exactly that interval!
• 2023-01-27: did some more work on small community energy grants (and we have a couple of good ones now I think), and I am now trying to fill out the body of my "UK heat-pump installs by 2050" write-up since I want to get it to decent draft by early next week.
• 2023-01-26: in at University all day for induction. My fellow students seem a nice bunch. I am not the oldest in this intake by nearly a decade, but definitely at the tail of the age distribution! I may have slightly startled the associate dean of the doctoral college...
• 2023-01-25: replacement of one of the (two) boards in one of the Enphase ACBs by JPS Renewable Energy today, to avoid a non-recoverable full discharge, I understand.
• 2023-01-24: visited Reading Hydro today: write-up. Interesting fact: of the seven hydro schemes running on the Thames, three are private, three are community, and one is the King's!
• 2023-01-23: side research: finding out if happy hardcore is the background music I need for research reading...
• 2023-01-22: off-grid battery got FULL again; first time since December 18th. Morning mist did not prevent reasonable generation for both off-grid and grid-tied systems, indeed improved it a little as the diffuse light avoided shadowing. At ~-5°C overnight we are due to be colder than Reykjavik and Moscow...
• 2023-01-20: I drank quite a lot of coffee, I sketched yet another grant proposal, and a friend came over to think with me about how more householders might be helped to start the process of greening their home. And I'm messing around most of the afternoon and evening...
• 2023-01-19: I worked on some possible small GLA community energy grant proposals this morning. When I got out for my walk there was an amazing blue sky, and it was sunny and cold since we are a couple of says into another cold snap. Research reading in the afternoon.
• 2023-01-11: reading: (including first two using my new uni email to get through a paywall) [amponsah2014greenhouse] [orso2023census] [zhou2023porosity]. Most further research reading will be captured on the PhD page only.
• 2023-01-11: I have my uni ac.uk email address working! And separately I am progressing the heating stickers work, and also trying to get this year's tax return nailed down (rather later than usual, bah).
• 2023-01-10: my first official (grey and drizzly) day on campus! I did not quite manage to get as far as collecting my student ID card. The return journey (bus and train) is about £15 and about and hour and a half each way, which I shall likely be doing at least 400 times over the course of my PhD! The station and train WiFi worked well, so the time was reasonably productive...
• 2023-01-09: attending online UCL Workshop on AI for Sustainability (Rendani Mbuvha; So Takao).
• 2023-01-09: today I am officially a PhD student / doctoral candidate / researcher! Though I still need to get some paperwork done, ID issued, etc...
• 2023-01-08: EOU can now send automated grid-intensity Mastodon toots.
• 2023-01-08: reading: [blasi2022english]
• 2023-01-07: my RSS feed list has grown to about ~14 entries, maybe doubling since the Twitter troubles started. I have a Master's degree in distributed systems and what with RSS and Mastodon (and still running my own email and Web servers) I am being reminded of some of their value!
• 2023-01-07: listening: Oxygene Pt. 4 by Jean-Michel Jarre, 1976: performed by 19KB of JS code.
• 2023-01-06: reading: [penasco2023assessing]
• 2023-01-06: reading: why gas cookers should be replaced with induction: [michanowicz2022home] [gruenwald2022asthma]
• 2023-01-06: a belated birthday present for my daughter arrived from Norway today (I 'won' it from the author on Twitter!), and I'm taking a suggestion from an Irish theoretical astrophysicist that may ease the arthritis in my thumbs!
• 2023-01-05: what a full and wild life I lead: today I put the Christmas tree and decorations back in the loft, topped up the dishwasher rinse aid, and refreshed the Combiphos in the Combimate.
• 2023-01-03: reading: [andersson2022measuring]
• 2023-01-03: booked for FOSDEM for the first time in many years! May be spending lots of time in the Energy devroom...
• 2023-01-01: attempting (a) #dryJanuary and (b) to undo the muscle memory of typing the year as 2022 before about July...

Many other interesting things happened during the year, such as the start of Repair Café Kingston: too many to list here!