Following recent developments in the pricing of electricity for households with solar panels in the Netherlands, I got interested in the energy balance of our own household. A little over two years ago, we moved into a newly build house that qualifies as a "zero-on-the-meter house". This qualification implies that -- under certain assumptions -- the house has a net energy balance of zero or below zero, i.e....
As part of a larger effort to get a better understanding of our energy consumption and production, I wanted to log the power generated by the photovoltaic installation in our house. We use a Solax system consisting of 8 solar panels, a Solax X1 inverter and the Solax Pocket Wifi 2.0 device. Via this manual I will explain how I got the data extracted. In the rest of...
As part of a larger effort to get a better understanding of our energy consumption and production, I wanted to predict the production of our solar arrays on a day to day basis. This requires information on the Global Horizontal Irradiance, which is calculated in the weather models by the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute KNMI. Because the KNMI is a publicly funded organisation and is part of the...
In the Netherlands and increasing number of homes have a smart energy meter, that communicates with the energy supplier and automatically provides them with numbers of the usage. In earlier times, you had to read of the reader yourself, fill in a registration form and mail it in to the energy supplier. The newer meters have an accessory port that can be used by the home owner, to...
Last year I wrote a blog post on the twisted treat that my family makes every years for new years eve: Nonnevotten. I tried to standardize the recipe to measures of weight instead of volume and to standardize the process of making them to get more reliable results. If I want to improve on the recipe, I need to experiment a bit with the recipe to see if...
Our daily commute to work by bicycle has more than doubled in duration since our move. Instead of...
Amsterdam based Strackk sells neat looking, thin, aluminium shelves that are mounted without visible brackets (floating shelves). In...
Not too long ago I started 3D printing terrain pieces for use tabletop roleplaying games. Besides some scatter...
My grandmother was born and raised near Sittard in the south of Limburg–one of the three southern provinces...
We started playing around the very start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and were for the larger part of...