That sounds good! I can see how that would save a lot of money on the bills. I especially like that you’ve got a “janky” template sensor haha. HA is so good for it’s openness and letting you bodge things together which have no right to work but do so all the same!
I’ll be taking advantage of the negative cost energy to charge my car. How have you got HA set up to take advantage? Is it automating certain appliances running when the rate is lowest?
From what I understand a lot of the UK rail network is reliant on old infrastructure, think Victorian era bridges/tunnels. These weren’t designed with rail electrification in mind so may not have room for a train and an overhead line for example. While there may be solutions for each individual instance of this sort of problem, solving them involves addressing each of them individually and takes more time and money than electrification would in a vacuum.
With Jira everything is an issue
Just finished reading Human Nature on Tuesday. It was interesting to see where the episodes deviated from the book. The main plot points are the same but there are some interesting differences. Overall I enjoyed it.
I only have one at the moment. I bought a cheap Dell Wyse thin client from eBay, installed a light Linux distro on it and set it up as a Wyoming Satellite and as a snapcast client. That is connected to an old all in one mini HiFi for speakers. For the mic I just have a small omnidirectional USB mic plugged into the front. Biggest hassle setting it up was ALSA since snapcast and Wyoming were fighting over the devices
It’s what Americans would call a band-aid
Calibre is what I use. It’s a good ebook management software that allows converting ebooks to different formats. When you copy the books into Calibre they will have Amazon’s DRM on them which will prevent them from from being used. If you want to work around that with Calibre then it is possible and Google is your friend.
Hope I never have the misfortune of seeing one of these in person. It’s ugly, but more importantly I can’t see any way it won’t be incredibly dangerous to all other road users.
First of all I understand why a lot of people are concerned about moving from ICE to EVs. It’s a big change and there is still a long way to go before they become the majority of vehicles.
Having said that, plenty of people have already bought used EVs and it doesn’t seem to be a major problem. Improvements in battery management systems and chemistry will further improve the life of EV batteries which will be on the used market by 2030. The price of new EVs is already starting to come down and that of used ones will follow. ICE cars are far more mechanically complex than EVs so you could argue there are more things that could go wrong buying a used ICE car than an EV but I do accept that batteries are an expensive part to replace.
Batteries can be repurposed for other applications where energy density is less important or they can be recycled.
Over the past year the grid was less than 40% fossil fuels and that will be less over time so most sounds like an exaggeration.
I can only speak for myself but the upcoming ICE ban was a factor in my recent EV purchase. I intend to keep my car for a long time so as we move closer to the ban more and more cars will be EVs so I didn’t want to be left behind.
The other aspects you mentioned were also factors. Particularly after a test drive and feeling the acceleration and quietness of the car.
I agree that a mix of energy sources is a good idea. Maybe a mix of wind, solar, hydro…
Batteries isn’t an energy source, it’s energy storage. We can generate electricity in many ways.
Disclaimer: I’ve only had my EV for about a month and usually charge at work or home so haven’t got that much experience with public charger etiquette.
I wouldn’t think 4 hours a week is “hogging it” but I would think the etiquette somewhat depends what 4 hours you are there. If your 4 hours coincidence with the peak usage of the charger (maybe when people are checking in for example) that is different to 4 hours when nobody is there anyway.
For me the car is the main thing that I can move to cheaper times. I’m also lucky in that I don’t need to do that many miles so I can often wait for cheaper times to charge. If I did more miles and needed to charge more frequently/consistently then it would probably be better to have a tariff with a set night rate, sometimes there are decently long stretches where the variable tariff doesn’t get as cheap as a night rate would be. On the other side there are days like this where I can get as much into the car as possible and get money back for it.
It definitely depends on your individual usage which would be better. If you’re with Octopus, I believe they have a tool which will show you what you would have paid on the variable tariff over the past months, obviously that wouldn’t take into account any behavioral changes you would make (or automate) if you had a variable tariff but could still be helpful.