Typical Bank Holiday Weekend

Rain, grey skies and Eurovision. This weekends project was to decorate the living room. It has now become a major construction project. Shelves, a desk, new door surround, repainting and a new floor.

While looking at flooring I noticed that there is now a lot of bamboo options available. Half the price of oak and fast growing (so probably more sustainable). I think this is what we are going with.

Our holiday this year is sailing in the Ionian of the North Corfu around the faraway islands. The original plan was to travel there by train. Both for the adventure and to reduce our carbon footprint. Train through Albania and Greece proved too difficult to pre-book so we decided to take a ferry from Venice to Greece. Train tickets from Paris to Venice only become available 90 days before travel. When we attempted to book (89 days before travel) the return journey the tickets were sold out so now we are going by train and ferry and returning by ferry, air and train.

First Installation

Having waited and waited for an accepted quote to lead to an installation, finally it happened today. A solar PV installation. Now hurrying around to make sure that everything is in place for monitoring it's output live.

On 20th April, our first live monitored site was commissioned. Powis Hughes finally have a 6kW wind turbine up and running. The monitoring software has had a few issues but seems to be running nicely now. As I look at their RenSMART page now, I see that they have made about £90 so far. Only another 7 years to go and they will have their initial investment back.


Yesterday was spend uploading and annotating a couple of videos on how to use RenSMART Weather Data maps. You can find them on the RenSMART video page. They look good so I think I'll probably do a couple more.

Finally I have to look at going back to contracting for a while to get some funds. As Helen reminds me, I should not expect a profitable business after one months trading :-). That is why I am back blogging. It is my CV and agent avoidance plan :-)

Flying Start

Well RenSMART went live on 29th March as planned. There were the usual launch issues. Applications always misbehave when real people get their hands on them :-)

We are now half way through our second week. I've throttled back a little on the Google AdWords campaign and am concentrating in trying to raise our profile.

We are listed no younoodle (I did this quite a while ago) and have a reasonable score. We are aiming to be listed on the Telegraph 100 growth companies list



My initial concerns, that the Site Planner is to complicated for people to use does not seem to have been grounded. We received 10 quote requests in the first week, and a couple of calls about large commercial systems.

Today's big event was a call from a turbine manufacturer who was not happy. The turbine data for his product were all wrong. The data was updated and live within half an hour and as a result the term Indicative Price is being plastered all over the Site Planner.

Right. I'd better get back to it.

Take Off

The RenSMART Quote Request Service goes live on 29th March.

We have a good long list of installers signed up to give quotes and a good number of members waiting to request quotes.

Now I am looking for virtual canapés and champagne for our launch party :-)

JP has helped a lot with improving the database, I finally got the Sheeva plug working consistently as a data logger and the web server is running like a dream.

Role on Monday 29th

On the Launch pad. Ready to go

Finally the RenSMART Site Planner seems to be ready for launch. Not sure how people will take to it. It is quite an involved process. I am contemplating taking the underlying model and creating a simple front end for specific scenarios e.g. Domestic home installations or Commercial Small Office wind installation.

I have been running a small trial with a few friends and they seem to agree about the complexity issue (when it works).

Now I have forgotten what I was writing as Alex and Theo have brought me their pictures to see.

I finally got the response times down to under 5 seconds by removing all of the 'optimisation' features I had added to the server.

I have just run a sanity test of the Site Planner using an example from GreenBuilding magazine. The example was for a Solar PV installation in Cornwall. I replicated the system in the Site Planner and the yearly generation and system price were within 10% of actual values. Not bad.

Now to get the installers on board with quotes!

The RenSMART model and web application is almost ready for release. I've been trying to get the processing time down. It was taking 30 seconds+ to update a financial projection for a project. It now takes about 15, however all the data is now transferred in on big transaction so there is less feedback about what the process is doing.

The snow went, came back and has now gone. The sun is out but we are all out of oil (darn) and no delivery until tomorrow. We'll be getting through a few logs tonight.

Best Intentions

Well it's been a while... probably the most used phrase in and diary or blog (253 million times according to a Google search) In the the period since November I have had time out from RenSMART development to look after the boys while the child minder went on holiday and a dose of bronchitis and then there was Christmas. Anyway back now and a new year. The RenSMART financial planning tool is coming along nicely and will go live at the end of January! Only a few bits to sort out with the front end and some testing. At the same time as working on that I have been working on a number of live feed applications that RenSMART members will be able to sign up for. First is a energy use monitor that will create an energy use profile for use with the financial planner and secondly a weather station feed again for use with RenSMART services.
There is still snow on the ground as there has been for the last week. Every one seems to have got used to it and people are moving around again. When it first fell the area ground to a halt. Our little lane turned into an ice slope. Lucky we haven't got rid of the Freelander yet as the Seat would not make it up.
Now back to the project.