Is it worth it? — In this final part, I discuss the economics of solar, the various optional extras you can choose, and whether it’s worth the investment. How much does it cost? The total cost of the system will depend on a number of factors, most obviously the number of panels, but also the optional extras you buy. Interestingly…

System Performance and Troubleshooting — Once my solar PV system was up and running, I was able to watch how it performed. Inverter monitoring This system has a 6kW hybrid inverter from Ginlong Solis — a mid-range, work-horse Chinese brand — and includes a wifi module that connects to the Internet. It uploads data to the “Solis…

The Installation — Getting the system installed by a professional installer was straightforward. These are the steps involved. Outline design You should contact several installers — I recommend at least three. Ensure they are registered with the relevant trade bodies, such as the Renewable Energy Consumer Code. Tell them your outline requirements and get them…

Introduction — I’ve recently had a solar panel system with batteries installed — and I’m very pleased with it. In the following series of articles I’ll note some of the things I learned along the way. How it works There are now three sources of electricity for our house: the sun, energy stored in the…

In a previous article I wrote about using Hashicorp Vault as an SSH certificate authority. As of version 1.9, Vault has gained the ability to act as an OpenID Connect Identity Provider as well. This is an exciting development which greatly increases the scope and utility of Vault. The feature…

A personal ramble — In the beginning I was born in the late 1960's. My father (now retired) was a field service engineer in a mainframe company. He built me my first computer from a kit¹ while I will still at primary school. This computer was based on the Motorola 6800 processor running at 1MHz. After we…

Kubernetes specifics — Part 1 gave an overview of jsonnet syntax and semantics. I’m now going to suggest some ways to use these with kubernetes. These are not hard-and-fast rules, but some patterns you may or may not find useful. To illustrate this, I’m going to build a complete configuration of the docker…

Basics — In these two articles I’m going to introduce jsonnet as a clean and powerful alternative to helm charts and kustomize for configuring kubernetes resources. Jsonnet is a general-purpose language for generating JSON, and I needed to play with it for a while to find the best way to apply it…

Have you ever come across Hashicorp’s Vault? It started life as a place to store application “secrets” (e.g. database passwords) securely, without hard-coding them in configuration files. Over time, it has grown into something much more powerful. There are a number of ways in which users can authenticate themselves to…