clokwise

Fancy a trip to Lubbock, Texas? But not to worry, even if you don't die from measles your immune system is now f'd up for the rest of your miserable life, much of it will be spent in the hospital, and you'll eventually die from a myriad of complications, none of which are very pleasant.

I was just in Pai for the past 3 days. I witnessed foreigners being pulled aside and ticketed for smoking weed. Last night the big district cop did a walkabout surrounded by the media. There are now posters and signs everywhere notifying you to not smoke weed in public. I also saw signs instructing people to cover up and be respectful. Sadly, this all feels like too little too late. I've been visiting Pai for over 20 years, long before they had traffic lights and 7-11s. Just in the past year or so the place has changed entirely (again). It's suddenly now become a place for rowdy pub crawls, and river tubing with multiple stops along the way offering booze and weed with obnoxiously loud music. There are far too many shirtless young men revving their little scooters up and down walking street. The majority of the tourists now (90% maybe) are Israelis, and their vibe clearly indicates that they don't gaf about other people, they want to party loud and hard. Pai in general is now crowded as hell too. The banks of the river are lined with garbage and plastic waste. It's over. Whatever cool vibe Pai used to have is long gone. If you're thinking to visit to see for yourself, prepare to be massively disappointed.

Very cool. I will likely to this too. At least to start with. If things still gets too hot I'll have to install an A/C in there though. The dedicated PCB and thermostat seems overkill, although I'm sure it works great. I will be using Home Assistant, a bluetooth thermometer in the room, plus I'll tap into the Inverter's own thermometers via Solarman, and a wifi smart switch for controlling the fans.

I just took the word of my installer on that topic. I didn't care for being locked into the Xiaomi ecosystem, and it's more expensive than Deye. Initially I was advised to remove certain devices, motors and heaters from the inverter and keep them grid-only, however one of the reasons we went with battery/solar is because in our area the grid goes off frequently (it's off right now in fact) and I've already had to replace countless pump motors destroyed by power cuts. So keeping them on the battery was a necessity. Ultimately I chose to put everything under the Inverter. And at least so far, no issues with phase imbalances. I also use the Solarman Home Assistant integration to alert me of any serious issues with the grid or inverter, just in case.

Thank you!

Although I'm a nerd about many kinds of electrical things, I chose to hire an installer just to ensure it was done quickly and safely. I'd recommend going that route unless you have prior experience installing solar inverters. My installer also offered a pretty good price for all the hardware needed, vs. me buying it all myself, so that saved a bunch.

Yeah, that's probably what I'm gonna end up doing. I saw some portable units for sale on Amazon.com which send the steam outside to condense in the air, but haven't spotted any here, so a small wall-unit will definitely do the trick. I will try routing the heat via ducts first, as it is cheap and easy.

I keep a thermometer in the closet and it gets bloody hot in there, no need to thermal image anything 555 The exhaust fans along the top of the inverter are pushing out most of the heat right there, so I'll need to construct some sort of duct system to collect the heat and take it outside. Has anyone used a portable A/C unit? They don't seem like a good option since they collect a lot of water which will need to be changed frequently, but are there any available (in Thailand) with a condenser to push steam outside? Or is that still not a good idea?

I installed a Deye 3-phase inverter and a couple batteries three months ago. All the gear is installed in the wedge shaped closet under the stairs. I knew at that time that we'd have to eventually deal with the excess heat, and with summer rapidly approaching I need to do this real soon, it's getting quite hot in there already. I'm curious how others have tackled this problem. I currently have an extractor fan in the ceiling, however the draw of that fan in minimal. I have put a Hatari standalone fan in there as a temporary solution, and that has worked well, at least in the winter. Options I'm considering: I could construct a cover and pipe over the Inverter to funnel the heat directly up into the extractor fan I could install a small wall mounted A/C unit I could install a MUCH stronger fan in the extractor ?????

I genuinely curious why you want to do this. I have had a similar idea but ultimately decided running a CAT6 between the AIS router and my own hi-end router was good enough. I also switched over to Bridge mode but didn't notice any bandwidth or network improvements - AIS bandwidth is all over the map throughout the day anyway so it's hard to tell. Here's the last 24 hours...

An update from today: I arrived 10:00am, thought the place might be closed, hardly anyone there. They called my queue number before I even sat down! Despite a hiccup with a document it was sorted and I had my extension in about an hour. I have never seen the place so quiet, ever.

This seems at odds with what was previously known, including that big sign (shown above) at CF immigration itself. Did you actually get a retirement extension there by yourself (no agent)?

I've looked several times over the years and never once seen even a single queue slot available. People here have said you need to get online like 1 second after midnight to book a spot in the queue for a specific day, there is some math involved to sort out which day will be freed up next. I don't really see the point of the queue system anyway. Just do what the other 99.9% of us does, head down to immigration in the morning, file your papers, wait, and assuming you have everything they need, you'll be outta there in a few hours.

