Blog
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A house with no insulation is a cold house!
Living in a house with no insulation We had the ceiling insulation in much of our house removed a couple of days ago before we install our HVAC system. Today was a cold rainy day and whatever heat was still in the house has been leaking away as we have no heating. We took out…
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Replacing ceiling insulation
Our current ceiling insulation is a patchwork of old solutions. Today we had much of the old insulation removed, a general cleanup, and the ductwork for the evaporative cooler removed. We will have new insulation installed soon after we install the HVAC system next week. State of the current ceiling insulation Our house has an…
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My Home Assistant setup
There are several ways to setup Home Assistant. It can run on a dedicated machine for example raspberry pi with the Home Assistant Operating System (HAOS). HA can also be run in a container environment on any pic you might have around. See setting up home assistant for more details. I had an 12 year…
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Getting ready to replace ducted gas heating
We need to replace our gas heating system About five months about our ducted gas heating system broke down. This was not the first time it has done so as the unit is now 30 years old. We called a technician to look at it, and he determined one of two components had failed. The…
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Chasing down electricity usage
Working to minimise usage We will be using our battery to power our electric heating and so we want to minimise usage. After setting up the monitoring of energy flow in Home Assistant I noticed that we were drawing 300W-400W of energy overnight. This ends up using about 10%-15% of our battery storage. There are…
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Measuring energy flow with Home Assistant
Energy flow in the HA dashboard Understanding the energy flow in our household will be critical in trying to reduce dependence on the grid. We also want to maximise our use solar energy. Summary tab The HA Energy dashboard Summary tab provides useful overview on where and when we are producing and using energy. The…
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Predicting solar performance with Solcast
In order to better understand how to monitor and control our appliances to take maximum advantage of available solar energy, predicting the likely solar availability is vital. On sunny days in the summer our system could produce more than 80kWh of energy, while on a dark rainy winter day, this could be less than 10…
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Using home assistant for monitoring battery and solar
We have been using home assistant for monitoring and controlling many items in our home for a few years. This is a fantastic open source home automation system, and is ideal for monitoring energy usage. It can also be used for controlling use and charging of a battery taking into account tariffs, solar input. We…
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Solar panel installation day
Our home has a terracotta tile roof. This is one of the more challenging surfaces for solar panel installation. We were quite careful about choosing our installer, and went with a local company on the recommendation of someone who had used them in the past. We discussed with them the challenges of installation, and they…
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Solar system size
Our goal for our home is to move completely off of gas and onto electricity and we need the solar system size to be adequate for the task . When we started, we were not heavy users of electricity, using 10-15 kWh per day, with our biggest uses coming from household appliances (washer, dryer, fridge,…
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