Pretty sure that the AO Smith 120v hybrid hot water heater's power usage is measured in their cloud backend at 2x the actual kwh used. Someone forgot to account for the difference from 240v. Lol.

It's cloudy and the hot water heater is turned off to save power. Suddenly,
the clouds break, and the house's battery is confronted with more incoming amps than are safe to sustain. It's about to shut off half the solar panels to save itself. But then the hot water heater dives in and takes the power.

The car's battery is low, and the hot water heater has a good amount of hot water, but could still heat more. It runs for a while but sees the house battery is depleting under both loads, and won't meet the hourly target. So it shuts off to maximise the car and house battery charges.

Or vice-versa, the hot water heater is running low and the car stops charging.

A few scenarios I automated today.. Mostly using less code than it takes to describe them here.

This is the power graph as it was heating up. Between the HWH having 2 modes and the EVSE being able to run at 7 different levels, I will be having some programming fun.

#offgrid hot water from #PV achieved. Heated 66 gallons today with about 8 kwh, with another 8 kwh going into the car, and the usual 3 kwh for the rest of the house's loads

I've wanted solar hot water for a long time, resisted the complexity of solar thermal, pondered on direct DC heating but it's got issues, in the end cheap solar panels and hybrid heat pump wins.

(heat pump hybrid, not gas hybrid.. so ready to ditch my propane HWH)

installed hybrid hot water heater successfully, no #plumbing leaks and running #offgrid while my car also charges at max rate

May the 4th be with you

Eight hours of driving over two days, evenly split over between EV and gas, and the first time I've had to do this in a year. The 13 minutes spent charging were nicer and faster, and 10x cheaper.

Wow, it's been too long since I read a really good #haskell blog post.

https://blog.haskell.org/a-couple-million-lines-of-haskell/

Putting this away to enjoy later, I was up at 6 am working out how to winch a huge hot water heater from a pickup truck onto my porch. Which we succeeded at eventually..

I'd rather hook my mom up but she lives 200 feet from sanity.

Plug in solar just became legal in #Virginia. Pondering who to give my spare 450 watt solar panel to, along with a $250 microinveter like the APsystems EZ1-LV-NA

tempting

https://mastodon.social/@bagder/116465795296421293

At the point of permantly closing off communication and cutting ties with people who continue to inflict AI slop on me in bug reports etc.

This will have financial consequences for me, and probably reduces the probability I am able to continue working on free software in the medium term, but so be it.

The probability I would irreparably burn out if I don't do this is 100%.

scoping out where to hang the hammock in the shade the lazy way, by checking the graphs of nearby solar panel arrays

re #Conservancy's Eternal November post, pro/anti-AI sentiment seems to increasingly split along the same lines as political affiliation in the US. So a meta strategic consideration is that Free Software needs to avoid a political party affiliation split or risks serious losses in its reach.

Of course this has been a consideration going well back to CoC discourse and as with that it does not make sense for the free software community to tolerate every behavior a human is capable of.

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2026/apr/15/eternal-november-generative-ai-llm/

At a really good library. Charging my car as well here

on an overnight trip to listen to a hot water heater

 Just saw my 1st swift!!!!!!

 I might have caught early lyme disease so im now on 2 antibiotics

If you ever see a bulls eye on your skin consult a doctor.  This is the second time ive had this disease.  Everything happens for a reason.

Got my car charging rate to match incoming #solar power. There are products that do this, but I just wrote some #haskell code https://git.joeyh.name/index.cgi/joey/house.git/commit/?id=25834a4421769c5e4a427985f0cffe04f315e3ab

It will mostly do this in the evening to avoid ending the day with the house battery too low. Earlier in the day it makes more sense to keep charging at high power and drain the house battery slightly, since higher power car charging is much more efficient.

Meanwhile, I have to mention that my dad quietly with no fuss got a contractor to drop another solar array into his field, rivaling my arrays. And has ground source whole house HVAC+water. And is getting a grid connected whole house battery. I think he wins. (Edit: But no BEV!)

Hope the oil crisis and climate change are treating you well, dear readers.

The heat pump will use heat generated by the inverter that is running the heat pump and charging the car. And it will cool the inverter to reduce its fan needs. The new mech room is going to have some fun duct work and noise insulation.

I'd say this really completes the solar upgrade I started 2 years ago, but *shrug*, I'm planning to drop in a heat pump hot water heater soon, and induction stove remains on the wishlist.

Until I have been able to see the entire solar curve of my solar fields on a sunny day, without it being clipped at 1 pm due to there being more power than anything can use, can I call the solar upgrade really complete?

My #offgrid #EV charging speed has more than doubled. Still L1 charging, but now at 16A (on a 20A outlet) rather than on a slow extension cord, and I don't need any more than that. The car can charge about 30% per day now from solar power (including on cloudy days).

Had to start a new mechanical room on the other side of the bathroom from the current closet for an inverter upgrade. That and running buried conduit to the woodshed made this a lot of work.