Status: Staying put in our homestead unless we need to get groceries.
Plans: Prepare for grocery shopping tomorrow. Work on Home Assistant integration and programming NodeMCU’s.
https://www.home-assistant.io/
Narrative: It’s early, I made a pot of Coffee that we normally drink at 07:00. I put the remainder in a thermos. One decision point that the Home Assistant platform doesn’t have an input for is the brightness of the sun. The two solar panels generate about 170W of electricity in bright sunlight approximately 5 hours a day starting about 9AM. They make almost no power on a heavily cloudy day.
The software does have triggers, but they are not very accurate. It was bright sun yesterday morning when we went for a walk and the software had it as cloudy. The plan is to mount a small solar cell on a weatherproof box somewhere close to the two solar panels. The box will report to the Home Assistant if there is enough sun to release the relay powering the refrigerator UPS and let it run on battery. The two solar panels are connected to the batteries and can easily maintain them at 27 volts with a 10A bench power supply providing the remainder of battery power. About 16:00 the shadow of the tree next door will shade the panel and we’ll want to close the relay powering the fridge UPS.
We spent most of the evening working on our grocery list and deciding what we’re going to freeze for storage. We don’t know what the store will have which makes it difficult to get too picky. This will be our third week of managing our groceries on a strict weekly basis. Like most Americans we were used to being able to just run to the store for something anytime during the week.
Our backup refrigerator and freezer arrives on Wednesday, we’ll likely move some items from the freezer into that on Thursday. (After it’s chilled down.)
I had planned on working in the attic but decided to wait on the thermostat wire. I can work on the bi-phase inverter tomorrow and run up in the attic on Thursday.
Tomorrow: Go grocery shopping first thing in the morning.
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