• 12 Posts
  • 326 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • American House with an EV, all electric, and no solar, I use about 1200 kWh/mo (1.2 MWh/mo) on average. This could only carry me through about 3y. Even if I had access to good public infrastructure I think best I could do is 6y (again, all-electric home).

    But I digress. Lithium ion as purely load shifting is a pretty reasonable, I’d argue critical, solution for covering day/night loads, but starts to fall apart completely when it comes to seasonal (summer/winter) loads.

    But what makes this plant interesting is the addition of super capacitors. The combo battery/SC plant is less about day/night load shifting and more about providing stability to a shifting grid. As supply and demand grow increasingly decoupled, and we try and shift away from expensive peaker plants always on standby, systems like this can dramatically help smooth grid performance.

    ~90 MW of peaker capacity is small potatoes currently, but this is a big step towards a more reliable grid future.





  • Fair point! As far as I can tell, the temp sensors are just beacons - anyone can connect and see that somewhere in your house it’s 72 °F, but who cares ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    If you’re running on a Raspberry Pi, you can just use the onboard BT, whose drivers are updated regularly.

    ZigBee ones get occasional updates automatically detected through HA, and have to be moved to somewhere near the controller to update. I assume, as temperature and humidity sensing hasn’t changed, that these are security patches.

    BT ones get no updates, which either means their security goes unpatched, or it really doesn’t matter when all they do is shout out measurements into the void.


  • Of course! From an end-user the experience between Bluetooth and ZigBee sensors is basically indistinguishable, except for range.

    I have a detached garage, on the opposite end of my property from my HA controller, so the Bluetooth sensor out there specifically was a little flaky. The BT sensor is rated for ~160 ft but realistically it’s 50-100 ft if your home has walls.

    Swapping that one sensor to ZigBee so it could tie into my mesh network solved the problem. All other BT sensors have had zero issues, and their AA batteries unsurprisingly last longer than the 3R ZigBee AAAs, but both last at least 6mo.

    Some Shelly devices can be used as “Bluetooth repeaters” but I’m unsure of the specifics of how that works.








  • I don’t hate it, but I would REALLY like to be able to move those buttons around. Refresh, share, and forward are hands-down my most used buttons. Having to chase them up feels tedious.

    Similarly sign in (or, I’m guessing account once you do sign in) does not need that much real estate.

    Finally I’d love to swap Passwords with a shortcut to my password manager of choice (in my case, Bitwarden)

    I appreciate the more modern take, but I think it could use some refinement or customization options, similar to dragging things around your toolbar in FF desktop.