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> an average home battery system costs between $10,000 to $20,000

What size is this? In the UK you can get a 16kWh LFP battery for £2,700. I believe an inverter would be £1,500.

This would cover one day of electricity usage for me if you exclude EV charging, double it to include that too. Note that my heating is gas.

I’ve considered getting a setup like this just to charge it at night at 7p/kWh and use it during the day to save paying 30p/kWh but the ROI of saving £100/month is slightly too long. If prices come down further I’ll probably bite.


Is that Fogstar? Because looking at non-niche brands like Growatt, Goodwe, Givenergy, Solax, Huawei, LG Chem, etc., it looks to be more like the rest of Western Europe at ~€800-1000 per kWh (which is highway robbery to a depressing degree), or am I missing something like some green tax deductions?

[Edited to use € instead of £ because it turns out I wasn't up-to-speed with current exchange rates]


Take a look here (titansolar DOT de) or ( etronixcenter DOT com) or ( secondsol DOT com)...

If you look around, you can go as low as 50kwh for 6000 Euro. So around 120 Euro / Kwh on the low point. For the newer models with build in fire suppression, its around 150 Euro / Kwh.

Ofcourse, self installation. Its those "professional" installation jobs that are so overpriced and where you pay a premium. Think my dad payed like 3.5K euro for a 5K battery a few years ago (Huawei). And he passive regretted not just doing a second installation himself with a 20k battery (at that time was around 3.5k).

Prices have collapsed. Bifu (double side) Panels are now like 70 Euro, even 62 Euro (32 panel packs).

Note: German prices in the above stores, aka no tax on solar as its tax free in Germany.


Yes, fogstar: https://www.fogstar.co.uk/collections/solar-battery-storage/...

I’m no expert - is there any issue with fogstar?


Had never heard of them before, that's all. Only familiar with the usual players. They look interesting for sure. I've been so depressed with prices of home batteries compared to prices on naked prismatic LFP cells that I've semi-seriously considered DIY-ing one, but time is also money.

By your numbers the payback period would be about 3.5 years. A bit more for a transfer switch and some wiring and other accessories.

That seems like reasonable investment.


> UK’s has one major airport to get out of the country—Heathrow.

I’ve been using Edinburgh airport and Glasgow airport for 40 years to “get out of the country”.


Note that when an English person says the north, they expect everyone to know they are talking specifically about the north of England, not the north of the UK even if everyone else is talking about the UK.

Similarly, Americans expect people to be aware that California is not "the South", despite being on the southern border, and that the Midwest is actually in the eastern half of the country.

Basically the names of geographical regions don't always make sense.


It's a very moveable dividing line depending on where the speaker is from, there's no Mason-Dixon line here. Can mean anywhere north of London.

No normal person refers to Scotland as "north UK" when they could say Scotland, though.


You do occasionally see "North Britain" for Scotland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Britain

It was once common, and in modern times it's occasionally used as a deliberate affectation.


When I grew up (in London), Watford was always the "gateway to the north".

On the other hand, Balham was the "gateway to the south" (which reached as far as the Mediterranean).


I think the original phrase was "North of the Watford Gap", but people often mis-abbreviate to "North of Watford". The Watford Gap is not the same place as Watford. It's about 75 miles north of London. Watford is within London's motorway ring road (The M25), and on the underground map. Its only about 17 miles away from the centre.

Did you know that most people outside the US do not intuitively understand the arbitrary US delineations for North, South, West, Midwest? And yet, "they expect everyone to know they are talking specifically about..."

Though Scotrail was just as bad for many years, so it was a bit of a moot point until a few years ago.

Every country does this, the US south, midwest etc are nonsense geographically.

> England there are people who fight against those who are trying to restore the forest, because the island

England isn’t an island, it shares land borders with Scotland and Wales.


I feel like the Venn diagram of people who need a MISRA JSON parser and the people who can use a AGPL-3.0 library in their (probably) embedded product has no overlap - who is the target for this?

Commercially speaking, the target audience is embedded developers. It's FOSS because, a few months back, I released a MISRA compliant Unicode algorithms library [1] and I received comments on HN asking why it wasn't under a FOSS license. With this project, I wanted to experiment with dual-licensing. I'm using a copyleft license because I fear a permissive license will mean no sales.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42423988


> much, much heavier

Stop that. 10 - 15% doesn’t constitute “much, much”.


IMO it does, that’s the difference between a sedan and an SUV for a lot of brands.

> fixes everything I hate about Windows

It fixes the forced reboots? Or are these a thing of the past?


Do you mind sharing some numbers? Looks like it’s a £7,500 grant with a matching loan? What is your monthly heating bill now? Do you think a battery + octopus 7p deal would bring down the costs?


Yes, that's the available money. It ended up being closer to £10k and I paid the balance rather than deal with a loan. Monthly bill is £200 for everything (including gas HW and hob).

I would probably benefit from a smart meter + time of use tariff. I need to research whether that would impact my existing solar FIT arrangement.


> the US has also formally blocked its allies from sharing US intelligence with Ukraine

Terrifying.


Just curious, how does this work in practice? How is it enforced? How would they know if someone is sharing intelligence or not?


The US spies on everyone, including its allies, and the until-recently-friends that it prohibits sharing with.


Why terrifying? If the US isn't sharing directly, US allies don't get to be the back door for the same US intel to get somewhere.


For a start it shows that the intel is still happening, so it’s not a cost-cutting exercise, it’s a choice to not share when they could. Why would you blind Ukraine, one of your allies to the advantage of your enemy?

Next, your other allies may be getting matching data from other sources so it puts them in a position of running foul of the ban in the eyes of the US when they didn’t. We’ve seen how this administration treats its allies, and how trump reacts when he thinks he’s been slighted. The situation is precarious to say the least.


> That’s 63-110 months till break even, which is less than the expected lifetime of the panels + battery.

You might want to check these, they are way off. You’ll get double these times at least. Not sure why you need the EV plus separate batteries too?


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