Steve's Blog

Supercharging my UPS

I hope the charging circuit doesn’t melt when it has to recharge the higher capacity battery.

I’ve had a 600VA UPS forever. Surge protection for my modem / router (I’ve had to replace one after a lightning storm even though the whole estate is on underground phone and power). Surge protection for whatever I plug into it.

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Tags: Backup, UPS

My Smart Meter was reprogrammed today

When I got home from work tonight, I started the dishwasher up as it was full and I was running out of crockery and cutlery. Then as part of my ritual, I went outside to read and record my electricity meter readings for usage and solar fed in for the past 24 hours so I could add the data to my spreadsheet.

I was confronted with a usage reading of 0000.4 kWh and a feed in of 0000.0 kWh. They showed 2251.9 kWh and 116.1 kWh yesterday.

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Tags: Meter, Smart, Victoria

1st June 2011 output

Using the Solmetric data and punching it into the CEC spreadsheet, June is the worst month of the year for solar generation. The following is my generation for the 1st day of June 2011 and it was a cloud free day..

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Accessing the EverSolar PMU remotely

My Inverter and PMU are in my garage and my 4 port wireless router is inside the house. Initially to get the PMU running I had to temporarily run a CAT5 network cable from the garage and into the house this was a pain and a trip hazard.

So off to eBay I went looking for a cheap wireless bridge. I settled on a Vonets VAP11G that cost me $28AUD delivered. It came with a disk and was easy to set up and so far has been working just fine.

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Prova 210 I-V curve tracer

At work I have access to a Prova 210 Solar Panel Analyser / I-V curve tracer.

It is a very handy instrument for testing solar panels and analysing their I-V-P curves.

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