Nightly Goodnight Everyone

[native pepper]

My ph is with mate for telstra and and Moose with optus. They both give me 6gig for $12 and unlimited calls and they are calendar month not 28 days, my phones come from ebay and they are cheap but really good. The one have now has 128gig storage and takes a 256gig card, has andriod 10 all the same bells and whistles the expensive ones have and high quality vids and photos.

Cost me less than $200 a year or two ago, then have my pine ph which runs linux and that has a moose sim, it's not really a ph but a small computer which can plug into any screen or any of my computer systems, does everything other phones do but much better and each update makes it even better. Use that when travelling for internet on the road and plug it into my laptop of a night too download anything I want from it, it interacts with Mint and can use a Kali usb to check and clean it out if necessary.

Using Signal in a container means can vid talk to my friends round the world and be perfectly safe, firefox is my browser on all phones and never get adverts or scams as it's locked tight in a container running through a free linux vpn, which sometimes uses the Tor network. Just wish could put andoid firefox and other android things in containers, but don't think flatpack runs on android yet, but haven't checked that out and the Pine Ph system is adding more and more linux apps all the time.

Having a 28 day ph account means you lose an entire month a year to the rip off merchants compared to a calendar billing month, just another profit grab by the corporate morons.

[Shirley]

The 365 day deals go from date activated to same date next year, the problem is often the good deals are only for new customers, none of the carriers look after loyal customers.unfortunately & Boost has increased each year.

[dream4red]

Still over heated Dot? xxxx

Thanks all for the phone advice. We have found that the safest way for phones in our travels has to have one optus phone (mine) and one telstra. Then there is not much of the inhabited parts of the country that we don't get reception. David, sadly his old samsung was too old for the smart switch app, and annoyingly, his plan has such a little amount of data that he was running up big bills with the few apps that were running in the background. So he had telstra disconnect the phone from the internet from their end. That means he can't accidentally cause the phone to use too much of the pathetic data. He would maybe make a dozen calls per year, so it doesn't make sense to have a dearer plan. We pay $30 for six months and he gets 100 hours of free calls, which accumulate if unused and the bill is paid on the due date. It does what we need it to do.

Today we had a solar battery breakthrough. My nagging/threats must of had some good effects on someone. Our installer rang this morning to ask could he come and remove the dangerous battery today. Job is now done. A little bit later in the day, LG person rang to ask us to nag our installer to get him to send her an account for the uninstalling and she would then be able to have it removed. She was surprised when I told her that the battery was removed earlier today. Hoping to see then end of this hassle soon.

Our solar man tells us that the laws about solar lithium battery installations have been tightened up. The battery had been sited under our bedroom in the cellar/dungeon. It may not be under any inhabitable rooms and must be outside the house and not next to inhabitable rooms. So it has to go out side the bathroom wall. Luckily, our airconditioner units are not in those spots, so it looks like the battery will go outside. Now I am thinking about the salty air that we have. Hope it gets a good coating of rustproofing before installation.

That's enough excitement for one hot n humid day
night all xxx

[native pepper]

Maybe things have changed, but from what I know and experienced, lifepo4 batteries don't explode or catch fire, they don't even get hot when charging or in use and mine have been in operation in my lounge for over 16 years. They still produce close to 100% and my 120amp portable pack a year longer, the bus the same, the bus pack sits under the lounge and is the same age as the portable pack.

Have some Li-ion for my video camera which were purchased in 1999 and they still run the camera, they have always got a little warm when charging. Li-ion/li-poly are great for certain uses but not when it come to homes, or vehicles because they are to volatile in my opinion, especially when fast charging. People who have asked my advise regarding what home or mobile batteries to use, tell them never use li-ion always use lifepo4 or what ever they call them now and there's probably a better safer chemical make up that works as good as lifepo4. Sure they may not have the capacity of li-ion, but for me safety and longevity are the keys to success for off home energy storage and lifepo4 provides that.

[dream4red]

Still heat affected Dotty? xxxx

I can't really explain the problem Native pepper. All I can tell you is that LG have a nationwide recall on these batteries and when they finally came to visit ours, it was starting to swell and leak. I am really pleased to see it go from under our home. I am glad that you know much more about these things than I do and are able to have more confidence in them than I do at the moment.

Today was so damned hot, again and humidity up there like a rain forest. We took his phone to a local shopping complex and had it protected with a screen covering and bought him a decent case. I know that these are way cheaper on flea bay, but he didn't want to wait for that. Anyway, he's happy, that's all I care.

We did the usual veggie shopping and drugs from the chemist and that was enough. We came home exhausted. I think it would help if we slept a lot better. I hate fans and air con on when in bed and there seems to be very little breeze off the water these nights. So sweaty nights are starting to take their toll.

nighty night xxx

[native pepper]

Ti explains it better in good morning daily Deborah, when it come to technological meanings I'm lost but have a practical mind and when see things in action it makes sense. Along with a late friend of mine who was a technological genius, we experimented with different lithium chemistries and found lifepo4 to be the safest most reliable chemistry at the time and have used it ever since.

