FTTP

​The guys from the phone company came on Monday and completed the installation of the FTTP (fibre to the premises) connection. They ran a fibre from the box at the front of the house up through the roof space and over to where the modem is upstairs. There is a new box on the wall there that converts the fibre into a regular ethernet connection that I plug the modem into. The only drawback is that it requires power to work so I have it plugged into my battery backup. They finally switched it over on Thursday and now our connection is running at 105-108 Mb downloads and still at about 18 Mb uploads, so it is twice as fast as before.
We are both really noticing the difference.

I also got the newer version of the modem on Monday and spent a few days getting everything set up on our old connection. You were supposed to be able to just set the name of the wireless to what it was in the old modem and everything would automatically connect. In reality it took me two days playing around to get all the wireless cameras, the Sonos speakers, the Dyson heaters, the two AC/Heat pump units, the solar inverter, my wireless weather station, and a few other things to connect. Even the regular stuff like our laptops, chromebooks and phones had to be manually reconnected to the new modem. It’s a good thing I have a bit of a background in this stuff, imagine if I was totally clueless.

I had been thinking about this issue we have here with occasional power outages, even if they happen on a sunny day we have nothing from the solar panels because the solar inverter needs the power from the mains to work. I found a local company that does battery retrofits to existing solar installations and has a chat with him on Wednesday. They have a battery system with a hybrid inverter that would replace my inverter, and also allow the battery to charge from the solar panels and power the house for a while in case of a power cut. It could also charge the battery during off-peak power time, then use that during peak pricing time to save a bit of money. The cost for peak power is more than twice that of off-peak. There is also an interest free loan up to $10,000 from the state government for systems like this, so I would want to see about that.

I had an email from the Natural Resource Management guy about the bandicoot habitat regeneration project, it looks like I can collect the tube stock plants after the 25th just up the road in Riverside, about 10 minutes away. The patch I sprayed out in the back paddock last week looked like nothing had happened, so I mixed up a stronger batch of roundup and sprayed it and a few other spots as well. I will probably mix up another batch this week and treat some more areas where I will be planting the stuff. Some of that pasture grass is very hard to kill.