Dose's Sometimes DIY and Pay Someone Home & Boat Improvement Thread

[MBS206]

1 minute ago, GTSBoy said:

 

I'm extremely suspicious of the VPP stuff. Best I can tell, you surrender any and all control of your panels and battery to the VPP, because there's no way that anyone could write a sufficiently useful set of "rules" as to how much you would be willing to let out of your export meter at any given time.

If one of your main interests is to have enough in your battery every evening to get you through the night without having to import, you could easily find yourself with nothing in your battery at the end of the day, or part way through the night, and then be paying import pricing instead of paying nothing. I cannot see how this cannot come to pass.

Add more solar panels to the array.

Call the electricity company and tell them you're moving out...

Live off grid electric wise

[GTSBoy]

1 minute ago, MBS206 said:

Add more solar panels to the array.

Call the electricity company and tell them you're moving out...

Live off grid electric wise

That sounds like an excellent idea. But total self-sufficiency means exactly that. You have no-one else to blame when your system faults out and you have no power for a week or two while it gets fixed. You'd have to go the whole hog and get a diesel genny and all the switchover gear, to get you through such times.

And, despite the fact that over 20 years, my system has been pretty reliable**, I have seen so many inverter explosions (or less dramatic deaths), panel and roof JB fires, and so on, over that time, to know that the stuff is the same as any other bulk Chinese manufactured stuff. The failure rate is well above zero - both on the equipment and on behalf of the meth addled installation labour force. And then..... warranty and means of redress against the supplier you bought the gear from. Best I can tell is that only a handful of solar companies are still around within 5 years of starting their advertising pitch. They disappear and phoenix like crazy.

So, as per 1st paragraph, I suspect the only way to is go balls deep and spend maybe 2-3 times as much as you might think, so that you have every base covered. Plus, know and understand your gear intimately, so you can diagnose problems, sort them out yourself, etc, etc. Plus, probably have to consider upgrading various parts as the years pass, to maintain compatibility with newer stuff, performance and reliability, etc, etc.

Whereas, remaining attached to the grid has an ongoing cost that keeps going up even if you use bugger all power from it. But it does provide the fallback in case of the worst case with your own gear. You either pay up front or as you go, I suspect.

[Dose Pipe Sutututu]

28 minutes ago, GTSBoy said:

extremely suspicious of the VPP stuff. Best I can tell, you surrender any and all control of your panels and battery to the VPP

You can set hard reserves on your battery system, and it can't be discharged past that.

 

[MBS206]

53 minutes ago, GTSBoy said:

That sounds like an excellent idea. But total self-sufficiency means exactly that. You have no-one else to blame when your system faults out and you have no power for a week or two while it gets fixed. You'd have to go the whole hog and get a diesel genny and all the switchover gear, to get you through such times.

And, despite the fact that over 20 years, my system has been pretty reliable**, I have seen so many inverter explosions (or less dramatic deaths), panel and roof JB fires, and so on, over that time, to know that the stuff is the same as any other bulk Chinese manufactured stuff. The failure rate is well above zero - both on the equipment and on behalf of the meth addled installation labour force. And then..... warranty and means of redress against the supplier you bought the gear from. Best I can tell is that only a handful of solar companies are still around within 5 years of starting their advertising pitch. They disappear and phoenix like crazy.

So, as per 1st paragraph, I suspect the only way to is go balls deep and spend maybe 2-3 times as much as you might think, so that you have every base covered. Plus, know and understand your gear intimately, so you can diagnose problems, sort them out yourself, etc, etc. Plus, probably have to consider upgrading various parts as the years pass, to maintain compatibility with newer stuff, performance and reliability, etc, etc.

Whereas, remaining attached to the grid has an ongoing cost that keeps going up even if you use bugger all power from it. But it does provide the fallback in case of the worst case with your own gear. You either pay up front or as you go, I suspect.

Yep, totally get that. However hooking in for Generator back up is only a few hundred bucks for the wiring. You could put a couple of those in (for different circuits explicitly) and run a couple of baby generators. Bonus, you can balance them across different circuits, and now have backups in your backup.

I'm looking at buying places that won't even have water etc, and I don't mind the idea of getting off the electric grid either, even with everything you've said. This country already has enough power outages that even the mains grid isn't that reliable anymore.

