The upgrades made to the solar array and witness server were a success

Today was a busy day, started with me disabling my witness as I knew the power was going to be off for awhile. I used @ausbitbank's tool to do this. Thank you very much. I think I can do it in peakd as well under witness parameters, maybe next time I disable I will try it there. I just recall seeing it work for someone in the Hive discord and glad I was able to use it to broadcast my witness changes. I could have done it in the cli wallet as well, but just easier to do it there.

Check it out here, it has an entire block explorer inside: https://hive.ausbit.dev/

Once disabled I had a few changes to make.

1. Turned on logging of hived
2. Server hardening
3. Changed price feed to update every 6 hours instead of 12
4. Apply updates

Shortly after I wrapped up with the changes I met with some electricians and we got started working on my solar array. We mounted a second Sol-ark 15k inverter on the wall and wired it into the second mains from the utility. I have two services coming in, with two service panels. So moving each service panel to each inverter was preferrable.

Before I had just one inverter, powering two panels. Not recommeneded. The second panel is across the house, but still feeds in from here.

Some cleanup was needed as well, proper high voltage junction boxes were installed and the temporary boxes removed. Above is the old box that held the joining of the curcuits.

We split the power coming off the battery bank to both inverters. Going to replace that buss bar with a disconnect switch. The one I had previously was bad, and I replaced it with a buss bar. But for saftey reasons I really need to get a replacement disconnect switch that trips at a certain amp load such a short curcuit.

And now each service panel has its own dedicated inverter powering it.

Before closing up the box, we can see how the wires were joined after the changes were done. The two buss bars seen above will have two more wires added to them, bridging the two inverters so they can draw from a single battery bank.

Speaking of batteries, I had a plan on being able to keep the witness online during all of this. But it failed. I was going to take a 100AH 12V battery and connect it to an 750W inverter.. much than enough to deal with the small load my network equipment and server put on it. But when it was all hooked up it did not work. My UPS that normally provides power for short periods of time did not like the power coming in from the this little inverter. I guess my inverter does not produce "pure sine waves" which I need for a UPS to register the power coming in as not dirty.. or something like that.

So with this unfortunate outcome I had to shut down my server during this upgrade. As my UPS would only power it for 30 minutes or so.. normally more than enough for my generator to kick on if the power went out and solar array hiccuped or something. But not enough power to get through 10 hours of downtime during the solar array upgrade I did today.

For those curious about the size of the server, here is my hand as a reference.

Really glad I got the upgrades done to my server and my solar array. With my server secured and well logged I should be able to let it run for the foreseeable future without issue. And by upgrading from one to now two inverters it doubles my solar panel capacity. I should be able to run upwards of 30KW of solar power now. Which would be a huge step up from my entire array I currently have.

My witness server is back online and waiting its next block to produce.

There is still more work to do on the solar array, I need to add a disconnect switch by the battery side. And need to redo a little wiring as we ran out while they were there. So we had to use the wrong color (still marked it correct) and did not really run it far enough, but it was good enough to get everything back up and we can deal with that later. But all small things I can do myself without issue. Glad I was able to find some local help and get the array upgraded. And glad my witness came back up early.

Posted using STEMGeeks