I think Hoyle needs to up the Lancastrian. He’s got the accent in spades, but he needs to start turning up in a flat cap and with a whippet.

No. Yes. Kind of.

My home setup is three ProLiant towers in a ProxMox cluster. One box handles all-the-time stuff like OpenWRT, file server, email, backups, and - crucially - Home Assistant and is UPS protected because of how important it’s jobs are. The other two are powered up based on energy costs; Home Assistant turns them on for the cheapest six hours of the day or when energy costs are negative and they perform intensive things like sailing the high seas, preemptive video transcoding, BOINC workloads and such. The other boxes in the photo are also on all the time basically being used as disk enclosures for the file server and they are full of mismatched hard disks that spend virtually all their time asleep. At rest the whole setup pulls about 35-40W.

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Ten pictures of Feddit users reacting to clickbait headlines that will make you say “no, these are all trains. No, I’m complaining as such, I like trains, I just… I thought… No, the headline said something about… reactions, yeah, and ins- actually, hang on, how did you get in here?”

Fedi Punter in Media Lingo Rant Slam: Reaction

Hey. Heyhey. Heyheyhey. Have you ever noticed that your warships have giant barcodes on them? It’s so that when they return to port they can scan the navy in.

Leonardo balls lmao gottem

Well, now is your chance.

Go hunt. Kill skuls.

I forgot about Final Space. Loved that show. Such things are clearly too good for this world.

I used Kodi with a Jellyfin plugin for media center duties.

Consider a refurbished USFF business PC.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_nkw=usff+pc

A unit from any major brand will be good and there are i5/8gb units available for well under £100 that will happily shunt 4K video about. Plus they have the advantage of coming in a nice case, lots of ports, included storage, etc…

Honestly any parts you buy today probably won’t be much good in 30 years.

Did you know the world naïve is written backwards on your water bottle?

Thanks for your response.

Why not just use standard thermostat functionality: set the target temp a bit higher when rates are low and a bit lower when rates are high.

That was my original idea and it actually works pretty well, but since the cost of power spends most of the day at industry average rates electric heating gets pretty expensive which is really what I’m trying to minimise.

One thing you don’t mention is whether you have any way to store heat

I don’t, but I really, really wish I did. The place I’m in is rented so I’m loathe to make big changes like installing storage heaters (installing relays in the walls behind the current radiators doesn’t count, shush) but I had old-fashioned, 1980s storage heaters exactly as you described in my old place and I loved them for the exact reasons you described. They weren’t active with a fan, but even just having a very heavy, very hot thing in the corner of the room was enough to maintain the temperature and given my electric rates regularly get below 5p/kWh and sometimes even go negative overnight my heating bill was basically negligible. Consider me a member of Team Storage Heaters.

As you suggested, what I’m trying to do is turn my walls, floors and furniture into the thermal mass of a storage heater, by making them toasty when it’s cheap in the hope they’ll keep the room slightly warmer when it’s expensive.

Thanks, I already suspected I would need to get Excel involved and this confirm it! The window thing you mentioned is very real - my place has single-pane 2×3m windows everywhere; their insulative properties are basically negligible.

Once I’ve got a reasonable set of estimates going I’ll probably push the calculations into a Helper to produce daily numbers automagically. If it works reasonably I’ll post an update on here. Thanks again!

Thanks, I gave that a go and it actually came up pretty close to the numbers I already had (after converting BTU to kWh anyway) so that was a useful sanity check, thanks!

massively overcomplicating things

…you say? 🤔

Three HP ProLiant servers running ProxMox cluster. Each box has a VM for Portaiber, as well as mismatch of VMs running Home Assistant OS, OpenWRT, Ubuntu, Windows and Debian, along with a Windows file server that connectes to four cheap NAS running Ubuntu LTS with a combined 20 mismatched hard drives by iSCSI and borgs them together with Storage Spaces.

It’s a fucking mess, if I’m honest.

So if I solve the problem, do I get their PHDs? Would I have to pay postage?

What you’re describing is similar to the approach I’ve already taken which is reassuring! The problem I’ve got is that it only really works if the weather’s fairly consistent, but the problem I have is that the property I’m in is very old, with fairly naff insulation and huge, single-pane windows that get battered by wind from an open aspect. I think for most people your approach would work well, though.

And, yeah, I don’t mind the temperature peaking and troughing for a couple of hours every now and then, but I appreciate that’s not for everyone!