Dave @ Dave @lemmy.nz Posts 497Comments 5,223Joined 2 yr. ago
Through the middle of the day we are hitting the export cap most days, but we also try to turn on the dishwasher or charge the car at that time because it's better to use the power than sell to the grid and buy it back later.
We've only had it through the summer so I'm curious what the winter will be like.
We get 20c per KWh at a fixed rate, which is much better than some companies that do 10c or less or some don't pay you at all. We are with SolarEdge, a specialist electricity company that only work with people who have solar or other renewable power (e.g. wind). Apparently they can't do it in all areas, though.
All in all it will be interesting to pull out a spread sheet after a year and try to work out whether it's been financially worth it.
Yeah I am hoping the rush on EVs continues and the big bucks keep being put into battery research. I am really tempted to get a second battery, but then I remember the battery alone costs a good $10-15k depending on model., I reckon in 5 years or so when I'm hoping capacities have doubled (so getting one more will triple our current capacity).
It's hard watching the solar output get capped because the battery is full and you can only provide 5KW to the grid on single phase power systems.
Aotearoa Weekly Kōrero 18/4/2025
An update, some of you might remember we had federation issues with Lemmy.world. For a long time now we have had a second server in Finland that Lemmy.world was pointed at, then that server would pass the activities in bulk to our Lemmy.nz server in NZ. This has worked for a long time to prevent a delay federating all the Lemmy.world content.
A recent version of Lemmy added a way to send activities in parallel. Lemmy.world has turned this on, and not long ago this morning have started sending the activities directly to the Lemmy.nz server again, bypassing the extra one.
Let me know if you see anything strange, but it does seem to be working from what I've seen monitoring it this morning.
Aotearoa Weekly Kōrero 18/4/2025
I used to be like that on reddit. Coming here I decided I'd just say things that came to mind. If it doesn't resonate with people then they don't reply and no harm no foul, but very often it triggers replies and conversations. I think it's a great way to get value out of lemmy.
Wikipedia mentions the term "quirina", I wonder if that would be more familiar to them?
It seems you can do a lot yourself but you wouldn't be able to avoid an electrician completely. The thing that stands out to me is that you can't connect the house to the grid, and you can't connect new subcircuits. So you can replace existing hot points, but if you install new ones then you can run the cabling but need to have an electrician actually connect it to the power, and need the work to be inspected.
They talk about cutting the electrician time down to a few days for this design, I guess you could make it one day if you do the leg work yourself and just have them there for the inspection and connection.
For assembling, it seems like you should be able to do it with a few friends so long as you have a loader crane type thing. I presume you can hire those but I'm not sure what the class requirements are to drive them.
We got solar somewhat recently. You can often get cheap finance through your bank if you have a mortgage, $10k should be enough for a few panels. While a battery would be good for resilience, it's a significant cost that Consumer NZ reckons doesn't pay for itself and is only worth doing if you are looking for that protection from power cuts. It does seem like that's what you want, but you can add a battery later, and if you lose power for a long time then having power during the day is still better than none at all.
One thing that surprised me was how little power the house battery stores. As the nights get longer, we are often left without much power in the battery come morning. And if the heating is on we often don't make it through and it starts pulling from the grid.
The battery is about 13KWh and we have a Leaf EV that's maybe 25 or 30Kwh, so if you charge overnight then it just drains the whole battery.
Sounds like you didn't believe you could fly.
Interesting! I see there is a community specifically for Lemmy.ee questions such as this, you could try there if you don't get an answer here?
I just really want to see where the numbers come from.
You know people self hosting email, I know people self hosting email. But that is certainly not the case for the vast, vast majority of individuals. For businesses, I have seen Exchange take over what used to be smaller hosts, and Google has broken into the small/medium business world as well. I have searched and searched and found nothing, but I don't see why it should be so hard to do. Obtain a list of email addresses from some data breach (I dunno how but I'm sure security researchers do it all the time) then check their DNS to see what proportion point at big tech. My gut feel is that it's a large proportion, but maybe that's just the corner I work in.
Lemmy by default only has an on/off switch for admins. Either users can or can't create communities.
Your instance is lemm.ee, and as far as I can tell there is no custom limitation happening.
