Lukas Blogs

Mini 600W Solar System

2022-09-10T00:00:00+00:00

I times of rising energy prices, the need to reduce the reliance on grid power has been rising. That’s why my familiy and I have decided to put two solar panels on our roof. There is a german law, allowing consumers to install a 600W Peak Solarsystem by themselves. The 600W is the defined as the maximum output of the inverter. Thats why it’s possible to overprovision the capacity of the panels by a little bit, to have a higher median output.

Product

We have ordered our panels from yuma a german supplyer of small solar systems. The kit we got, came with two 340W panels from Eurener, a 600W inverter form Hoymiles (HM-600) and a mounting kit for our tile roof. I addition we got a 10m AC cable for plugging the solar system in.

Installation

Mounts

The installation went relativly smooth. First we connectet the included aluminium profiles together so we had a pair of long profiles. Then we went up on the roof and searched for the right trusses to screw in the six mounts for the aluminium profile, where the panels will later sit on. Our trusses had a distance between 80 and 90 cm so we choose three adjacent to each other. The vertical distance was a little over 90 with our roof tiles. After installing all 6 mounts to the roof, we installed the two aluminium profiles and tried to level them as good as possible. Then we screwed the micro inverter on the top aluminium profile.

Getting the panels on the roof

Professional solar installations normally use scaffholfing on the side of the roof while installing the panels. This makes it easier to get them on the roof. This wasn’t an option for us, so we helped ourselves with two long ladders, pushing and pulling the packages onto the roof with ropes.

Panels

The next part was the installation of the panels. This was a little tricky because the panels are quite big, i am not proficient working on roofs and after removing the panels form their cartons, they could easily slide of the roof. Fortunatly, with my dads help everything worked and we got them installed in no time. Only on the second panel i realized, that plugging them in forst would have been a good idea. Fortunatly a was still able to plug them in afterwards. Even though getting the connection of the plugs to propperly lock wasn’t that easy onehanded.

AC cable

I plugged the AC cable into the inverter using a special connector. Then we fished the cable through the roof next to the antenna cables of the satellite dish. Unfortunalty the licking pin broke on the special connector on the roof side. I am going to fix that in th future.

Plugging it in

Currently we don’t have an outlet in the attic. Thats why we just plugged it in in one of the first floor outlets for testing purposes. After 5-10 minutes, the energy produc of the solar system started working. This could also be confiremd by a green blinking light on the inverter (which was a bit hard to reach, because it’s under the panels). It was a bit hard to realy measure the production on our meter because of the fluctuating energy useage of other devices in the houshold. I am planing on installing a shelly Power meter into the outlet, that is going into the attic. I’m probably going to write another blog post about the meter and graphing the results in the future.

Getting started with Authentik

2022-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

For a while now, i was thinking about centralizing user authentication for my hosted services. Features, i was searching for were:

Basic Authetication with forewardAuth/Oauth/etc.
Webfrontend for user management (not just an ldap command line)
User Groups
Self hosted

I had a look at Authelia before. Unfortunatly Authelia only has Authentication providers for files and ldap. Which are both don’t provide a Webfrontend for usermanagement out of the box. There are forontends for ldap, but they are not built in and a hassle to set up.

A friend mentioned Authentik, so I had a look at it.

Infrastructure

The setup I have is the following:

Virtual Server in the Cloud:
- Traefik as a reverse proxy for my Services
- Docker for hosting all my containers
- Services like: Gitea, Paperlessngx, Nextcloud, codeserver .. in containers

I wanted to integrate authentik into this infrasturcture, by using the proxy provider from authentik and having it provide authentication with a traefik forward auth middleware.

Testing Jekyll

2022-08-07T00:00:00+00:00

I was searching for a way to have a small blog website to post projects to and where i can commit the posts to GitHub.

What i found

After googeling, I found several repositories, with markedown files and example sites, which i later found out were all diffrent Themes for Jekyll. Next I found the GitHub documentation for Github pages, which also talked about Jekyll. That made me wanna try it. So i created a repository and started trying.

Getting started

First i tried, a default theme called hacker. It was okay but not what i was searching for. next I found this custom theme called Minimal Mistakes they had a very nice demo site, where they also posted their own posts, so i could really see it in action.

Custom Domain

I am hosting this website on Github Pages. This is awsome. But of course i wanted to use my own domain for this website. fortunatly I can do so. I just ad to set A and AAAA records for the root domain lholz.de and a CNAME for www.lholz.de. I am using Cloudflare for my DNS, so this was an almost instantanous change. Unfortunatly I still have to wait 24 hours to be able to activate HTTPS.

Testing Features

One of Minial Mistakes Blog Posts talks about adding videos anywhere in the text, by using this Liquid templateing code:

{% include video id="BBnomwpF_uY" provider="youtube" %}

In this case, i can embedd a video, from one of my favourite Youtubers Jeff Geerling, without complicated html code, which might breake the look and feel of this post.

Including Pictures, can be done, by uploading them into an assets folder, but I’m not really satisfied with that solution yet. I’ll see if I can find something better.

Conclusion

All in all, i am quite satisfied with this solution and it seems to be a far better option than Wordpress.