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Saturday 12 April 2025: 19:47. This post will be very different from almost any posted here in the past two decades. It is an essay about geopolitics, and it is the first long form essay I have written since before I had children over eleven years ago (so I am out of practice!). It was mainly written between 9th March 2025 and 24th March, with a fair bit of editing in response to feedback from others until the 31st. I was abroad last weekend, so two weeks have elapsed before I could publish this.

As with all speculation, all opinions expressed here are my own personal opinions at the current and present time. They will be different in a year, five years, or even tomorrow. My supporting claims may be factually wrong, either partially or completely, you will note I haven’t bothered to reference any of my claims nor speculations to emphasise how untrustworthy anything in this essay is. I write this essay purely to clarify my own thinking and to better position my family and those I care about.

Last post I claimed:

I am one of the few I believe to have correctly predicted the current secession of the United States from its colonial outposts in Europe in approximate timing, form and nature. Because I never wrote any of that down, only the people who know me well enough to have heard me blabbing on about all this since a few years after the financial collapse will be able to confirm it. I made the suspicion roughly after returning from working for BlackBerry in Canada [ed: in 2013], it got confirmed with how the first election of Donald Trump came about, and obviously we are right now in the beginning of said secession.

We are used to empires of antiquity only shrinking due to misfortune, defeat or incompetence. As a result, we tend to assume that once you have an Empire, nobody would willingly give it up. However, this hasn’t been true in recent centuries in Europe – those who gain Empire generally did so for good reasons at the time, and those reasons can change in ways where maintaining Empire no longer seems worth it. After all, Empire is (i) expensive (ii) unpopular with the citizenry who would much rather rulers concern themselves with local issues not faraway ones (iii) a lot of complicated effort balancing off competing foreign interests in a long term sustainable way, replete with much unpleasant surprise and blame whether things were your fault or not. One thus sees a pattern throughout European recent history of empires voluntarily disestablishing themselves, as I think the United States has just begun to do for its empire.

Five hundred years of European colonial empires

So, why does an Empire voluntarily give up its imperium? As the United States is the latest in a series of European globe striding colonial empires over the past five hundred years, I’ll only look at what I think are the relevant subset of European colonial empires preceding the American one, as I think how those ended are the most applicable to the current disestablishment:

1. The Spanish-Portuguese empire collapsed in the 1820s after Napoleon showed that Spain was no longer a worthy keeper of its colonies.
2. The First British empire (up to 1783, mostly in North America).
3. The First French empire, up to the Napoleonic conquest of Europe ended in 1815 and taking with it many of the institutions that had kept Europe relatively stable for centuries – in particular the Holy Roman Empire, which had kept the Germanic peoples restrained.
4. The Second British and French empires from 1820 onwards peaked around 1920, which together had been a sufficient global superpower to ensure a century of relative global peace. It ended by the 1960s after it had become fully internalised that the United States had taken over as global hegemon.

I use the term ‘colonial Empire’ because that’s what the literature uses, and readers will instantly know what it means. But really all these are sea-faring Empires based around far away colonies overseas – and most of the other European empires at the same time were principally land-based Empires, who tended towards regional spheres of influence as a result. Nations surrounded by sea have a natural advantage to specialise in maritime projections of power and trade, but it has an effect on cultures and values too – liberalism, individualism and egalitarianism as philosophies and mentalities tend to be more popular in maritime-focused cultures than land-focused cultures. This distinction will matter later in this essay.

Let’s take each of those colonial Empires in turn. The first modern European colonial empire ended because Spain and Portugal principally used their colonial income to purchase goods and services from Northern Europe, including mercenaries to fight their wars, rather than develop their own local industry and maintain their own local military of sufficient potency. Partially this was geography – the Iberian peninsula is almost like an island off the coast of Europe as its land bridge is high mountains. Certainly, at the time, by far the easiest way to get to it was by sea, which bred a certain complacency about invasion from anywhere but from the Moors to the south. Additionally, the land and weather were neither as agriculturally nor industrially forgiving nor bountiful as in Northern Europe, plus Northern Europe was where all the finance was. This is a good example of what happens when you offshore the wrong things to others – the others grow stronger off your wealth until you can’t stop them from invading you.

