Solarcene update: it's been cloudy and rainy for days here so we've had very little #solarpower, currently the solarcene.community systems are mainly shutdown as the battery is too low, hopefully might get a bit of sun today. Just to illustrate the average solar in the last few days has been about 50Wh a day and even with the system only drawing 3W that still adds up to 3 * 24 = 72Wh a day, so slowly running out of juice.

Hopefully a sunny day soon though the forecast suggests that might be in 1 weeks time! Its been a very wet 2026!

Just one of the challenges of running very small solar systems, of course I could plug into the grid but that's not the point of this experiment, instead just need to do without, I should probably dig out some other project to do while I wait for the 🌞

#solarpanel #solarpunk #rain #clouds #solarInstance

Something is up with the local network that solarcene.community is on, it might be to do with the network switches power supply, I'm looking into it - apologies for anyone who uses the server!

#solarinstance

While I wait for a bit more sun before we can finally turn solarcene instance back on I've added a bit of info to the offline webpage.

If you go to https://solarcene.community and when the instance is offline you'll be able to see some of the stats.

I have a low powered #NanoPi which sits in front of the instance and manages traffic with #nginx so when the main instance is offline it can serve up a custom 502 page

#solarinstance

I'm proud to say that our family dinner today was make your own bruschetta and had tomatoes 🍅 from our garden, red onion from our garden and the basil in the pesto is from the solarcene.community #hydroponic setup!

Obviously didn't produce the mozzarella or the chickpeas in the hummus

#solarpower #growyourown #solarinstance

Attention any solarcene.community users - the instance is offline as the battery has really deteriorated in the last few weeks and we barely got above 10V today and therefore everything sorted of stopped working. We probably didn't do the battery any favours early on in the project so I'm not surprised it's struggling now.

I won't be able to replace it until Thursday so suspect the system will remain offline until then. Of course you won't see this message as it's offline... #solarinstance #solar

I’m upgrading my garage ethernet network so maybe some down time on the solarcene.community #solarinstance. Pleased with myself as instead of jumping to am&zon I went on #eBay and got a 8 port network switch #secondhand . It was missing the power adapter which is fine as I’ll be rigging it anyway to run off 5V (it’s a TP SG108 and I’ve already got the 5 port version which works fine off 5V with a little modification).

Means I can finally put in place my plans to automate the #mastodon instance