I do agree though on spending a bit more to get better gear, and to add some extra redundancy in to the system too.

[Dose Pipe Sutututu]

Because sometimes I do dumb shit and because I kept thinking about 6.6kWh worth of PVs wouldn't be fully enough if I'm consuming during the day as well as charging. So I did a thing, added another 5kW of PVs lol.

Since there's a spare MPPT port, why the fk not?  

 

[Dose Pipe Sutututu]

Proof I drive my car

[GTSBoy]

That could be caused by cosmic rays!

[MBS206]

1 hour ago, Dose Pipe Sutututu said:

Proof I drive my car

I reckon I push my Skyline further back and forth in the garage than you drive yours!

[Dose Pipe Sutututu]

I reckon there are floaty bits in the fuel tank, I should top it off with 98RON to keep everything happy

[MBS206]

3 minutes ago, Dose Pipe Sutututu said:

I reckon there are floaty bits in the fuel tank, I should top it off with 98RON to keep everything happy

I did 700kms in the cruiser, not last week but the one before. Used 2 fuel filters. A third filter is sitting in it ready to go. Currently can't use the sub tank as it has heaps of shit in it and I didn't want to be swapping another fuel filter while I picked up my new portable, dual axle, steel deck for the house.

[r32-25t]

2 hours ago, Dose Pipe Sutututu said:

Proof I drive my car

I did more kms in my car this year lol 

[Dose Pipe Sutututu]

10 minutes ago, MBS206 said:

picked up my new portable, dual axle, steel deck for the house.

renovations going well 😆

 

Assuming each tank has it's own filter? OR does it just merge upstream into 1?

 

[Dose Pipe Sutututu]

1 minute ago, r32-25t said:

I did more kms in my car this year lol 

fark... Brett is beating me in terms of kms

[MBS206]

17 minutes ago, Dose Pipe Sutututu said:

renovations going well 😆

 

Assuming each tank has it's own filter? OR does it just merge upstream into 1?

 

One main filter.

Each tank has a prefilter to keep rocks and small children out, then the big main filter that also does water separation.

Clogged the first one so bad it was like a rev limiter at 3200rpm. Literally just like dropping the throttle off and maintaining rpm!

[Dose Pipe Sutututu]

Wife wanted basket things in the wardrobe in our temporary house.

Thought about ripping our the wardrobe and fitting the entire IKEA set, but it's a temporary house and we want to move in a few years.

So IKEA advertises this as a 50cm unit, however the actually basket and rails measure 46cm wide. Only issue was depth, IKEA stuff is quite deep, where as the builder special junk is super shallow at less than 40cm.

Send it, chopped the rails, then offset the mounting holes, job done, happy wife, less shit scattered all over the bedroom. Did the same to the other side too.

Also drove the Skyline shit box today, dropped off oil at Supercheap Auto. I didn't realise they only now take max 2x bottles per visit. I visited 2x Supercheap Autos.

 

[Dose Pipe Sutututu]

Today, I'm a Breville BES920 tech, new triac board and new 3x way solenoid.

Had overheating issues, home RCD tripping when it got warm, and the boiler stayed on when the machine was shut off. Also, usually 3x way solenoid chatter, this is the 3rd time I'm replacing it. Mind you, this machine is 9 year old and send it every day doing at minimum 3x double shots. When the in laws come over to took after my daughter, it will easily see 6x double shots in a single day.

Tried to be somewhat compliant, crimped and then used a screw connector over the top. Would have preferred to use heat shrinks.

 

After all that, turns out all the overheating has damaged the o-rings to the steam tap as well. Ordered new ones, coming soon.

 

[The Bogan]

My coffee comes at a filtered drip at a time..., no rocket science looking stuff is inside it thankfully, yours looks like something that could split atoms

I ❤️ my SMEG coffee maker, it is idiot proof, which is handy...

 

[GTSBoy]

I shall avoid allowing the coffee snob in me to sniff haughtily at the hoi polloi using non-Italian, non-E61 group head dedicated boiler machines.

[Dose Pipe Sutututu]

The BES920 is like the Toyota Camrys of coffee machines.

E61 group head is cool, however the time requirements for home use makes it less desirable.

The Toyota Camry coffee machine runs twin boilers and also PID temp control, some say it produces coffees as good as an E61 group head machine.