It’s not like all this wasn’t well known at the time by Spanish rulers. They embarked on multiple rounds of reform. Unfortunately, they weren’t executed competently, and arguably a full century of effort was put into turning things around by the Bourbons without much to show for it when Napoleon turned up. All that said, out of all the places Napoleon conquered, by far the most indigestible was the Iberian peninsula until his fateful Russian invasion. The lessons on how the Spanish managed their Empire and how they lost it was noticed by other Europeans.

The French and British empires fed off one another, with each desperate to prevent the other from gaining a significant advantage. In this, they continued an ancient rivalry as neighbours which had continually invaded one another for centuries and had then gone on to compete for North America which the British initially won, only for the newly formed United States to then secede. Though it waxed and waned, since independence the United States was mostly ambivalent towards Britain and France, and not much of an ally until the 20th century. They were happy to trade with the other maritime powers, and the wealth which accumulated within the US enabled the industrialisation which made the US Empire possible later. In any case, Europe had its reliable flows of cheap raw materials from North America without the hassle of governing, which was another useful lesson learned.

Obviously, Napoleon conquering all of Europe within a few short years scared the pants off the British, which caused them to double down on imperial expansion after 1815 to ensure that France would not threaten them again. France kept up a fair pace of colonial expansion into especially Africa to ensure it didn’t fall too far behind Britain. Between the two of them, the world gained a century of relative peace (‘Pax Britannica’) during which Central and Eastern Europe industrialised and militarised, setting the stage for WW1, then a pause, then its continuation WW2 which put Germany back in its pre-Napoleonic role as the restrained European hegemon, this time with the EU replacing the Holy Roman Empire as the German-restraining mechanism (both of which have eerily similar internal structures and processes, which is surely not a coincidence).

My claim is that Britain arguably overextended its Empire after the shock of Napoleon principally out of fear of what might happen if it didn’t. You need a critical mass of people to agree on that fear to achieve enough consensus to agree on such an allocation of resources to abroad rather than to home (which is never popular under any system of government). When post-revolutionary France suddenly leapt ahead in imperial accomplishment, and Britain had to muster everything to defeat Napoleon, it established uncontroversially with the British ruling elite that that genie must be firmly kept within the bottle going forth.

Whilst the British Empire technically peaked in 1920, it was approaching bankruptcy and it was widely recognised as having been unwell for some decades by that point. Most think that imperial decline set in during the long economic depression starting from 1873, during which continuing to pay for Empire began to be increasingly questioned. By the time the 20th century had begun, real doubt had set in whether the monies spent on ensuring the empire were worth it. After all, by then most regions of the world now had regional rulers who were more than happy to extract resources, put them on a boat and sell them to you for a price just like the United States. Why bother directly running colonies and getting all the blame, hassle and stress, when you could get most of the value of having colonies without the bother of running them?

Also – and I think this is more important than people realise – by 1890, approximately four generations had lived since Napoleon. By the time you get to great-grandchildren in charge of things, the memories and convictions of great-grandparents become more abstract facts than sincerely and deeply held truisms. I note that the United States believed in the need to maintain its empire for around 80 years after WW2; what it is doing now is because a sufficient number of its ruling elite no longer fears the consequences of withdrawing US hard power from Europe. That is almost exactly the same timescale on which Britain stopped committing fully to its Empire. I think this parallel in Imperial evolution timelines is not widely realised, in fact let’s compare the British and American imperial timelines directly:

	Britain	USA	Time since existential threat was dealt with
Existential threat vanquished	1815	1945
Imperial overexpansion caused extended Economic depression1 begins	1873	2008	(58 years)	(63 years)
Usefulness of Empire loses consensus within ruling elites	1900	2025?	(85 years)	(80? years)

Ah, but what about the 1973 stagflation period I hear you ask? Well, WW1 ended in 1918. 1973 - 1918 = 55 years. I’ve no idea if it isn’t just coincidence that these durations happen to align so well, and no doubt that the 1970s stagflation was brought on early by the oil price shocks from the Middle East (though the Economics literature is fairly sure stagflation would have happened anyway by the end of the 1970s).

All these resonances make you ponder, don’t they?

