[UK] Fibre to the Ladyshed - Project Vera

IoT plants? What’s the world comin’ to these days… :face_with_monocle:

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sprinklers and misters and lights and fans. so technically IoT plants.

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IoT plants

LOL

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This is an awesome set up.
Did you already have power to the shed?

My biggest issue when I was doing something slightly similar was no hard wired power to my shed so I went the other route here in sunny Australia. Solar power all the things (12v style) and used a decased, meshed unifi access point in a weather proof box on the outside to get the network connectivity.

There is something cool about having a secondary detached space that is just as techified as your actual house. Awesome stuff

Thank-you :grinning: !

No, both power and data are new runs. Reading @ChrisA post was incredibly informative because I went to-and-fro about burying and above-ground. The situation I faced (likely short-term need to do fence repairs involving digging) then decided it for me.

I’ll try to do a photo of the end of the garden; the Ladyshed was a nice place to terminate for now but adjacent is a WW2 era brick Anderson shelter (“family bunker” basically). The one we have seems to be a later, stronger edition than the many “part-buried in back garden under corrugated iron” that are more widely know.

Anyways, my plan is to use that to hold some marine batteries for testing out solar arrays and as an ideal mount point for a weather station and my older NAS. That’s a Synology DS-1812 and is only powered on a few times a year to do LAN synchronisation to the newer NAS. Moving it to the “bunker” would give me out-of-house backups - I suppose one could call it “pseudo offsite” !

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Full connectivity in the Ladyshed HAS been achieved - sideways view below of the enclosure+transceiver and my ethernet cabling coming off.

Of course, it helps to add NAT rules in the firewall interface too <cough, cough> !

Trunking for fibre protection remains to be done as does adding “Caution fibre runs” sheeting between the 2 concrete pads. I need to see if some place will sell a few metres of the stuff rather than an entire reel…

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absolute complete overkill

I love it

I bet the battery is sitting right below the touchpad and is a warmer area. Cats always find the best spots!

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If you do not have a thermal camera, just use a cat.

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I skimmed this and mis-read it as “thermal cat” …

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Nice one again, the above is one of the reasons I was keen to use fiber :+1:

Very glad it helped, I think you made the right call on how you did it.

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Oh dear, two more rabbit holes to fall into in a single innocuos looking phrase :slight_smile:
It looks like you have your weekend research sorted for the next couple of winters :slight_smile:

PS: For battery storage, avoid old lead acid batteries even if they are marine grade and even if you can get them for free, they are not worth the environmental risk in 2023 and they are absolutely being obsoleted by lithium iron phosphate ones … You can get a test 5KW storage system new for 2-3K new and with warranty, way less if you go the alibaba way …

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Good to know, particularly so since that’s the basis of any storage system and hence other subsystems. Cheers :slight_smile:

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as a fellow self proclaimed battery obsessed nerd +1 for the no lead acid batteries, it’s just not worth it these days.

it may seem cheaper at first glance but it really isn’t, not in the long run, and lifepo4 batteries are a safe chemistry that should last decades if you treat them right

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Agreed, the biggest issue is that discharge level and number of charges, anything that’s not lead acid kicks bottom. I reckon Oli knows that though!

It’s on my to-do list to get some batteries and solar for my office, but as the cost is so high and pay back so long, I’m in no hurry. What I do like it for though is getting me through a day long power cut. It happens very rarely,but when it does, it’s really annoying!

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i have 14kwh in batteries but it supplements the grid and has limited ups functionality, they are used to keep my power bill under control every day, capturing the sun and releasing it at night

point of this life story is that battery rigs don’t have to be just sitting around waiting for a power cut they can be very useful every day

price is an issue, and i’m waiting patiently for sodium ion batteries to ramp up, they should really shake up the price of plain old energy storage

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@tjw

i have 14kwh in batteries

What kind of volume does that represent? As in: to store them you need a volume of space in what length, width and height?

Having recently installed my OpenEnergyMonitor system, I found it intruiging to note that my (larger, older) virtualisation servers and NAS device account for circa 4 kWh worth of power usage every day. That’s very approx and ignores always-running firewall, main NAS, core switches and cams.

Those servers were all bought new 2010-2012 as a long-term investment. I had a scare when one very old whitebox PC PSU blew up in my face (loud bang and lots of magic smoke released) and figured the house burning down due to non-enterprise rated tech was unwise…

Anyways, 3/4/5 kWh is a figure that I reckon should be coverable by a combination of rooftop solar and batteries. Obviously this is somewhat beyond experimenting with them but your post is exactly what I was thinking.

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I figured that was the way to go but it’s good to hear people’s experiences :grinning:

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600x350

you’ll get that out of 100Ah cells, it’s easily the best bang for buck kinda capacity right now

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You’re lucky you can disperse of your surplus electricity on the Grid, the Dutch Grid network is so full there’s actually a severe risk of newly build domestic neighbourhoods unable to get a connection as wiring would be overloaded if they did. Some commercial properties are already denied access to the electricity network. This as a direct result of Gov’t policy changes following the Ukraine war to get off our natural gas supply dependency from Russia ASAP and thus the switch to electric power for heating and cooking.

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