It might be that it's just the regulator that's different (the bit that connects to the cylinder). If you haven't already then it could be worth getting in touch with their support. I had a broken glass window on my oven, the replacement was never in stock, so they sent me a whole new door with glass for free.
I have a Solis inverter [0], while it has WiFi built in, and we have the data logging dongle, it doesn't need to be connected to the internet to function, and you can configure the dongle to talk to MQTT locally (but I haven't done this).
It doesn't need to be connected to the internet during configuration either, we set it up and got it going before connecting the data logger to it.
That said, I do use their portal to see my generation and consumption. It's pretty handy. But I also do scrape their data and store it locally as well.
As a person from Northern Ireland, I'm not sure what holiday you're referring to.
Closest I can think of is the 12th July, which is a holiday, but not one celebrating burning Catholics[0]. You might be referring to the bonfires that are lit on the 11th, but that's not a holiday.
Aside from some small events in Scotland, the 12th July is not celebrated in the rest of the UK.
Is Guy Fawkes Day in November not a big thing in NI? It is in England, at least. Although the traditional burning of the effigy of Catholic dissident/terrorist Guy Fawkes is becoming less common and people just are more commonly just treating it as a general holiday.
No, we don't observe it at all, in either community. Halloween is bigger here, and observed by both main communities, it's probably close enough to 5th November that we've just ended up forgetting about Guy Fawkes.
Plus it's taught in school as an English event, and we have enough of our own history going on in the early 1600s.
That's still insane. I have a Hue bridge and server at home that together draw less than 50W. Network equipment is also in the range of max 10W per device.
That's not "idle" use... somebody wasted good money on those labour-saving devices. And they'll write a blog post about it too once they get around to fixing them!
(I write this lovingly yet seriously as absolutely a victim of this exact same dynamic, sitting next to a pile of expensive fans I'm going to use to reduce the noise from my rack... any day now...).
There's an energy monitor with 16 CT clamps included, you put one on each of the circuits coming from the fuse board. 16 is more than enough for most UK houses, which would at least let you know which circuits are consuming the power.
So I got into this a bit over the past year, and put a SmartThings socket behind just about everything in the house. Not so much for the cost saving (which will take forever at £29 for each of the SmartThings sockets), but more to understand where the power is being used so that we can run for longer on solar + batteries.
There's a range of devices that consume practically nothing when they are in standby mode, these include:
- Phone chargers (0 - 1W)
- Projectors (0 - 1W)
- TVs (0 - 3W for the ones we have)
- Laptops (3 - 4W for the ones we have)
- AV amps e.g. Denon (2W)
- Coffee Machine e.g. Jura (4W)
- Printers (0 - 1W)
There's a bunch of low powered devices that stay on all the time
- Amazon Echo Show (4W)
- Presumably the Echos without a screen but I haven't tested them
If I turned all of these two groups off in the house when we are not using them then we might save close to the £30/year, but we have a lot of them and it's not worth the effort.
There's some devices that you have to keep running, but will cycle, these are typically fridges and freezers.
- Pretty much all around 1W sleep
- 2 year old full height fridge - peaks at 49W for 7 minutes ever 30 mins or so
- 2 year old full height freezer - peaks at 75W for 10 minutes ever 45 mins or so
- 1 year old chest freezer - peaks at 76W for 12 minutes every 30 mins or so
- 10 year old half height fridge - peaks at 66W for 30 minutes ever 120 mins or so
- 2 year old half height wine fridge - load isn't smooth, spikes and goes back down, average of about 100W for 10 minutes every 60 mins or so
- 10 year old combined full height fridge and freezer - 110W for 17 mins every 50 mins or so
There's not much you can do about these (well I could remove some) but they need to stay on.
Then there's some things that can be reduced:
- I usually walk away from my laptop and leave it running. The external monitor goes to sleep, but the laptop itself continues to use 33W when left like this. If I put it to sleep instead it would go close to 0. Assuming that I leave it like this for 12 hours each evening, that's 0.033kW \* 0.22p/kWh \* 365days \* 12hours = £31.80 - with this change alone I can hit the headline figures
- We have a Virgin Media Box and an XBox One X, I haven't separated their power usage, they both draw in their sleep/standby mode, but together they are using 38W when in standby. Using the formula above, switching them off for 12 hours would save £36.61
- Lights, yes, they are only 0.5W each for the Philips Hue, but we've 32 of them in the kitchen alone. That's 16W in standby, for say an average of 18 hours a day over the year when they aren't being used. £20.56 for the kitchen lights to be "off".
Problem with these articles are that some older folk in older houses go round switching off the telly rather than using standby on the remote. That's fine, you might save £1 or £2 over the course of the year, but the house is old, the sockets are close to the floor, the risk of you tripping/falling is much higher. It's never worth it to save £1.
Where it does make sense is people who have a few consoles in the house, leaving them in standby mode (particularly the one where it can download updates in the background), or just walking away from their computer and not putting it to sleep properly. Switch it off instead and you'll save the headline figures easily.
I am using a monitor light bar (Xiaomi) instead of a ceiling light when working at night. This gives a very nice atmosphere and saves a few Watts, but it will take some years until the energy savings compensate the price for the light bar.
