elyob
Self-hosted solar + battery ROI tracker, motorbike trip writeups with GPS routes, and notes on building it all with Claude Code.
A home ADS-B receiver in my back garden — an old Pi in a waterproof box — wired into Home Assistant, caught the 8 September NATS air-traffic outage in real time: aircraft overhead down 88% by teatime, and the backlog rebound the day after.
One tile on my solar page said zero. Fixing it took two minutes; working out why the fix wouldn't show took three AI assistants an evening of arguing and catching each other being wrong — and it left the code harder to fool.
I stopped writing my flat's Home Assistant code and started describing ideas instead — and Claude builds them, rewrites years of cruft in an evening, and even fixed my LED power-gauge frames from a photo. The gap between a thought and a thing on the wall has collapsed to a conversation.
I built a bedroom microphone that counts my snores. It can't detect a breathing pause and my watch disagrees with it — but it did nag me into booking a real sleep-apnea test.
My panels just crossed half a megawatt-hour — 510.9 kWh, ~61.1 kg of CO2 avoided. Net that against the whole kit's carbon — panels, battery, shipping — and it's a close call.
I stopped building “hotels in Paris” pages—nobody finds those. What my hotel site actually gets found for is events, so I rebuilt it to start there.
I have only ever met an eclipse through my solar data. On 2 August 2027 totality crosses the Strait of Gibraltar — and I want to stand under it.
I wasn’t anti-fox — but I did once run a little “fuck off, foxes” system to dissuade them. Now a regular visitor treats my walled garden as a safe base, takes the odd scrap, and I rank among the more amiable humans on her nightly round.
The government broadcast a barbecue advisory to forty-four million phones as a Severe emergency alert — while five days of an actual New Forest wildfire went out on a Facebook post. The alert system has only one gear.
Watching the eclipse through Home Assistant's National Grid feed — a 1.7 GW solar hole, a price spike to £226/MWh, and a rooftop-solar demand shelf.
London saw ~90% of the Sun covered, the biggest UK eclipse since 1999 — yet my solar barely dipped. The real mark was in the charge controller.
April 2026: 142 negative half-hours, 223 kWh imported at 3.91p — the most electricity I bought all year, and the least I paid for it.
A year in: 452 kWh made and 1,925 bought for just £254 — the fact-based case for a small garden array plus a battery on Octopus Agile.
After years of accreted config, dead sensors, and a failed ChatGPT attempt, I handed my Home Assistant to Claude to rewrite the YAML and clean house.
As a price oracle: ~41% trustworthy. As a slot-picking map: 97.4% of perfect. My planner only uses it as the second thing — measured over 26,552 predictions.
£1.52 of gas, £10.12 for the pipe it came through — and across a full year, winter included, the pipe still wins.
A battery, seven garden panels and a half-hourly tariff — the whole story, mapped: the build, the brain, the money, the scoreboards.
December: 4.5 kWh. June: 72. One year of a scavenged garden array — the season it went quiet, and the season it woke up.
One-word answer, then the evidence: a 43% cheaper July in an 11% dearer market, a battery filling at 6.5p, and a paper trail that proves it.
A dearer market, a cheaper bill. One number — achieved price minus market average — isolates the charge planner's skill from weather, solar and luck.
106 days in this year my ground-level garden panels beat the grid outright. The month-by-month breakdown.
A week ago I said my battery had never breached its floor. Last night it did — not because the safety net failed to fire, but because a second safety system was running month-old code and kept turning the charger back off. Two backstops at war, and a human at 2am.
Satellite and terrestrial TV switch off within a decade and everything moves to the internet. But that's just the pipe — the real fight is what wins inside it: fragmented pay-streaming, four million dodgy Fire Sticks, and a BBC weighing whether to firewall iPlayer.
Electricity and gas behave nothing like each other over a year — one flat, one seasonal. And six weeks away turned the flat into an accidental experiment in what's heating and what's always-on.
The government's taking VAT off electricity for six months. Measured against my actual bills, it would have saved me about £12 — a number with a story behind it.
A year ago I put in a home battery and started timing my electricity buying — by hand at first, then a Python script I built. What the year added up to.
The charge planner squeezed a month of energy down to £16.93 — so the fixed daily fees are now the bill.
I've owned local-hotel.com for 27 years and stalled twice trying to launch it. What changed in 2026 wasn't the idea — it was finally having Claude as the engineering team. A builder's log: 11 weeks, 2,321 commits, more test code than app code, and the honest traffic numbers.
My brother's the keen photographer with all the kit — but it's my casual Flickr snaps that ended up across Wikipedia in 35 languages. Every one, and where it's used.
Google keeps gently suggesting I meant 'elyon' — a name of God with a few-thousand-year head start and its own MMORPG. A short tale of one adjacent keystroke, and a bin calendar.
A Cloudflare 502 sent me to fix one thing. By the end of the night I'd found three more — numbers that had been quietly wrong for weeks.
Five years of monthly electricity and gas bills laid out side by side: pre-war calm, the Ukraine spike, the partial rebound, and what installing solar + battery + Octopus Agile did to the line ever since.
