Earth Notes: On Website Technicals (2026-08)

The rising net export (negative import) figure over ~1 year (374 days) is good!

Winter USoC dump thresholds

Thinking ahead again to mid-winter, I have set powermng now to nominally allow 2 days' dumping (keeping the router off-grid), eg in state 'e' even without grid imports, by adjusting the upper usable SoC threshold for dumping to accommodate those 2 days' router load, assumed to be 30% USoC per day. I have set more than one day' router load, as rarely is every day going to get the battery fully charged then.

This has lowered the upper dumping threshold from ~60% to ~40%, with the lower threshold remaining at 20% of USoC, ie about 60% full SoC.

Heatwaves

I added to the spelling dictionary used by the EOU site build heatwave, heatwaves (why yes, I am writing about them more!) and microinverter.

uptime

 17:33:30 up 342 days,  5:04,  1 user,  load average: 0.71, 0.60, 0.55

~13:20Z I checked the connections in the back garden main PV connection box; all seem fine. But the Schottky diodes used to parallel the 255Wp panels were painfully hot, though probably not hot enough to harm them. Both diodes were hot even though one panel is partially shaded.

The microinverter will be adding a bit over 1A load, or maybe 0.5W extra heat, to that.

Maybe I should find small clip-on heatsinks for them. I think I have some.

I am working on first-round updates/corrections to my paper currently in flight with a journal.

One improvement asked for by the editors and reviewers is higher figure quality. I take this to be both technical presentation/resolution and content/labelling, etc.

Many of the figures are gnuplot line graphs. For HTML pages I am now using SVG where possible because scalable and often much more compact than PNG, especially brotli-compressed. But pdflatex with which I am preparing this paper does not handle SVG, so initially I had reverted to PNG, but there are visible artefacts from the 640x480 pixel raster format used.

I have started to generate PDF output alongside SVG and PNG, as an alternative scalable vector format (ie without raster artefacts) that pdflatex does accept.

I hope that this sufficiently addresses the technical issue for those graphs that I can easily regenerate from data. Some historic PNG snapshots (eg screenshots) may be harder to improve.

I have also changed the axes to be a more conventional journal style, with more descriptive axis labels and the axis tick values purely numeric.