[1]: The meaning of ‘Extended Economic depression’ ought to be clarified – it is when an economic downturn lasts decades and during which a majority of the population feels that their lot in life is diminishing. The 1873 long depression lasted a quarter century and was particularly notable for most workers remaining both employed and increasing their purchasing power throughout due to falling prices; despite this there was rising anger with ruling elites for ‘cheating the system’ in favour of themselves – in reality, profit margins had fallen as mass production had soared, so this long depression was one of industrial overcapacity tying up capital in unproductive uses, so the ruling elite looked like they owned all the wealth, but they were actually quite trapped by how little capital there was around for growth. The current long depression starting in 2008 has run for seventeen years so far, and looks more similar to the 1873 long depression than any other I can think of – once again populists who impose tariffs are put in power by angry populations despite that on most measures, those populations are better off economically than they were before the depression began. The 1873 depression was ended by remilitarisation and sending off enough of that population to war that those who returned were grateful for their lots in life, and no longer so angry with ruling elites (which is paradoxical given those elites sent them off to die, but there you have it!). I suspect this depression is also ending with remilitarisation, and the only question will be whether war can be averted this time?

The post-WW2 European compact

It is worth recollecting why the US colonised Europe in the first place after WW2, and were generally welcomed in to do so at the time by most European countries – indeed, only France, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland and Ireland out of all the European countries west of the Iron Curtain do not host US military bases.

Europeans, having repeatedly demonstrated their fondness for ethnically cleansing each other over millennia, were clearly unfit to have nuclear weapons. And I think that most of the Western and Central European ruling elite were wise enough to agree more or less to not obtaining them for the most part, and so you got the strange system of America lending nuclear weapons to various European countries who then claim they have no nuclear weapons, which persists to this day. Britain does have her own nuclear weapons, but depends exclusively on the US to maintain those weapons, which gives the US considerable soft power over British nuclear doctrine. Only France and Russia have a completely sovereign and independent weapon, targeting and delivery system. They alone can independently posture a potential nuclear strike by airplane bomber to warn off aggressors, as the British rely exclusively on US kit for non-submarine launched strikes i.e. British nukes would need to be mounted on US made missiles or aircraft, which gives the US a say over most of their use. And apart from Russia, France and Britain, no other European country has the capability to target hard power anywhere on the planet.

The United States holding a veto over European hard power was designed into the system from the beginning. The US, having been drawn into global war for a second time to protect its interests, was keen on preventing Europe from waging war going forth. So a compact was formed: European nations provided boots on the ground and raw numbers and paid for lots of expensive US kit which generated lots of good US factory jobs. The US kept a monopoly on strategic command, intelligence, and the ability to coordinate all the European militaries as a whole, with only France mounting a relevant objection to such submissiveness. Yes, some individual countries could to a limited degree coordinate and plan a mobilisation on their own – France independently, Britain with much quiet technical help and therefore acquiescence from the United States – but nobody other than the United States had the capacity to marshall European forces as a single entity.

Whilst expensive, the United States at the time gained much from this arrangement:

1. They got a front seat to preventing the expansion of Communism (and actually Eurasianism) via Soviet Russia.
2. They stopped European countries getting themselves into a state where they would blow up civilisation, including the United States.
3. Post WW2, only three other parts of the world had shown any ability to challenge US power across a global scale: the Soviets, Japan, and Europe. By keeping Europe and Japan under the US colonial thumb, they were neutered as threats to US hard power preeminence. And Japan and Europe ‘bookended’ the Soviet threat from both sides, physically containing it with buffer states between it and the US.
4. Whenever the US wanted to do something globally unpopular, it could hark back to the allied coalition of WW2 by getting most of those same countries to send their troops to fight alongside US troops. It therefore could claim a moral superiority by likening whatever unpopular thing it was doing with defeating Nazis in a coalition of the same allies which defeated Nazism. This was very useful – especially to the domestic audience – so long as you cared about looking morally superior and enough people remembered and cared about what happened during WW2.

The expansion of the United States Empire came with submission of Western Europe and Far Eastern Asia, and constraint of historical Eurasianism. This is what geopolitics calls ‘Atlanticism vs Eurasianism’, which is very long recognised in the literature – indeed, Orwell’s three warring superstates in 1984 were called Oceania (Americas + Anglo Saxon countries), Eurasia (Europe + Russia) and Eastasia (China + Far East). This gross oversimplification was at the time less true than it is today – but as with much in 1984, Orwell did a great job at extrapolating the future accurately from ongoing trends in his time.

