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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • FTA:

    The so-called plug-in systems involve routing the direct current generated by the panels to an inverter, which converts it to an alternating current. They can then be plugged into a conventional wall socket to feed power to a home.

    So, yeah, almost certainly illegal in pretty much any grid-powered home in the US.

    The basic problem is that if the grid power goes down the inverter can back-feed the grid enough to electrocute the people who are working to fix it.

    Utilities require an approved isolation system of some kind that prevents that happening. They are pretty strict about this for various other technical and political reasons too, but evidently it is mostly a safety concern.

    I’ve got some good locations at home for panels, and about 500W in panels that I use for camping, but the equipment I’d need to handle easily and safely consuming the power at home is kind of expensive (just running an inverter and a battery for an isolated system is easy enough, I’ve got all that, but it’s not cheap to seamlessly connect it to my home power system). Would love to have a safe and approved system like what is described in the article.







  • Previously my server was just a Debian box where I had a ‘docker’ directory with a bunch of .sh files containing ‘docker run’ commands (and a couple of docker-compose files for services that that have closely related containers). That works really well, it’s easy to understand and manage. I had nginx running natively to expose stuff as necessary.

    Recently I decided to try TrueNAS Scale (I wanted more reliable storage for my media library, which is large enough to be annoying to replace when a simple drive fails), and I’m still trying to figure it out. It’s kind of a pain in the ass for running containers since the documentation is garbage. The web interface is kind of nice (other than constantly logging me out), but the learning curve for charts and exposing services has been tough, and it seems that ZFS is just a bad choice for Docker.

    I was attracted to the idea of being able to run my services on my NAS server as one appliance, but it’s feeling like TrueNAS Scale is way too complicated for home-scale (and way too primitive for commercial, not entirely sure what market they are aiming for) and I’m considering dumping it and setting up two servers, one for NAS and for running my containers and VMs.