Quote from: Ruthio on Yesterday at 08:56:08 PMTrain-attack accused 'maybe linked to other incidents' - police - BBC News - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c986n2q6qy0o

Anthony Williams of no fixed abode
Here he is if you want to see what he looks like

They'd certainly think twice if we brought back hanging.

Quote from: klondike on Yesterday at 10:56:41 AMYesterday at 10:58:39 AMNor did I. They refuse to understand even slightly mispronounced or grammatically incorrect French. I think we try to help most foreigners trying to speak to us but the French seemed to me to despise us.

That is true, certainly in Paris and other cities.  We have driven from North to South, stopping half-way for the night, and found a friendly farm who accommodated us.  He even let us put our car (with two bikes on the back) in his barn.  We tried to speak French; he tried to speak English: we got along very well.

I think that the ones who pretend not to understand us are likely to be those in city areas.  Why?  Perhaps they think that we should have remained under their rule, as in the EU.  I suppose that contrary to us showing them up in the war, they would feel happier if they could control us!  🤣

Did you know that back in the day Cowboys would put a lantern on their saddles at night so that they could find the trail when they were far from home. This was early saddle light navigation 

Quote from: Ashy on Yesterday at 06:26:51 PMIt appears that the same man was involved in terrorist incidents in two locations in the hours before the appalling attempted murder on Sunday, police were called but did not detain the man (obvs).

I'm afraid that our protectors, the police, seem to be becoming more incompetent as the days go by.
When civil war kicks off, we are all on our own.

Hoping for some good news later. All the best.

Yesterday at 07:37:55 PM

Quote from: Vlad on Yesterday at 03:08:32 PMAhh, we are doomed then?
Nothing new I suppose, I have been doomed so many times it just become boring. I am surprised that I haven't been taxed on it.

Men carrying placards saying "The End of the World is Nigh" used to appear quite frequently in newspaper cartoons. That was back in the days of the cold war and I haven't seen any in years but as I gave up buying papers around the time they stopped wrapping chips in them I suppose that isn't surprising.

This doomsayer is a late middle aged lady of the dusky persuasion and from what I recall (not a lot) looked clean and tidy and entirely normal.

Her concern could be based on this...

In April 2029, a large asteroid named 99942 Apophis will have a very close flyby of Earth on April 13, passing within about 32,000 km (19,000 miles) of the surface. While the asteroid is not a threat and will miss Earth entirely, it will be visible to the naked eye in parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia. This event is a significant scientific opportunity to study an asteroid up close, with missions like NASA's OSIRIS-APEX and the ESA's Ramses probe scheduled to observe it. 

or it could be

The Voices

I urge you all not  to worry. If It happens may it be quick.

Why am I laughing?

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Solar Assistant support

If you have read my post on the failing Octopus Flux automation built into the SunSynk you will know that I don't rate SunSynk support highly at all. Their poor performance is why I decided to use Solar Assistant. So how well do their support rate. I'll let you judge for yourself from this series of emails.

First email from me to Solar Assistant  25 Oct 2025, 10:17

Hi,

I was running the 2025-06-13 beta when over time  I had at least 3 instances of no response to commands to the inverter Sunsynk 3.6kw wired using your port splitter and USB dongle

example
[Fri Oct 17 02:00:01] Failed to set Capacity point 2 to 95: No response

I tried to code around this in the automations by putting the commands in twice but this lead to the annoying
[Wed Oct 22 02:10:00] Active table row changed twice in 15m00s. Suspending rule table automation for 10m00s. Consider adding a gap between table row end and next row start.
so I removed them

For charging which is important right now as winter approaches and given the time it gets done not something I am likely to be monitoring I reverted to setting a hard coded capacity of 100% and grid charge in the work mode timer and just having the automations adjust the capacity and maximum charge rate.

On checking I see there have been two software updates and have now installed the 2025-10-24 Beta

I don't see any mention of retrying failed commands mentioned in the release notes.

Are there any plans to provide email or GUI notifications of updates without the need to check manually?
Are there any plans to automatically retry commands that were not actioned as these can badly upset system efficiency and having to constantly check is not possible and should be unnecessary if running solar assistant to control the inverter.

