Earth Notes: On Website Technicals (2026-03)

A new Share button for Mastodon has arrived, here as a plain link: Share on Mastodon

I will add this to all main/top desktop pages for two reasons. The obvious one is to help get EOU pages shared. The other is to increase visibility of Mastodon and the Fediverse generally!

I am going with an initial minimal foot-of-page button:

Yes, including the page's URL in the toot is the whole point, why do you ask?

2026-03-09: shunned

I have inserted a #EOU tag at the end of the generated toot text to make it easier to see if anyone has used this shiny new toy by searching for that tag. I do not think that anyone has, yet!

An array of stats is captured around each EOM (End of Month). The process starts with meter readings taken nominally ~18:00 local time of the last day of the month, after any evening meal has been cooked (and eaten). First thing in the morning of the first of the next month HDD and Enphase monthly stats are captured. Then in the hour after noon UTC, when there is most likely to be some incoming sunshine, cron jobs on the main and heat-battery RPis capture (often compressed) monthly versions of various logs.

Those jobs were both running nearly at the end of the hour. I moved the smaller task (on pekoe for the Thermino heat battery) earlier a little so that manually committing that data to SVN and pulling it out elsewhere can be separated from the main server RPi work somewhat.

Pre-load?

For about an hour this afternoon the grid was 'green' intensity (G), with intensity predicted to rise by at least a fact of 3 over the next ~48h (P):

% egrep ' F[^ ]*P' data/heatBattery/log/live/20260301.log
2026-03-01T14:31Z MT 0 GI 44 IT 41 F FGqPbvx1N ES 1
2026-03-01T14:36Z MT 0 GI 44 IT 41 F FGqPbvx1N ES 1
2026-03-01T14:41Z MT 0 GI 44 IT 41 F FGqPbvx1N ES 1
2026-03-01T14:46Z MT 0 GI 44 IT 41 F FGqPbvx1N ES 1
2026-03-01T14:51Z MT 0 GI 45 IT 41 F FGqPbvx1N ES 1
2026-03-01T14:56Z MT 0 GI 45 IT 41 F FGqPbvx1N ES 1
2026-03-01T15:01Z MT 0 GI 46 IT 41 F FGqPbvx1N ES 1
2026-03-01T15:06Z MT 0 GI 48 IT 41 F FGqPbvx1N ES 1
2026-03-01T15:11Z MT 0 GI 51 IT 41 F FGqPbvx1N ES 1
2026-03-01T15:21Z MT 0 GI 51 IT 41 F FGqPbvx1N ES 1
2026-03-01T15:31Z MT 0 GI 55 IT 41 F FGqPbvx1N ES 1

There was a similar interval on 2025-10-28.

It would possibly have been worthwhile from an emissions point of view to at least partly load up the heat battery, maybe just to the 'not-cold' level, to reduce subsequent heat-pump demand, though some gas generators were being turned up in England around that time.

2026-03-02: steeper

There was then half an hour or so of P (and G) coming up to midnight, and through 06:15 this morning. But again, there were at least some constraints on the GB grid by ~03:00 with wind turned down in Scotland and gas turned up in England.

There may be a case for boosting the Thermino a little, to at least 'not cold', or less controversially removing some daytime restrictions on PV diversion, in such G and P periods. But maybe only outside (GB or SSES) peak demand times. Ideally also only if there are no fossil generation turn-ups!

All of those P samples so far in 2026, and in 2025, seem to already be G.