Octopus wanted to double my direct debit. My own bills — and the slice the battery and Agile actually control — say otherwise.
I swapped my undersized £12 Amazon battery busbar for a pair of Victron 250A 6P bars after temperature sensors flagged 76°C peaks. The busbar end now runs 24°C cooler under the same load. Better data made a better decision possible — instrument the wire, not just the cells.
The 0-byte ghost.db fossil at content/data is a Ghost migration leftover. The one that actually runs this site lives one directory over — 13 MB, 44 tables, and the entire reporting and automation layer for GPS, energy, SEO, alerts, and the planner.
Most home batteries charge whenever the rate is cheap. Mine compares this cycle's cheapest slot against the next cycle's, the projected drain, the SOC-aware ceiling, and a forecast of tomorrow's solar — every 30 minutes.
A small wrapper around an amazing open-source UK bin-collection scraper — plus three upstream council fixes I sent along the way.
A £63 upgrade — one extra 100W mono panel — bumps the garden array from 600W to 700W and should pay for itself by autumn.
Every night since 2006, written down by GPS. 4 AM local tells me where I slept — including red-eyes. Twenty years on the map, including the years where nothing happened.
The Fogstar Drift battery just hit 1,000 kWh of lifetime throughput — and 420 kWh of that came straight from the solar panels.
38 countries across Europe, Asia, Africa and North America — by motorcycle, bicycle and scooter.
My 600W solar panels hit 692W. Here's how irradiance, temperature and panel physics make that not just possible, but expected.
Discover how Home Assistant automates your solar energy system to maximize savings with Octopus Agile pricing and intelligent self-management.
Discover how solar power transformed energy independence in just 6 months. Explore real data, battery tech, and dramatic electricity bill savings.
Discover how a Q1 2026 energy experiment revealed unexpected savings with solar power and smart meter monitoring. Real data, real results.
39 days in Goa, India — moving slowly between Vagator, Arambol and Agonda with no fixed plan. January to February 2026.
In 2025, not once did my garden panels beat the grid — the honest baseline, month by month, before the year that changed it.
Caught by a Google Street View car on the road north of Bovec, July 2019. Years later, I went looking — and found myself.
A 27-day solo motorcycle ride through 19 countries — east through Germany and the Balkans, then back west via Greece, Italy and France. Around 9,000 km (6,000 mi) in total.
KTM motorcycle trip through the Lake District, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Festivals, ferries and 2,000 miles of summer riding.
Portsmouth to Saint-Malo by ferry, then D-Day beaches, Mont-Saint-Michel, the Somme battlefields and back via the Channel Tunnel.
A short motorcycle trip through northern France — Lille, Le Mans and the D-Day beaches at Bayeux.
Motorcycle tour through northern France visiting Le Mans racing museum and circuit, Rouen, Tours and Deauville across 1,400 km (870 mi) in October 2017.
Three days in Padstow with my brothers — Fovant Downs, the Camel Estuary, and a mass open-water swim in the harbour.
4,500 km (2,800 mi) through the Netherlands, Germany, Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Austria by motorcycle.
Three days riding Dorset and Devon with my brothers — Weymouth, Lyme Regis, Torquay, Exmoor.
A 38-day trip through Southeast Asia from 2017-02-01 to 2017-03-10, covering Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos with transit through Turkey and Belgium.
3,200 km (2,000 mi) by motorcycle through France, Spain and Portugal.
A motorcycle loop through France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, weeks after the Brexit vote.
Three weeks across Java and into Bali on a rented motorbike — Jakarta to Denpasar via Bandung, Yogyakarta, Mount Bromo and the Gilimanuk ferry.
Nine days looping out of Phuket through Krabi, Trang, Surat Thani and Phang-nga on a rented motorbike — 1,200 km around southern Thailand.
Eight weeks on a motorbike through Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Laos, plus Hong Kong.
2,800 km (1,700 mi) through France, Switzerland, Italy and Austria, crossing the Alps by motorcycle.
2,500 km (1,600 mi) around the UK and Ireland by motorcycle — Edinburgh, Belfast, Dublin and Cork.
Motorcycle tour through Belgium and Germany: De Panne tobacco run extended to Koblenz via Ghent, Rhine valley, and Ardennes on a KTM Adventure.
A quick motorcycle run from London to Grenoble via Calais and Lyon.
2,000 km (1,000 mi) around Ireland by motorcycle — Galway, Cork, Belfast and back.
Rode a Piaggio Beverley 350 from England via Portsmouth ferry to watch Tour de France Stages 10-11 in Normandy, culminating at Mont-Saint-Michel.
Won a competition to fly with The Blades aerobatic team at Sywell — piloted by Sqn Ldr Andy Offer, former Red 1 of the Red Arrows.
Land's End to John o'Groats by bike, with a detour to Orkney. 1,700 km (1,100 mi) the length of Britain.
A Sunday ride along London's canal network with Liam — Hammersmith to Little Venice via the Thames towpath. April 2006.