Yeah, I can share something about that. I bought some Reolink IP Cameras from Amazon last year. Out of the four, one of them would not charge, turns out the USB connector was cracked. The camera cost $90. I filed a claim to return the item. Was instructed to take it to DHL because it has lithium batteries built into it so the post office will not ship it. Shipment back to the USA cost 3500 baht - more than the camera itself. I had briefly (but not clearly) read that return shipping costs will be covered, so I just went ahead and paid for the shipping. Short time later I got a Amazon credit for the cost of the camera and nothing more. After reviewing the terms, they only covered up to $20 shipping by US post office only. So I was SOL - I had no camera and DHL got 3500 baht. I would have been FAR better off chucking the broken camera in the bin and ordering another one.

What is wrong with you? Where did I say I wanted to get into politics? I said precisely the opposite - I don't give a sh!t about US politics. Your reaction to my comment says everything I need to know about you. Say whatever you want to me now I won't see it, you're on my morons ignore list.

I stopped being partisan when i realized my vote literally doesn't count - and not just because I live in Thailand. Yes, I know I can register to vote using my old home address, but I don't even bother to register. I'm sick of people personally hating me and arguing that I MUST vote, and why every vote counts blah blah blah. No, actually, that is not true. Explain to me how one more vote (D or R doesn't matter) cast in West Hollywood California is going to change anything - ANYTHING. It won't. Millions of people still living in America sat out the election for the exact same reason. If I had lived in a swing state, that's another story. If they get rid of the EC and made it a straight up vote, I'll be thrilled to vote for the first time ever, but until then, nope. Plus, I have no skin in the game. I escaped the USA when I was 18, have never paid US taxes, have never voted, I don't collect govt benefits, and my US passport expired ages ago. My closest relatives are either dead, nearly dead, or escaped just like I did, long ago. Now that weed is legal here, I have absolutely no reason to return to the US. It's heartbreaking what America is about to go through (and put the entire world through), but their political system is thoroughly corrupt and utterly broken. The only solution would be a revolution and a new constitution (that's of course assuming the good guys win the revolution). But I'm betting on aliens appearing and putting us all to work as their slaves long before America can fix itself.

I've never stayed there but I have been inside to meet some guests, it truly is quite an impressive interior, I was not prepared to see such a grand sight in Chiang Mai of all places. Some guy recently did a "tour" of the hotel, including the parts you're not supposed to see...

Further speculation: Five-year driver licenses may not be issued against a DTV, whereas with a Non-O you can do it. Biggest DTV benefit for me vs Non-O is I won't need an exit visa anymore. Such a pita and not cheap. My problem with the DTV is I have no income whatsoever. I'm envious of you guys with pensions! But if it's as simple as signing up for a 2 week cooking course I'll reconsider, even though I'm a decent Thai cook already I'm sure I can learn something new.

From what I recall of the place, it would be silly to reopen it as-is. It was an architectural nightmare. But after watching the videos I don't think there is any point in reopening it, it looks like it's already been largely destroyed by the elements, it will need to be knocked down. Just my guess - we'll see condos there soon.

It always was a pretty crap mall, but before Central Airport or any of those other malls this was basically all there was.

Oops, forgot to post the link to part 2. wow, what a disaster area

I thought this was quite interesting, I have plenty of memories of the place from back in the day. Unbelievable that it has been left to just flood and collapse in on itself......

I don't do any power monitoring at the moment. Once my solar/battery system is installed next month I'll hook HA into the inverter with a RS435 interface. But I have zero interest in monitoring individual bulbs or sockets for power use because nothing in my home uses electricity to such a degree that I need to monitor or control it. We're talking a few baht here and there, it's basically inconsequential. I may, however, use a clamp such as the one you mentioned, but only to monitor some of my dumb devices to determine when they are on or off, but nothing more than that.

I have WiFi smart plugs with energy monitoring sensors. They work fine, though I don't care about energy monitoring my devices. The trick is to use LocalTuya, not the default Tuya integration.

FWIW, my home is Zigbee, Z-wave, HomeKit, and Matter free. 100% WiFi, with at least 40 various devices now. I know a lot of people swear by Zigbee, but the advantages it offers are minor, at least for my home. Any hardware I need is available in a WiFi version. Worst case for me - I'm quite fine with WiFi sensors that take 2 seconds to go online whenever they are triggered. These technologies also all require additional hardware which I knew was just going to complicate things further down the line. Also, some of these protocols, such as Zigbee, can be vendor specific - there is constantly a lot of discussion online about which zigbee router works with which devices and which it doesn't. No thanks. My objective was to make home automation simpler, not get more technical - that's just gonna make a bigger beast to tackle when things go wrong later. I had a Matter LED strip controller, so I installed a Matter software router. The controller was buggy as hell, so I dumped it and installed a much cheaper Tuya Wifi version - works perfectly. I have a HomeKit Yale lock. Had to move a HomePod speaker close enough to the door to get the lock to go online. It worked 95% of the time, but with a 2 to 3 second lag. That 5% tho....grrrr. Made a $3 ESP32 bluetooth proxy which covers the entire house and now the lock is super responsive and uptime is 100%.