The side bar on the lemm.ee home page says:
About this site
- Sign-ups are open
- E-mail verification is required
- Downvotes are enabled
- User community creation is enabled
- Image uploads are enabled 4 weeks after account creation
- Image upload limit is 500kb per image
- We have a policy for administration, moderation, and federation
- We have a status page
Feel free to create or join communities for any topics that interest you!
It doesn't mention a time limit and says feel free to create communities, so you should be able to do it.
email can be run using hundreds of servers on dozens of platforms even from your own house and interact with the email network.
It's nice that it can, but the point of this list is is that what actually happens for the majority of people?
And from my experience, the answer is no, the vast majority of people use Microsoft or Google.
This claim is "Top Provider User Share: Google ≈ 17% → Score: 27/30"
Where does this number come from? Gmail alone claims 1.5 billion active users. Outlook.com has 500 million. But then you have to start adding up all the email users worldwide that are using services hosted by Microsoft (all the Exchange business customers), and the google customers as well (that may or may not be included in the Gmail figures). Then there are all the ISP email addresses that use these services as the provider.
I find it hard to believe that email is as decentralised as claimed here, and I'm really keen to see more data on how it was calculated.
The reason I find it so hard to believe is that when Microsoft fucks up (and given time they always do), a significant portion of the business customers I deal with get affected.
Kids that age shouldn’t just be able to use a computer unsupervised or have free access to a computer/console like that. Screentime is a thing and its important.
There is no indication that's it's free unlimited access. I don't get how it being unsupervised is related to screen time.
I'd happily throw minecraft on a phone to a kid in the back seat of the car. I can't see what they are doing, but I know that minecraft not on a public server has very little content inappropriate for a 5 year old, and what little there is doesn't come up if you have peaceful mode on.
I'm not convinced that a 5 year old can't grasp the concept of virtuality. Minecraft on peaceful mode is just giant blocks being picked up and placed. Even if it were true they don't get that it's virtual (that I don't really understand how that could be true), I can't imagine what long term damage could possibly be done by believing the blocks are real.
Even younger. The touch screen version is easy enough for a 4 year old or maybe younger, depending on what you constitute "playing".
Now I think about it, I'm certain I've had this conversation, except it was cats not cows.
They cover it here: https://livinghouse.nz/#living-house-cost-breakdown
They allocate $15k for insulation. It says cost dependant on location - different parts of the country have different requirements for R value so I'm guessing they are going for bare minimum required by law. However, it turns out they are an architecture company not a building company so they simply sell you the plans for $10k and you contract your own builders to do it (they have agreements with suppliers for most of it but you aren't required to use them). What I'm getting at is you can spend a bit more and get better insulation if you wanted to.
The process manager lets you kill any process.
You can also click the do it anyway button when it's waiting on shutdown, but I've had less consistent success with that.
No mention of insulation, which should be a top priority for low income housing, otherwise the heating and cooling costs will be crazy.
I eventually found this site: https://livinghouse.nz/
It has this cost breakdown:
There's also this more detailed breakdown: https://livinghouse.nz/#living-house-cost-breakdown
It seems it does have insulation, as they allocate $15k for the cost of insulation including delivery.
Heating is via a heatpump (with power partly provided from the solar). The place is only 85sqm so it should be enough to keep it cosy, since it will have to meet modern insulation requirements. It also uses a heat pump hot water system which should save on the power bills.
Also, doesn't fisher and paykel have a fairly poor reputation for reliability?
Yeah I generally avoid them. Lucky thing is that the site explains that they are not builders just architects, you buy the plans from them then find a builder to build it. They have agreements with certain suppliers to bring down the costs but presumably you can decide to buy different appliances.
Do you think there are any editors are RNZ or other press outlets who make pro US, pro Israel, pro EU or pro UK edits
For sure.
Do you think the GCSB investigated anybody for being pro any of those countries?
I would not be surprised at all. The GCSB is presumably investigating various people all day every day as the core part of their job.
I disagree. Freedom of the press involves exactly that. In fact the most of the press in our country is owned by foreigners and you can bet your ass those countries are manipulating the press in order to change public opinion.
I'm really struggling with your argument. You are saying that the foreign owned press is manipulating the public through media and that in your opinion we should not do anything about that?
What surprises me is that they count using an email service as self-hosting. With that logic wouldn't bluesky get a high score because people can bring their own domain easily?
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