Crossy

Does anyone know how long after a parcel is set to the "Packed" status before the order is automatically cancelled and refunded? A little while back I ordered an item (located in Thailand), delivery was 2-3 days. After a couple of days, the item was still "To Pack". At this point I could have cancelled, but I needed the item. Then the status changed to "Packed", great thinks I something is actually happening. He even generated a valid Kerry tracking number. Now after another 4 days (and a day after the last expected delivery date) I receive a message from the seller "Sorry, out of stock". Grrr. But now I can't cancel the order because it's "Packed". I've asked the seller to cancel the order from his end, of course there's been no response. So, I'm assuming that if the seller never actually ships the item, it will eventually auto-cancel and refund. Anyone know just how long Lazada wait until cancelling an unshipped item?

Well, the UK is one. The UK regs don't say "do not bond", they allow the designer to do a risk assessment and determine just how to address the issue. The major point is whether you connect your equipotential zone to the TNC-S earth or have it with a local TT ground (and appropriate earth leakage protection of course). IF you build your pool and surroundings to Aussie standards then bonding back to the MET is absolutely fine. As I said, you shouldn't cherry-pick requirements, do everything to your chosen standard. Ideally, avoid having any mains powered equipment in the pool zone anyway. No amount of bonding will protect you from getting hold of a live wire or faulty electric barbie (hopefully the RCBO will).

Yes, this is exactly what I would do too. It's also how the UK regs treat pools, hot tubs and EV charge points. The risk involved with bonding exposed metalwork to the main earth in a Thai TNC-S system is just too great. It's not just open neutrals, we had a poster a little while back who was complaining his kitchen floor was getting hot, coincidentally just where his ground rod was buried! Turned out that the PEA had managed to swap L&N at the meter so his rod was actually connected to the hot side of the supply (we never did find out how much his power bill decreased by when it was fixed). Of course, turning off the main switch doesn't break that connection so if you happen to be holding on to that fence you still die! As has been noted, electrical regulations vary around the world, some are highly prescriptive "do it like this and it is to code" (the US NEC is like this), others are more proscriptive "this is what you have to achieve, it's up to the designer how they achieve it" (the UK BS7671 IEE Regs follows this route), and many are somewhere in between. There is a real risk in cherry-picking regs from one country and applying them randomly to another. One could actually introduce a hazard where there wasn't one before. For example, a country may have very strict requirements for pool construction meaning that all the re-bar is interconnected, there are ground mats under the pool perimeter and any metallic fencing is also bonded to this, making an equipotential zone where there is no risk of getting between two "grounded" items that are actually at different potentials. There is no issue at all in connecting this zone to the main TNC-S earth. Do the same here where your fence may not be bonded to the re-bar and the re-bar may not be solidly interconnected and a world of hurt can open up ???? Generally, don't earth it just because it's metal. A stainless-steel sink in a granite worktop with plastic plumbing is probably not earthed at all, touch it and your faulty electric kettle and you probably won't die. If that sink was solidly bonded to deck ... let's hope your RCBO is up to scratch! EDIT The "hot rod" thread https://aseannow.com/topic/1250930-earth-rod-is-hot/

Meanwhile. Line Pay needs my fingerprint TWICE (and seemingly endless confirmations) to transfer 16 Baht to a work colleague to pay for the Coke she got me from the Seven.

I bet she starts on the first turn of the key! ???? Not a 2CV but from a similar era.

Thanks for the update. I hope your lady gets what she needs. Sadly, I'm no use. I'm boring old O+, lived in the UK during the BSE years and I'm too old anyway ????

Not a strange question at all. A reputable installer will probably use a branded pack (same as the inverter). Of course, you will pay for the brand name but you'll also get some kind of warranty.

https://www.lazada.co.th/products/vct-2x05-2x1-2x15-2x25-3x15-3x25-pks-i4101713175-s16031798046.html? Order 3 x 1.5 by the metre.

You do need to compare like with like. The "$40" batteries are single 3.2V cells, you need 4 of them for a 12V pack ($160) plus a BMS to protect them ($50- >$200), so we're looking at $210 for the equivalent of a 200Ah 12V lead-acid. Of course, we are talking about DIYing packs here, as soon as you put a fancy box around it the $$$ goes wheeee! For example, Seplos do a 48V, 280Ah DIY kit box (with BMS but no cells) for $600, cells will add another couple of grand US.

Nothing awry with your understanding, Bangkok Cable 0.75mm2 flex is indeed rated at 6A (in free air - coil it and all bets are off). But do note that our 1,800W (about 8A at 220V) kettle has 0.75mm2 flex, it definitely gets warm but no real hazard unless you have a million Brits needing a brew. The extension manufacturers definitely play fast-n-loose with their cable specs, but in reality, you're not going to be hooking your portable heater or welder up to it. Are you? If you want a "proper" 16A extension cord it's easy enough to get the requisite 1.5mm2 3-core along with 3-pin plugs and traily outlets in order to make up your own.

It would be really interesting to hear the experiences of anyone who has bought these cells from Lazada. Of course, they are Li-ion and so need appropriate safety arrangements (a quality BMS for starters and I wouldn't have them in the actual house).

Yeah ^^^. I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that pretty well all the LiFePO4 cells on Lazada are junk, even those which appear to be at "premium" prices. For the next upgrade I will head to a known-good supplier on Alibaba (which is another minefield to navigate with even more junk). Shenzen Luyuan Technology https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Luyuan-8pcs-280AH-LiFePO4-LFP-3_1600066769898.html are well regarded on other solar fora for actually supplying genuine, new cells (with real QR codes). Their prices reflect this, although, for example, the "same" Eve 105Ah cells that I got from Lazada are $39 (1,400 Baht) a pop (plus shipping) so in reality they are actually better value. But in the end, you pays your money ...