With the 2025-06-13 beta there was clearly no attention paid to the advanced settings for panel slope and azimuth as the forecast shows expected solar power at times when the panel azimuth means there is little to none. I am unsure if this is a problem with Solar Assistant or the third party site providing estimates. I see solar forecast mentioned again in the release notes but there is no detail of what has changed with that. Doubtless I will see now that I have updated it

Regards

Autoresponder Sat 25 Oct, 10:18

Hi,

Thanks for reaching out. Our support team is available Monday to Friday, 8 AM–5 PM (GMT 2). We'll get back to you within 48 hours, though it may take longer over weekends.  Your email has been received — thanks for your patience.

Kind regards,
SolarAssistant Support Team


Second email from me following no further response  31 Oct 2025, 07:19

Hi,

This one seems to have fallen through the cracks as you have not replied. I will repeat the query..


I was running the 2025-06-13 beta when over time  I had at least 3 instances of no response to commands to the inverter Sunsynk 3.6kw wired using your port splitter and USB dongle

example
[Fri Oct 17 02:00:01] Failed to set Capacity point 2 to 95: No response

I tried to code around this in the automations by putting the commands in twice but this lead to the annoying
[Wed Oct 22 02:10:00] Active table row changed twice in 15m00s. Suspending rule table automation for 10m00s. Consider adding a gap between table row end and next row start. so I removed them

For charging which is important right now as winter approaches and given the time it gets done not something I am likely to be monitoring I reverted to setting a hard coded capacity of 100% and grid charge in the work mode timer and just having the automations adjust the capacity and maximum charge rate.

On checking I see there have been two software updates and have now installed the 2025-10-24 Beta

I don't see any mention of retrying failed commands mentioned in the release notes.

Are there any plans to provide email or GUI notifications of updates without the need to check manually?
Are there any plans to automatically retry commands that were not actioned as these can badly upset system efficiency and having to constantly check is not possible and should be unnecessary if running solar assistant to control the inverter.

With the 2025-06-13 beta there was clearly no attention paid to the advanced settings for panel slope and azimuth as the forecast shows expected solar power at times when the panel azimuth means there is little to none. I am unsure if this is a problem with Solar Assistant or the third party site providing estimates. I see solar forecast mentioned again in the release notes but there is no detail of what has changed with that. Doubtless I will see now that I have updated it

Regards

Response Fri 31 Oct, 07:59

Hi Mark,

I was running the 2025-06-13 beta when over time  I had at least 3 instances of no response to commands to the inverter Sunsynk 3.6kw wired using your port splitter and USB dongle

example
[Fri Oct 17 02:00:01] Failed to set Capacity point 2 to 95: No response

No response means the command was sent to the inverter, but it did not respond.  Over a long period of time, it's likely that there will be a "No response" or "CRC error" from time to time.

When using the Solar Assistant automations, it will re-attempt setting a setting in a minute or so if there is an error.

When you receive the Active table row changed twice in 15m00s. Suspending rule table automation for 10m00s. Consider adding a gap between table row end and next row start.

When it comes to changing inverter modes, this should only be done at a certain frequency and switching too rapidly will cause damage to the inverter. Since these are not cheap pieces of equipment, we have made it so that the unit can only be polled to change modes once every 15 minutes to avoid any damage to the inverter. If you are getting this error often, please take a moment to revise your rule tables and make sure that you are not trying to get the mode to change so frequently.

Are there any plans to provide email or GUI notifications of updates without the need to check manually?
Not currently. We are working on inverter and battery events tab that will report inverter and battery fault codes.

Are there any plans to automatically retry commands that were not actioned as these can badly upset system efficiency and having to constantly check is not possible and should be unnecessary if running solar assistant to control the inverter.
As mentioned above SA will reattempt changing a setting if there was a error.