In my opinion manufacturers and installers don't have a clue about how lithium storage works always go for the cheapest makeup, which is li-ion or li-poly and they are volatile with very little margin for error in charging and discharging. Lifepo4 on the other hand is very forgiving and we found it almost impossible to get them to swell, heat up or not perform under most conditions, also had my charge controllers specially built, because manufacturers still use lead acid charge parameters, when lithium requires a very different form of charging and in my opinion that's why my lifepo4 systems have lasted so long and retained their capacity.

Another thing I've discovered with lifepo4 and the li-ion have for my video camera, they have a very long shelf life, have some spare lifepo4 cells which have never been used or charged and they still hold the same voltage as when I go them 17 years ago and the small li-ion video batteries are the same, I always take them out when not in use and they were bought back in 1999 and still run the camera. Have 2 bigger capacity spares never used and they still hold their charge.

You don't have to be a technical genius when dealing with new technologies you are getting, just do a bit of research on the net and you will find enough information to choose the right path for you and off course ask on forums and people like Ti who know what they are talking about are the best ways to find out and not just into profiting rather than providing long term safe and viable solutions.

[T1 Terry]

Are they replacing your battery free of charge Deborah? If they are not, demand a refund, if they refuse, Dept Fair Trading claim under "not fit for Purpose" will get you a full refund of the battery price.
Personally, I'd wait till sodium ion batteries become available for house battery use. The hysteria generated by the press regarding anything with lithium in the name, has poisoned the market, and that won't go away anytime soon. Insurance will be the next to jump on the "lithium" band wagon for sure, it's not like they'd miss the opportunity to get a quick buck by upping the premiums or refusing any claim where a tentative link could be made to lithium batteries ..... depending on the lithium chemistry and the level of professionalism regarding the BMS and installation, that tentative link could be easily broken, but I don't hold out much hope for those with drop in batteries winning an insurance claim refusal, the reseller has no knowledge of the internal workings of the battery, so dragging them to a claims hearing would be useless, and absolutely no hope of dragging the manufacturer before a claims tribunal, even finding who the actual manufacturer was is unlikely, they are mostly just sticker branded, the same product but a different resellers sticker on the case.

T1 Terry

[dream4red]

Dotty under the weather? xxxx

Thanks for your concerns and great suggestions Terry, Native Pepper and David.
I am in the process of arranging for a very generous refund from LG. I told them what I paid but couldn't give them any paperwork that specifically addressed the battery. It was a whole cost thing. I know I paid around 7grand for the battery at the the time and they have offered 8 grand now. I have asked them to refund it asap. They have been using stalling tactics for quite a while, so I have threatened to contact channel 9 and the fair trading peoples. I think they are finally hearing me.

As we have the system in place now with all the technology for a battery, we will trust our installer to do a lot more research. He has been putting solar systems with batteries into aboriginal communities for decades, so his knowledge is good. Just a shame that I chose the LG battery because it was a big bit cheaper than his next suggestion. The up side of this is that the replacement battery will have to placed outside the house and not under our bedroom. I will be a lot happier with that outcome.

This weekend has been so hot that not a lot of anything has happened, just ran the aircon consistently and kept hydrated.

sweet dreams xxx

[Busman]

I have built a 20 kW battery for our solar system, no special charging regime required. it is placed in the bus shed because I used to use the bus Liths as backup so that is where the wiring is. Only concession made to the chemistry is a Heltec balancer for the cells, which it does very well, never more than 5 or 6 millivolts apart, even when rapid charging. Only been back on the grid once when we had a party, sp pretty happy with performance. For a manufacturer the size of LG to have this massive recall, at massive cost, tends to make you wonder if they really did their homework.

[T1 Terry]

I think it was one of those "rush to market to get their share" things after Tesla made the big breakthrough into home storage .... and haven't they had dramas with fires, they are just quick enough to get things smoothed over so the name doesn't hit the front pages.
They all suffer the same problem, they use a lithium chemistries that is sensitive to heat and can produce oxygen internally when they reach the critical temperature. This heat is mostly generated internally when a cell goes outside the critical voltages, both upper voltage from over charging and under voltage from over discharging ..... add the oxygen internally and the spare created when the cell bursts open and an instant rapid expansion burn occurs, that adds heat to the cells around it, and you have a rapidly escalating fire that is very hot, generally, everything around that fire burns.

If they monitored every cell for voltage as well as "heat" (only required for these cells that contain cobalt) then the charging or discharging could be stopped until the voltage and temp came back into the safe range

T1 Terry