The Saga Continues In the 18 months that the system has been operating I've bought a fair number of smaller (32650) LiFePO4 cells for various projects including our solar floodlights. The experience has shown that the quality of the cells available is somewhat "variable", ranging from "pretty decent" to "absolute carp". Even buying the same cells from the same seller didn't really guarantee anything. With this in mind I bought 20 x 105Ah "Eve" cells at 1,099Baht from a seller I've used before, my idea being to capacity test them and use the best ones, along with the existing 100Ah cells (which I would also capacity test) to make the new 2P16S pack. The cells arrived and were duly charged to 3.65V (full) and capacity tested at 20A down to 2.5V (totally empty). The results were somewhat disappointing. The cells ranged from 82Ah down to 55Ah ???? OK, so I can pair them "best to worst" with the existing cells. When I capacity tested the existing 100Ah cells I was amazed to find that they ranged from 98Ah to 100Ah!! ???? I evidently got lucky on those. Hoping to make the best of a bad job I tried ordering another 4 of the Eve cells, "no stock", even at other sellers of the same cells "no stock". It's pretty obvious that all these suppliers were drop-shipping from the same source which was now exhausted. Grrr. OK, so now we have a 2P16S pack which has cell-pair capacities of 165Ah to 182Ah, meaning that the best I can hope for is a total of 165Ah (or about 8kWh). Oh well ???? This pack is currently under test and calibrating the Seplos BMS. I also now have the LiFePOQR app (check the Google Playstore) which can decode the QR codes on the cells and give you all kinds of useful details, manufacturer, manufacturing date, capacity etc. Unfortunately, all the cells (even the original 100Ah ones) come back with "invalid data" and a suggestion that the codes are fake ???? <More Soon>

A Little History Back in June 2021 we were commissioning our Sofar hybrid solar inverter, this unit needs a battery pack in order to function correctly. So, in my innocence, I bought 16 x 100Ah LiFePO4 cells at 1,125 Baht a pop, along with a cheap (Daly) BMS, stuck them together in a pack with zero preparation and hooked them up. It worked! Slightly later I bought my first battery capacity tester and a multi-charger, these arrived too late to actually test the pack I'd made and the BMS wasn't of the "smart" type so things were operating "blind". A little later I bought 16 x 200Ah "used" LiFePO4 golf-cart cells at 1,499 Baht a pop. I spent rather a long time doing capacity tests on these. The charger could only do 6A so it was taking a day and a half to charge them, then the tester discharged at 20A. All bar one cell tested at somewhere near 160Ah (I didn't keep records I'm afraid) the remaining cell was nearer 60Ah ???? Of course it was way too late to complain so I ordered another cell which came out somewhere near the others. So I built a pack, added a "Smart" BMS (another Daly) and hooked them in parallel with the first lot, all worked reasonably well and I was storing around 9kWh in the two packs (treating them gently). Fast-Forward to This Year I bought a more decent Smart BMS (from Seplos) which could actually talk to the inverter. There are many discussions on the web as to whether there's any advantage, but in our case the Sofar inverter has a software bug, in that it defaults to a lead-acid profile if there's no comms. It's supposed to be adjustable, but basically ignores any settings so we weren't getting quite to a full charge. Along with the Seplos I added a 5A "flying-capacitor" call balancer, hooked it all to the golf-cart cells and ran the PC software (which talks to the BMS via an RS484 converter). It rapidly became apparent that, even with the balancer, one of the cells was "a bit weak", so to help it along I hooked the "spare" cell (the one that I rejected 12 months ago) in parallel with it which improved matters a fair bit, but the parallel combo still showed as being rather low capacity. Earlier This Month (Dec. 2022) The Daly BMS on the 100Ah cells went "fzzt" and let out the Magic Smoke, it was replaced by the old non-smart unit to get the pack back online. So, the engineer in me got itchy fingers and ordered another Seplos BMS to replace the fried unit and decided that adding a further 16 x 100Ah cells to the current 100Ah pack (making it a 2P 16S arrangement) was going to be good use of my Christmas money from mummy (don't tell Madam!). Meanwhile I've acquired a second 20A tester and 4 x 20A 3.65V chargers, so I can do capacity tests in a reasonable time. <To be Continued>

Are you using the App or the website??

Set it to the lowest value that will stay on under adverse weather conditions (when surges may trip the beast). The UK standard for domestic RCBOs (which are fixed) is 30mA so you're really good to go at any of the available settings.

Yeah, the simple adaptors don't swap the pins over. UK is Live on the right; Thailand is Live on the left (both with earth at the top).

Fixed after reference to the original article.

I believe that switch is a "bypass" for the RCD part of the device and should normally be "off". The idea being that you can get the juice back on even if you have an earth-leak (not something I would be recommending). You could try making an external tester using a small lamp connected L-E on a plug. Plugging it in should trip the RCBO immediately.

I believe our OP is looking for something like this.

Yeah, a 19-year-old me fell into that trap, it took me a long time to re-build my credit score (UK).

Task A is to contact the card provider and talk to them. The single biggest error people make is to ignore it and hope it will go away. Try to maintain a dialogue, even when out of the country. If you can make any payment at all this should keep you in their (reasonably) good books. EDIT Are you entitled to any severance? It can get quite large if you've been there for a long time (IIRC up to 10 month's salary tax free).

Meanwhile, in another thread: -

Sadly, it's not, although an increasing number of inverters are being supplied with the necessary CT (Current Transformer) and internal gubbins so that they can do it. It's certainly a wise investment to pay a little extra for an inverter with the facility. The ESP8266 based system we use to automatically enable/disable export on meter-reading days is discussed in the Solar Car Port thread.