Huh? Fancy that… Net Metering Isn’t a Scam…

I’ve weighed in on the Net Metering debate before. So my opinions, which I like to think have a decent foundation in the facts, even though I clearly have some bias, aren’t exactly unknown. In the video below Matt Ferrell (a well known green energy advocate) goes into a fairly high level of detail (it’s kind of his thing), around […]

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Home Assistant + Unifi + Sun Power Solar Energy Integration

The massive amount of user provided integrations to various 3rd party providers available to Home Assistant is one of the best things about the platform. This is a quick walkthrough of how I used hass-sunpower (https://github.com/krbaker/hass-sunpower) via HACs to pull electricity consumption & production values into Home Assistant so I could see it in the Energy dashboard.

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Net Metering Isn’t a Subsidy

There have been several oddly similar anti-net metering op-eds floating around the national newspapers recently. I say “oddly similar” because they tend to repeat the same talking points, argued with little factual backing, with a clear intent to invoke an emotional “that’s not fair” response from readers using class-based rhetoric around how the scheme is a “subsidy” for the rich. […]

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Solar system is up and running

August 11th, 2020 was finally Solar Install Day. At least for me :). While I would have loved to catch those June/July rays, I definitely think it was worth the wait to get the system I wanted; and also I can’t say how long it would have taken for any of the other vendors either. In total, it took three […]

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Choosing a panel

As a technology enthusiast, digging into the underlying system specifications was of particular interest to me, both for the panel and inverters. I’m not going to get into detail around the inverter debate, but based on my research I’m solidly in the “micro” side of things, given the type of system I wanted installed here. Qualifying it that way, is […]

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The battery dilemma

Going off grid is the solar power dream, right? Actually, I think that’s the wrong way to look at it. The grid is the ultimate battery backup for your solar installation. Local storage, aka batteries, are a great way to insulate your house from a grid outage or peak usage pricing, but I think for most people they probably aren’t […]

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