21 November - Not such a bad day’s work
Three weeks ago I said there were
some technical problems here
which was something of an understatement.
The
home battery I installed last year stopped working, or to be a little more precise the inverter
started doing silly things. That is serious because my peak hour electricity tariff is nearly five times as
expensive as off-peak and the inverter system was acting dumb. It had worked
perfectly for 18 months but one day it lost the ability to sense when it
should charge the batteries and when it should discharge them to the house load
and save taking power from an expensive grid.
Naturally the inverter supplier assumed it was my fault despite me having
touched nothing. I made sure all the data lines were still intact and checked
that all the firmware was up to date to no effect and the supplier said “I’m stumped”
By trial and error I found that the batteries would discharge into the house if
I disconnected the AC supply to the inverter but of course in that state it
could not charge from the grid or from the solar panels. To take advantage of
cheap electricity I had to manually switch the power on at 00:30 and off again
at 05:30. If the power connection was left on the batteries wouldn’t do their
job and I would be saddled with expensive electricity all day long!
The problem is now fixed. An obscure software bug which affected only certain
system configurations has been identified. For the first time in a month I will
get a full night’s sleep. This is the future people! Your life controlled by
software engineers encouraged by Ed The Loon Miliband.
Not properly thought through
The Bexley Box that is. As you will have gathered, I very much approved of the Council Leader’s plan to
keep vulnerable old people warm this Winter. It is a good plan in its own right
and if it embarrasses Labour politicians, so much the better.
I asked the Cabinet Member if there was anything residents could do to help and
he gave me the banking details. I sent off a few bob but to
my mind it is a partially lost opportunity.
The generic Reference of ֹ‘Bexley Box Project’ does not identify the sender, so
don’t expect a thank you, but more importantly there is no facility for Gift Aid
to bump up receipts by 20%.
The same is true of the Mayor’s Charity. I got very close to donating but no
Gift Aid put a stop to that. Not being able to take every opportunity to rob this rotten Government does
not go down well with me.
Tidying up
I
asked Cabinet Member Richard Diment if I could remove the out of date notices
which adorn local streets. He said “Please do” because they get up his nose too.
Perhaps I will ask him to remove the ‘New Road Layout sign’ that I have been
passing regularly since 2007.
Maybe if you have a faded tatty Council notice in your street you could do Richard a favour too?
Poor old Sadiq
I am informed that yesterday’s
Euro
Ncap news reached BBC i-Player but as I am not allowed to look I have no
idea what is there. About six minutes into yesterday’s Evening News according to my transport
correspondent but you will have to be quick. It expires this evening.