I messed up: Need advice on bringing Trojan L16s back from near dead

[extrafu]

No worry about bandwidth consumption - we're talking about bytes here!

Look (attached screenshot) at what my 2 arrays (2 x 12 280W panels) were producing today (cold + sunny). Pretty impressive! The panels in the south array were producing 361W and the south-east were producing 329W - not bad for 280W panels!

[Mike90250]

Well, after a couple days of Absorb, you should be ready to run an EQ cycle. Any chance the neighbor can check the combiner breakers ? I've had mine trip on occasion from edge of cloud and such.

[hammick]

Yes, if the VPN gets disconnected or say the WiFi router reboots, everything will get re-established without a hiccup.

Thanks. I can't believe I didn't think of asking this until now. What kind of data does your VPN connection use when it is idle? I got so caught up in this I forgot about my measly 10gb per month of data. Does it work reliably after your data is throttled for the month? Only thing I will use it for is monitoring/configuring the Combox and hopefully my Wifi genset AGS.

Oh and back to the original topic. Today marks two weeks that my batteries have been in a partial state of charge. My neighbor finally got up there yesterday on snowmobile and shut off my inverter. I think one or more of my breakers in my combiner box may have tripped. Yesterday I was charging pretty slow and there was good sun. I've never tripped a breaker in close to five years of doing this but I guess very cold weather combined with sun reflecting off the snow could do it.

[Mike90250]

Yes, one time spammers post something "ok" and after a day when it's approved and forgotten about, they come and post their spam over the formerly good post.

[SunEagle]

That has happened to me, being more into correcting errors than able to get it right the first
time. It is PRETTY ANNOYING having to wait a day, when there were no links. Bruce Roe

That is why the forum has the Moderators who are happy to approve posts that have gone to moderation.

[bcroe]

I looked at your previous post and it looked like it was edited three or four times. I think the forum flags a post with several edits for moderation. Not sure why, maybe it's something spammers do.

That has happened to me, being more into correcting errors than able to get it right the first
time. It is PRETTY ANNOYING having to wait a day, when there were no links. Bruce Roe

[sdold]

if I edit any of my posts they get flagged as spam and need approval.

I looked at your previous post and it looked like it was edited three or four times. I think the forum flags a post with several edits for moderation. Not sure why, maybe it's something spammers do.

[SunEagle]

if I edit any of my posts they get flagged as spam and need approval.

I will pass this along. Thanks for the heads up.

[hammick]

Hi Dave. For some reason all of your posts first go to moderation for approval. I have contacted Solar Pete and the IT group to find out why but until then please be patient as I will approve them as I get them.

if I edit any of my posts they get flagged as spam and need approval.

[extrafu]

Yes, if the VPN gets disconnected or say the WiFi router reboots, everything will get re-established without a hiccup.

[hammick]

@hammick OpenVPN is installed on OpenWRT (so on your WiFi router) and establish a permanent VPN tunnel to somewhere - you need to have the server end for all of this to work. So it's like that:

[laptop] <-> LAN <-> OpenVPN server <-> Internet/satellite <-> Hughes Network modem <-> WiFi router running OpenWRT and the OpenVPN client <-> Combox (connected in the WiFi router)

If you toy around with routes on your LAN's router, you could simply connect to the Combox just like you were connected in the WiFi router directly. Personally I didn't set up routes because my VPN server is at the office. So what I do instead is whenever I am at the office, I establish a ssh tunnel. I basically port-forward a local port (2020) of my laptop to the Combox's IP + HTTP port 80. So then I access it from the office like http://localhost:2020/ - all over the SSH tunnel, which is all over the VPN tunnel.

What I meant by the cloud part (Conext Insight) is that high-latency connections (satellite, about 600ms latency) don't work well with the built-in feature of to Combox to push monitoring data to their cloud-based portal. It works well for a few days and then it gets slowly out of sync and all is messed up after a little while. I'm quite confident the same problems will be there with the Conext Gateway. Unless I have a free unit to test it for a little while, I won't be replacing my Combox with it.

Thanks. That makes a lot of sense. If the reverse VPN tunnel is disconnected for any reason will it automatically reconnect? I'm assuming that I need a static IP or Dynamic DNS on the OpenVPN server side? I have Google Fiber at our main home where the server would be located.

I just bought two Asus RT-N66R routers (aka "Dark Night" routers). They have both OpenVPN server and client built in and I think also Asus dynamic DDS service. I'm hoping to establish the VPN connection from my Montana place with the solar (Hughesnet) to my main home in Kansas City (Google Fiber). The client router will be in Montana and the server router will be in Kansas City. Since I'm 1,200 miles away I'm hoping to set up a Microsoft RDP connection so I can make changes on the server router when I'm setting all of this up. Having these networks bridged would be ideal.

I hope it goes smoothly but from past experience it rarely does.

Thanks for all the great advice.

[SunEagle]

I'm very active on 4 other forums and not once have I ever been spammed through a PM message. What makes this site a target for spammers via PMs? I would ask this question off the forum but...well...you know.

Hi Dave. For some reason all of your posts first go to moderation for approval. I have contacted Solar Pete and the IT group to find out why but until then please be patient as I will approve them as I get them.

[azdave]

No PM's on the forum anymore. Peddlers were abusing it to advertise their business, bypassing the forum advertising policy, so it was terminated. A couple rotten apples ruin it for all.

I'm very active on 4 other forums and not once have I ever been spammed through a PM message. What makes this site a target for spammers via PMs? I would ask this question off the forum but...well...you know.

[extrafu]

@hammick OpenVPN is installed on OpenWRT (so on your WiFi router) and establish a permanent VPN tunnel to somewhere - you need to have the server end for all of this to work. So it's like that:

[laptop] <-> LAN <-> OpenVPN server <-> Internet/satellite <-> Hughes Network modem <-> WiFi router running OpenWRT and the OpenVPN client <-> Combox (connected in the WiFi router)

If you toy around with routes on your LAN's router, you could simply connect to the Combox just like you were connected in the WiFi router directly. Personally I didn't set up routes because my VPN server is at the office. So what I do instead is whenever I am at the office, I establish a ssh tunnel. I basically port-forward a local port (2020) of my laptop to the Combox's IP + HTTP port 80. So then I access it from the office like http://localhost:2020/ - all over the SSH tunnel, which is all over the VPN tunnel.

What I meant by the cloud part (Conext Insight) is that high-latency connections (satellite, about 600ms latency) don't work well with the built-in feature of to Combox to push monitoring data to their cloud-based portal. It works well for a few days and then it gets slowly out of sync and all is messed up after a little while. I'm quite confident the same problems will be there with the Conext Gateway. Unless I have a free unit to test it for a little while, I won't be replacing my Combox with it.

[Mike90250]

No PM's on the forum anymore. Peddlers were abusing it to advertise their business, bypassing the forum advertising policy, so it was terminated. A couple rotten apples ruin it for all.