Smart Home Blog

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Our solar generation in 2024 was just over 7MWh, which is about 400kWh down on 2023.

I'm not really a person for New Year's resolutions but, I do have some plans for projects that must be completed this year. The first and highest priority is our smart home extension. We have a builder ready to start very soon. It's going to be a massive disruption, with the rear of our home being removed 😮

A big part of the smart home extension is going to be extending our smart home solar installation project by adding new in roof solar panels on both sides of the new extension roof. These new East and West facing solar panels will ensure we generate more solar energy both earlier in the day and also later into the day.

My other big project that is nearing completion is my MX-5e EV conversion. The main task remaining now is to fit the motor and high voltage battery pack. This project has its own progress blog.

Today was a very good start to our solar generation with 21.3kWh. Peak power seen today was 4.4kW.

On the 26th January 2024, we generated 26.2kWh. With our planned new in roof solar, we could potentially achieve over 35kWh at this time of year.

With our new smart home extension, we are creating a longer path down the side of our house, which requires smart lighting. I've started another project to add smart path lighting.

With the sunnier weather, we are seeing higher generation from our solar panels. 4712W was the peak power seen by our Tesla Powerwall and Gateway. The sun managed to get 16° above the horizon today.

My smart home uses Qpush to deliver notifications and this morning the Driver Control Unit (DCU) measured data resulted in a notification being sent to tell me that the 12V battery voltage in my MX-5e had dropped below my set threshhold.

A first for me but, not in a good way! At 4am this morning the Ethernet cable connecting the 8-port switch in my garage failed 😮 I noticed it because my Tesla Powerwall, Zappi smart EV charger and Enphase Envoy went off line. Fortunately, I run and test spare Ethernet cables for redundancy, so I could just swap over to another one. It took me quite a while to diagnose, as I struggled to believe that the cable could have failed.

Today has been the best solar generation day of 2025, with 22.7kWh.

A very good week for solar production after a fairly poor December. 97.1kWh generated this week and 135.5kWh this month already, which is more than the whole of last month. We've had no snow at all in Suffolk. I've also exported 84.3kWh this month so far.

This last week has been particularly cold and it is interesting to see how our gas usage varies. On the coldest days, we are using 107kWh of gas to heat our home to 21.5°C from about 6:30am to 10:30pm. In December 2024, it varied from about 47kWh to 80kWh, with an average of about 60kWh. Our heating system switches off completely at night, as we like to sleep in a cooler house. Chatting to a friend who lives on his own in an older, 4-bedroom bungalow, his gas usage was about 50% higher 😮

I don't consider our home (built in 1985) to be particularly well insulated but, we are improving this significantly as part of the new smart home extension. We are changing our home to have a multi-zone heating system.

I'm planning to install a lot more Ethernet cables in the new smart home extension for all of the new smart home features. With this in mind, I have purchased a 305m reel of Cat6 cable. I use a different colour cable each time I do a major installation, to help identify the type of cable and when it was installed.

All the new cables will be connected to this new patch panel in the 19" rack cabinet in my loft.