renstur@coopnet:~/blog$ ls -lt ./topics/home-energy/
home-energy/
Solar, Home Assistant and what the lab actually costs to run.
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My solar gateway went offline every night at 3 AM, and it was a Wi-Fi channel
My Enphase Envoy dropped off Home Assistant around 03:01 six nights running. UniFi's scheduled channel optimization moved the radio and the Envoy never rejoined. I turned channel optimization off, and in the six nights after, it didn't happen once.
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A solar gateway firmware update booked 11 MWh of phantom solar
An Envoy firmware update froze production and rebased the lifetime register, and Home Assistant booked about 11,562 kWh of fake solar in one hour. The CT counter never moved, so I reloaded the integration and rebuilt the statistics from it. An alert now watches the two registers.
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What the NAS costs to keep spinning
I measured my TrueNAS box at 81 W before touching spindown. The waste wasn't the disks. It was a Pascal GPU left without a driver by 25.10 and two blank USB drives. Spindown doesn't suit a pool that hosts apps, so I put a community driver back on the card and left the disks alone.
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Pricing an always-on homelab load at the rate it actually pays
The boxes that never turn off should be priced at my top tier, all in rate, not the dashboard's blended average, which always runs low. Average watts times 730 over 1000 gives kWh a month. In Home Assistant that's an Integral helper, a billing cycle utility meter and one template.