united solar sent an electrician to fix the broken revenue grade meter this afternoon. bob showed up around 1pm, the same guy who installed the meter originally. he managed to fix the meter, but it seemed to have lost our production numbers from the past 2 months. i called solaredge tech support afterwards and a technician (travis) told me that sometimes it takes 72 hours for the old data to repopulate the dashboard. he told me that if it continued, then i should contact my installer. however, when i reached out to lucas, he said though the numbers may come back, usually if it doesn't populate immediately, then something needs to be fixed to get it to work. he also added that it's usually something on the solaredge side. so who knows what's going on. in the meantime, all that precious data for february is currently lost in the solar energy ether. still, layout view gave me the correct production number for today, 33.52kWh. not bad, considering there was a smattering of clouds (high ones) and production was stopped for half an hour while bob called solaredge to troubleshoot the problem. it turned out to be a square magnet ring that was clipped onto the power cable in the wrong direction. an easy fix i could've done myself if i wasn't afraid of getting electrocuted. as for total february production, we made 573kWh this month, 200kWh more than last month with less days.

the other thing of note i did today was to swap out the cafe router with the DD-WRT tp-link router i set up last night. i did it in the morning when there wasn't any customers, so as to not disrupt anyone using the free wifi. it worked but the hardest part was reconfiguring the webcams. each one has two different MAC addresses (ethernet, wifi) and they were originally set up with static IP numbers. it was easier just to rest them and start over. they'd now get their IP numbers dynamically from the DHCP server, but in actuality, their MAC addresses have already been tagged with static IP's, which in turn are fixed to particular ports that allow remote access. all this can be a little complicated but i've been setting up routers and wireless cameras for a while now and it's pretty routine at this point. the webcams worked, we just needed to update some info in our apps (ip number, new port assignments, higher security password). i also swapped out the 64GB SD card to a smaller 32GB card because it didn't seem to like the larger memory. but the 32GB didn't work either, so it must be something else.

my mother and aunt were out in boston at the time, so i asked my father to keep an eye on the wifi, since this was the old router from my sister's place which began to drop connections, and i was afraid it'd start malfunctioning again. i received an e-mail from united solar who told me they had an electrician available today (somebody cancelled an appointment) and if we were available between 12:30-3pm. my father didn't know when my father would be back, so i volunteered to wait at their house instead. but first i had to go home and get some things (including a muffin for lunch), before riding back and heading towards belmont.

it was another warm day, temperature in the lower 60's. i wore just a t-shirt but brought my jacket because i knew it'd get colder later in the evening. first thing i did was to open some windows to air out the house. then i was in the backyard picking up stray bits of trash, a combination of broken pots, and debris from two separate construction crew working around the house (the roofers followed by the solar installers), including bits of roofing tiles, nails, and snippets of wires. i saw that the crocuses were already out, a sure sign of spring. afterwards i finally got around to painting a wooden block my father had made to install a solar-powered backyard spotlight. the block was a white piece of synthetic wood, i wanted to paint it to match the house.

i tried to remotely access the DD-WRT cafe router. it worked initially, but then i couldn't access the admin page anymore, even though i knew wifi was still working because i could still see the active webcams. i finally had my mother reset the router but that didn't fix it. so maybe this is symptomatic of a broken router. yesterday when i was cleaning it i remembered my sister spilled coffee on it one time (hence the dried coffee stains in the grills). that might be the reason why this router could be slowly dying.

we bought a copy of hat head because my mother liked it so much so she decided to return the library book, but i realized her mistake and frantically called her to tell her she took the wrong book. fortunately she didn't return it yet.

i also went through my father's e-mail account and manually filtered out a bunch of spam. he gets a lot of restaurant related junk mail. you never know if those places are legit and asking them to unsubscribe you might invite even more. i also wrote an e-mail to naveo bank, asking them if they had any update on the status of our pending mass solar loan payment. it's been nearly 2 months now, hopefully nothing bad has happened.

i stayed in belmont until my parents came home, where i had dinner with them before leaving. less than a week before their china trip, my mother was nursing a cough. hopefully she gets over it before next week.

i never noticed, but there's been an incremental update on the solaredge monitoring website. on the admin page it now allows API access and will generate an API key. this is crucial because it'll allow me to access the solar production data directly, and not have to go through the monitoring page. i tried it with some google sheets scripts and got it to partially work, managed to pull some system info and monthly totals. unfortunately the revenue grade meter is blocking access to the historical data and the monthly total for february was just 3.3kWh. but it's a start.

i spent the rest of the evening setting up the other TL-WR841N v9 router i took from the cafe. unlike my sister's router, this one has been working fine, although there was a period when they kept losing connection, but that hasn't happened in a while now. after i installed DD-WRT on this router then properly configuring the guest network, i realized what a pain it was and finally decided to get the asus RT-N12 D1. for $20 (after a $10 rebate) with a better GUI (including apps) and lot less headaches, it's worth it. still, if this second DD-WRT router ends up working, i could always return the asus. i then went ahead and set up the dynamic DNS function. it was a little complicated, first involving changing the nameserver of one of my least often used domain from my web host (dreamhost) to my web domain name register (namecheap). then i created an A+Dynamic DNS record, before making the necessary configurations on the router for dynamic DNS. this will allow me to remotely access the DD-WRT even when the IP address changes, as well as gaining access to the webcams.

i finally went to bed well past 3am.

(editor's note: this monthly production graph was created on 180310 using data pulled directly from the inverter through charts view)