With the 2025-06-13 beta there was clearly no attention paid to the advanced settings for panel slope and azimuth as the forecast shows expected solar power at times when the panel azimuth means there is little to none. I am unsure if this is a problem with Solar Assistant or the third party site providing estimates. I see solar forecast mentioned again in the release notes but there is no detail of what has changed with that. Doubtless I will see now that I have updated it

The Azimith of values are configured as below:

0 South. -90 east, 90 west,  -180 north

We only released the PV forecast feature in August. The 2025-06-13 version is our stable. We have a help page of how it works and where the data comes from:https://solar-assistant.io/help/dashboard/pv_forecast

Kind Regards,

My reply Fri 31 Oct, 09:15

Hi

regarding - "Are there any plans to automatically retry commands that were not actioned as these can badly upset system efficiency and having to constantly check is not possible and should be unnecessary if running solar assistant to control the inverter. As mentioned above SA will reattempt changing a setting if there was a error"

I have seen the problem on several occasions and have never seen it recover. If the start command for either charge or forced discharge fails then the activity simply doesn't happen. I do keep an eye on forced export and have managed to manually force export on several occasions by editing the workmode table after it failed. Sometimes not early enough to export as much as I would have liked.

I have now amended my automations such that there is grid charge and capacity set in the 2-5 slot and set the capacity  and charge rate based on solar forecast. I like to keep charge rate down as low as possible while still reaching my desired state of charge. I find that a good work round.

For export I set workmode 3 times like this in the hope one will work. So far this workaround seems to be working but I have not seen the failure reported since making this change..
4:00pm to 4:02pm 95.0 % to 100 % Selling first 
4:20pm to 4:22pm 85.0 % to 100 % Selling first 
4:40pm to 4:42pm 0 % to 100 % Selling first 

You have told me what your code is supposed to do but the fact that there is no report of a second failure and the action doesn't take place tells me that it isn't actually working. Perhaps a message when the command is reissued along with another failure message if necessary would show that it does at least try?

I know how to set the azimuth values. Mine are set to

Latitude
52.22569
Longitude
-0.90512
Tilt
30.0
Azimuth
120.0

and the forecast displayed appears to be for a south facing roof. This is not a huge problem as I only need to know the overall forecast for the coming day at around 2:00 when I set capacity and charge rate.

Your solar forecast was the only reason I bought solar assistant or I would have tried to get Home Assistant working. Without either manual values would need setting daily based on public forecasts, Solar Assistant is good enough as it is for me but others may have a need for things like PV energy remaining today which is one of the options offered and from what I see that is going to be useless for anything other than a south facing roof or maybe two roofs facing opposite directions.

Mark

Response 31 Oct 2025, 09:24

Hi Mark,

Thank you for that input. Below is an example from your site that clarifies what I mentioned SA reattempting to change the setting if it failed. Notice after 3 it changed capacity point 2 to 95 at 03:00.

[Fri Oct 17 03:00:08] Set 'Capacity point 2' to '95': success.
[Fri Oct 17 02:00:01] Set 'Grid charge point 2' to '1': success.
[Fri Oct 17 02:00:01] Failed to set Capacity point 2 to 95: No response

Kind Regards,

My Reply 31 Oct 2025, 10:12

Hi,

yes - that's because I coded it in my automation to get around the problem. It wasn't your software. I have since removed the grid charge point 2 automation as it was superfluous with grid charge now set in the workmode timer slot

This is the automation that had that failure which did not automatically recover.



You can see them all here where I have put them up on a forum I run as there is so little good information out there and your documentation is pretty limited (at least that I've found is)

https://letschat.club/index.php?topic=6090.0

Mark

End of story so far

Since that there has been the rest of Friday then a weekend and now all of Monday. Considering there was a fairly quick turnround on these I suspect that this is the end of the line but would be pleased to be proven wrong.

So in summary to my queries

Retry failed commands
They say the software does already.
I can't see any evidence that it does and certainly none that is has ever done so successfully

Notifications of updated releases
No plans

No use made of advanced settings for roof tilt and azimuth
Just a reply saying they can be set

Scores on the doors 0/3

So in conclusion IMO their support  is worth precisely what I am paying for it. (Nothing other than the licence fee)

Quote from: GrannyMac on Yesterday at 05:42:50 PMI'm going into hospital tomorrow, my new knee 🦿 must have arrived.  I may be around, I may not, depending on the schedule, and my recovery 🙏🏼.

Way to go GM, I wish you well. 

All the best GM, just keep doing the exercises, they are the key to recovery.