Pupdate

The month started out unusually warm and dry, so we got in some good long walks before the paths turn muddy.

By the end of the month their coats were back in use, as it had got cold and wet :(

Rachel Parris

We’ve been fans of Rachel Parris since first seeing her in one of our early trips to Edinburgh Fringe. We loved her on The Mash Report, and Tuesday Night Club with husband Marcus Brigstocke is one of the things that helped us survive COVID lockdown. So when her tour passed by our way of course we grabbed tickets.

Her set at Lewes Con Club was very much old skool Rachel Parris, with her singing catchy funny dittys, including ‘Hen Do On A Train‘, which naturally follwed on of the warm up acts (and also fits well for a venue close to Brighton).

Kubuntu upgrade

This should have been so simple – press the button, let the upgrader do its thing, carry on with what I was doing.

It’s a good job that I chose a quiet Saturday to upgrade to Kubuntu 26.04, because after rebooting I got no login screen. After many reboots and much fiddling (including switching away from Plasma to the regular Ubuntu desktop – ugh) I tracked it down to a USB device driver issue. It seems that Plasma needed libusbmuxd-2.0.so.6, but I’d been upgraded to libusbmuxd-2.0.so.7. A symlink sorted things out and I had my desktop back :)

More RCBOs

The ‘nuisance trips’ I wrote about almost a decade ago in ‘Restoring Power‘ were back. But not on any of the circuits that had been moved to residual current circuit breakers with overcurrent protection (RCBOs). The problem was all of the things left hanging off a single residual current device (RCD). Or more accurately all the things that had been added to that RCD: the heat pump, the solar panels, and the iBoost water heater. All those new things have inverters, and associated big capacitors, which can create the impression of earth leaks – especially when they’re all ganged up. The heat pump seemed particularly problematic[1], which isn’t surprising given that it’s sat outside in what’s been some atrocious weather. On resetting the RCD it would quite often get about a minute into it’s startup cycle and then trip everything again. I made sure it wasn’t full of cobwebs and other detritus, but that wasn’t enough – the trips kept coming.

So… (once again) out with the MCBs off a single RCD, and in with an individual RCBO for each circuit. Nick from CSK Electrical quoted me £300 for the job (including the new breakers), and he was done in less than an hour :)

Solar diary

Better than the last couple of Octobers, but not as good as the first couple.

Note

[1] Nick the Electrician pointed me to The RCD Problem Nobody Warned You About!, which takes a very detailed look at the complexities of heat pump protection. As it turns out Daikin doesn’t specify a type for my heat pump, and Contactum doesn’t make Type B (or F) RCBOs; so we took the simple/cheap option of fitting a regular Type A.