Recently, I've been getting back into shooting air rifles and wanted to be able to do so in the garden. To aid in this, I wanted to build a backstop able to trap and stop any pellets that hit it| www.bentasker.co.uk
Our sofa is actually part of a corner sofa. When we moved, we took the other end off it because it didn't fit well into our current living room. The remaining sofa-bit is big enough for 2 or 3 people| www.bentasker.co.uk
Bonnie came to live with us at the beginning of last year. She joined our family unspayed and so was still having regular seasons. I don't think that her previous owner had tried to breed her but, as he had a breeder in the family, I'm guessing that it was an option that he wanted to keep. Intact dogs aren't just exposed to the risk of accidental pregnancy, they also have an increased incidence of cancer and Pyometra (on average, 19% of intact females will suffer this before age 10). On top o...| www.bentasker.co.uk
For the last couple of years, we've used a free-standing oil radiator to provide additional heat in our attic room. However, I've never been overly comfortable with the risk that it'll get knocked ove| www.bentasker.co.uk
A little while ago, I wrote some musings on Home Automation and made reference to our heating setup.As it's had a bit of time (and some poor weather) to run and be improved upon, I thought it might be| www.bentasker.co.uk
I've dabbled with elements of Home Automation in the past.In a previous rental, we only had storage heaters, so I equipped each room with an Oil Radiator and an energenie RF plug socket (like these ht| www.bentasker.co.uk
We recently had solar installed and I wanted to be able to pull stats from the inverter down into InfluxDB so that I could use the metrics to monitor system efficiency as well as for various bits of a| www.bentasker.co.uk
We added a solar install to our house earlier in the year, including a 6kWh battery for storage. I've been working on a dashboard to analyse our path towards break-even, and was quite surprised to see| www.bentasker.co.uk
Last month I found that the break-even period of our solar battery measures in decades, far longer than its useful life. Although it will probably never be possible to optimise enough to correct that,| www.bentasker.co.uk
At the beginning of January, I noticed that our Pylontech US2000C solar battery wasn't starting to supply household usage at the time that it should have done. In fact, on some mornings, it wasn't eve| www.bentasker.co.uk
I live on Vashon now—well, technically, Maury Island, but ever since they built the isthmus in 1913, it’s all kinda one island. K. M. Alexander, Kari-Lise Alexander, and Ulysses After a fraught spr…| K. M. Alexander
This has been a difficult post to write. I’ve written and rewritten it over the last few weeks, but I never liked how it came out. This is an attempt to correct that. It is always challenging…| K. M. Alexander
We temporarily plugged a heater into a switched extension lead. It ultimately killed part of the lead, so I've taken it apart to see what went wrong.| www.bentasker.co.uk
This winter, we've been using electricity to provide additional heating in the living room. This post looks at how our usage differed to the prior year where we relied on bottled gas for additional he| www.bentasker.co.uk
Having now fixed a reporting bug, I wanted to revisit charging our solar battery in the morning to see whether further savings can be unlocked. I also look at why lower (and negative) savings seem to| www.bentasker.co.uk
I recently tried charging our battery from the grid in order to reduce our exposure to the morning peak in prices. In this post I briefly share the results| www.bentasker.co.uk