u/Valetudinous

A UK Redditor installed ~800W of solar panels on their rear wall. The panels are held 150-450mm off the wall on unistrut brackets.

In their blog post (linked from the Reddit thread), they say, "Solar panels shouldn't require planning permission, under Permitted Development rules. However, planning rules are VERY confusing, so I'm not actually sure if these fall under that? Citizens Advice think they do though, so we should be alright!"

Am I right in thinking that this is NOT permitted development?

Seems to me a brise soleil would be an obvious form factor for solar panels. I have no idea why they are aren't popular. Either in the shape of a solid awning, or as a series of slats a few inches wide to minimise wind-loading.

Anyone here know any UK suppliers of solar panel brise soleils, had one installed, or know someone who has?

Alternatively, any experiences of DIY approaches to this?

Cheers.

These seem the most viable 5015 blower fan options:

1. Xirbbo, 24V, 0.18A, 10.14CFM, 8500RPM, 67.8dBA. Has closest specs to R3Man 24V, 0.3A, 8.5CFM, 10,500RPM that some Q2 users report good results with and maybe also this 0.4A Q2 cooling fan upgrade.
2. GDSTIME, 24V, 0.1A, 5.36CFM, 6000RPM, 38.7dBA.
3. GDSTIME, 24V, 0.06A, 3.33CFM, 4000RPM, 29.2dBA.

Thoughts? Has anyone tried any of them? Better options that I'm missing?

The ASA said: "[We] concluded that [EcoFlow's] claim 'Effortless DIY installation – no electrician required' was misleading.

*[EcoFlow's] ad breached CAP Code (Edition 12) rules 3.1, 3.3 (Misleading advertising) and 3.9 (Qualification).*

[It] must not appear again the form complained of. We told Ecoflow Innovation UK t/a EcoFlow to ensure that their future ads did not misleadingly state or imply that their products could be installed without using a certified installer or electrician if that was not the case."

Source: https://www.asa.org.uk/rulings/ecoflow-innovation-uk-a26-1326698-ecoflow-innovation-uk.html

Like many people in the "People need to check out Gov.Uk news" thread, I had no idea how much information the government publishes directly.

After spending some time reading through the announcements, I found that a lot of them contain genuinely interesting developments, but they're often quite long, technical, or aimed at organisations rather than the general public and honestly the vast majority of it wasn't at all interesting to me as an individual.

To help myself keep up with what's actually changing, I built https://govnewssimplified.uk/.

Each day, it reviews recent GOV.UK announcements, filters for the stories most likely to affect the public, and generates plain-English summaries covering:

• What happened
• Why it matters
• Who is affected
• What happens next

The aim isn't to add opinion or political commentary, just to make government announcements easier to follow for people who don't have time to read the originals.

The About page explains the methodology in more detail. I'd be interested in any feedback on whether people find this useful or if there are ways it could be improved.

This project uses AI to provide the relevance scoring for all news articles posted on the gov.uk website in the past 24 hours and for daily updates and the past 7 days for weekly posts, the prompt below is used with Claude to generate the posts -

Write a concise daily digest blog post from these UK government announcements.
Audience: younger readers and people who want a clear and simple summary of important news.
Output rules:
- plain English, neutral tone, factual only
- no emoji
- no promotional or political framing
- around 100 words total where possible
- h2 title for each article with an unordered list of key points underneath
- each list item must include these labels in bold, each of which is an individual li:
  1) Summary
  2) Why it matters
  3) Who is affected
  4) What happens next
- include article links as HTML anchor tags at end of each article with a break between articles
- if information is uncertain, say so clearly
- use only simple HTML tags: <p>, <ul>, <li>, <strong>, <a>

https://medium.com/@jakeorlowitz/wikipedia-is-doing-the-capitalist-thing-56a393232943

This expands on the news already reported at https://www.reddit.com/r/enshittification/comments/1tpzol6/wikimedia_is_entering_a_new_stage_of/

My robot (J15 Pro Ultra) is connected to a WLAN without Internet access, hosted by an OpenWRT router.

If I connect my laptop to the same WLAN, I can do this:

$ ntpdate -q 192.168.3.1
2026-05-08 20:44:35.920519 (+0100) -0.005088 +/- 0.002602 192.168.3.1 s2 no-leap

I think this means my OpenWRT router is acting as an NTP server reachable at 192.168.3.1 . Correct me if I'm wrong.

However, in the Valetudo web interface, if I go to (Menu icon) > Connectivity > NTP Connectivity and set the "Server" field to 192.168.3.1 and then press the refresh icon, I get Error: connection Timeout waiting for NTP response from 192.168.3.1:123.

What am I doing wrong?

I'm contemplating a DIY air purifier build that needs to be compact and would involve a duct, so needs good static pressure. For VOCs and UFPs (enclosure for a couple of 3D printers running PLA, ASA, PETG, PHA, TPU, roughly 1m3).

I'm after Noctua-level quietness (20dBA @ 1m would be great), but higher static pressure.

I've read that centrifugal ("blower" or "squirrel cage") fans generate higher static pressure per Watt than axial fans (PC cooling fans) of the same size.

I hope to use just one fan, 120-140mm diameter and 20-40mm thick. Ideally 12V, but 5V or 24V would be OK. Budget would be max £100 for the fan. Power budget: hoping for <10W in normal usage.

PC fan manufacturers are OK at publishing at least basic specs for SPL and static pressure, and popular fans get scrutinised by reviewers so it's easy to find fans that are effective and quiet.

It's a different story with centrifugal fans. I haven't found many reviews. Brands like Sanyo Denki have good data sheets for PWM, static pressure, and airflow, but just give a maximum value for noise instead of a curve. For instance, this Sanyo Denki fan: datasheet. Maybe they're really quiet at 50% PWM? I can't tell from the datasheet.

Does anyone here have info on noise/sound-level vs static pressure values for centrifugal fans? Or recommended manufacturers?

This would be for a project in the UK, if it matters.