Start Here: the Solar & Battery Story

Since July 2025 a battery, seven garden panels and a half-hourly tariff have been quietly rewiring this flat's electricity bill — and generating a small library of posts along the way. This page is the map. Start anywhere; every post stands alone, but they're grouped here in the order the story actually happened.

The build

• Five Years of Energy Bills: Cheap, Crisis, Solar — the whole arc in one chart — crisis prices, the PowerHouse experiment, the real build
• My 600W Array Just Hit 692W — the physics of over-spec moments
• Adding a Seventh Panel — 100 W more for £63
• Why My Busbar Was Always Too Hot — the hardware lesson
• 1,000 kWh Through the Battery — the first big odometer moment

The brain

• Home Assistant as the Brain — how the system runs itself
• What My Battery Compares Every 30 Minutes — the decision, dissected
• One Year of Letting a Python Script Buy My Electricity — the planner's biography — results, safety record, and how it grew up
• Two Databases, One Repo — the plumbing
• Making the Numbers Honest — when the sensors lied, and what replaced them
• The Night My Safety Net Fought Itself — the 2am incident — a watchdog running stale code drained the battery it was guarding

The money

• Solar + Battery ROI: Agile vs the Price Cap — the full ledger — payback, efficiency chain, lifetime projections
• Octopus Suggested £97.78. My Bills Say £58 — estimate vs reality
• 61% of My Bill Is Now Standing Charges — the part no battery can fight
• The VAT Cut, Counterfactually — policy, priced against my own meter
• Gas vs Electricity: a Year — the other fuel

The scoreboards

• The Days My Solar Beat the Grid — 2026 — refreshed daily, one post per year (see also 2025)
• The Year the Garden Woke Up — December: 4.5 kWh. June: 72. The seasonal tide, with the all-time top twenty
• Price Capture — the one number that isolates the planner's skill from weather and luck
• So, Am I Winning? — the verdict

The scoreboard posts are generated from the planner's own database and refresh as the data grows — the story doesn't end, it accumulates.