April was a massive month for solar! We hit 91% self-sufficiency and saw record generation, proving that strategic battery management can make a huge difference to your bills.

Solar panel performance declines over the years. I thought it might be interesting to see how mine compares. Of course weather comes into it, but hopefully this will be a useful guide.

If you use the Sunsynk dashboard, you know how crucial accurate energy monitoring is. We recently ran into a tricky issue after adding the Octopus EV charger,. House consumption included the heat pump. We wanted to split it out.

This is my favourite power flow card for Home AssistantFor ages, we just had raw data. We desperately wanted one clear graph showing our daily electricity costs on our smart home dashboard. Plotly was the tool, but the learning curve was real. Here’s how we finally made it work!

March started with promise but faced some cloudy days. We look at our generation figures, battery performance, and how the changing weather impacted our grid usage and costs.

A very wet and overcast month led to our lowest February generation figures in recent memory. Despite some bright days, our panels struggled under the gloom, resulting in zero self-sustained days this period. Read on for our full breakdown of battery usage and cost savings.

I’ve updated my Sunsynk Home Assistant dashboard to include our new Octopus Charge EV charger. This post explains how I moved from the compact card to the full layout and how I’m now visualising heat pump, immersion, and EV charging loads together.

January brought the lowest solar generation since installation, with cold weather driving higher heat pump usage. Our battery and Cosy tariff strategy kept costs down, while solar, grid, and exports combined for a full picture of household energy usage.

December marked the end of a record solar year. Generation was lower than previous months, but battery management and the Cosy tariff kept costs down. Hopefully this overview is a useful guide to winter performance.

November saw solar generation decline as winter approached. Battery management and the Cosy tariff helped reduce costs despite low sunlight, with some days costing as little as £2.08. Hopefully this overview is a useful guide to winter performance.

Upgrading your smart home doesn’t have to be stressful. When Nabu Casa released the new ZBT-2 Zigbee coordinator, I migrated my entire Zigbee network from the ZBT-1 — and it was as simple as promised. With just a quick firmware update and a guided setup in Home Assistant, every device reconnected within seconds.

The statistics for our SolarPV and battery system for the month of September 2025

The statistics for our SolarPV and battery system for the month of September 2025

Fixing no sound when capturing from an Elgato 4K X

My settings for exporting my 4K videos from Final Cut Pro to YouTube

The statistics for our SolarPV and battery system for the month of August 2025

The statistics for our SolarPV and battery system for the month of July 2025

Setting up a notification when Samba Backup and native Home Assistant backups have run successfully

The statistics for our SolarPV and battery system for the month of June 2025

The statistics for our SolarPV and battery system for the month of May 2025