I think things began to change the status quo due to these principle events:

1. The elimination of Soviet Russia as the only near peer global power (1991), which made Eurasianism as an ideological and economic competitor to Atlanticism seem a spent force to the United States ruling elite (to a certain extent, I think they conflate the defeat of Soviet Communism with the defeat of Eurasianism as an ideology and dream).
2. The rise of the EU and China as peer economic competitors. I’m going to claim year 2005 for that realisation sinking in (see below). Europe no longer seemed to be where one ought to be concentrating compared to the rising ‘Eastasia’.
3. The older generations who could still remember WW2 died off, and ever fewer people in charge held the old truisms about the need for American Empire.
4. The partial deindustrialisation which had earlier afflicted Europe as industry moved to cheaper locations was applied on relevant portions of the United States after a lag of a couple of decades. Europe mostly reacted with worker retraining programmes which were somewhat successful at least with the children of the dispossessed – whereas the United States mainly did not, leaving behind multiple compounding generations of dispossessed citizens whose chronic illnesses are amplified by obesity, opiates and insecurity.

I began to notice calls within the US to withdraw from Europe starting from around year 2005. At the time, I took it as the Americans being pissed off by European negativity about their invasion of Iraq, but with hindsight I think that the organisation of the invasion of Iraq had made people deeply evaluate the cost benefits of empire for the first time since the end of the Cold War. I think the financial crash of 2009 both distracted the ruling elite for a while, but also strengthened the belief that the money spent on maintaining Empire is an opportunity cost, and that money would be better spent elsewhere. Currently, much noise is made in the US about ‘pivoting’ to Asia, conveniently ignoring the fact that a remilitarised Europe is a far stronger challenge to US interests not least due to simple geographic proximity, and that Europe still controls far more of the critical supply lines for the US economy than anywhere else (indeed, something like twice that of China). So I actually think that enough of the US ruling elite have decided that empire is no longer worth it that its disestablishment has begun, and there will be no more a pivot to Asia than comprehensive withdrawal from its Empire worldwide, despite the loud claims otherwise.

To be clear, I think belief in things like Empire is a bit like herd immunity from vaccines. If 95% of your ruling elite think it important enough, you get continuing Empire. If ‘herd immunity’ drops below some threshold – let’s say 75%, you get no more Empire. The same happened in Britain, by around 1900 you had a significant few influential people within the establishment holding the opinion that colonial Empire no longer suited British interests. That was all that was needed for it to unwind – all you need is ‘just enough’ doubt.

As Britain then learned, losing your Empire means losing lots of other things too. As late as 1970, Britain still made something like one eighth of all manufactured goods produced globally, and its opinion carried global weight worldwide. Within ten years, all those factories had been closed and all their workers made unemployed. Strikes were called, and then labour was crushed, permanently transforming British society into what could be called a traumatised people prone to epidemics of mass false belief and lashing out against manufactured fake threats. Until very recently when the recently appointed UK Prime Minister Starmer very unexpectedly actually turned out to be something of a global leader, I think it reasonable to say Britain had become mostly viewed globally as a self destroying basket case, and its opinion worth only ridicule if it was noticed at all.

It’s no fun for a country to lose empire. Yes, your young adults no longer need to go fight in endless foreign wars; yes, the money saved can now be spent on national urgencies instead, whether infrastructure or hospitals or more social welfare; yes your politicians can now spend far more time attending to domestic issues than worrying about countries far away.

But the loss of international clout and global dominance also means substantial economic and cultural retrenchment, and as with Britain, generally it is your lower socioeconomic classes who get hit especially hard as economic primacy ebbs away. The US has plenty of ‘left behind’ places, but not as many as Europe in my opinion, and nothing like as entrenched either. I have visited ‘shit holes’ in the US, UK and France. The ones in the US have started to dig themselves out after a decade or two – the ones in the UK and France are as awful and unchanged as they were when I first visited, and I see no good reason that they will ever get better so long as their countries remain on the path they have been on.

I am therefore confident that misery will become especially entrenched in swathes of the US, far worse than at present. I am confident that shrinking US military capacity will mean Europe and/or China will be far more capable of dictating how things shall be to the US in the decades to come – something which will be a shock to a population and culture not used to submissiveness. If the effect of British, Spanish, French, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman post-imperial relative decline on their populations and culture are anything to go by, it’s going to be real not fun for the American people over the next few decades as their relative decline of importance in the world speeds up, and their population reels at how much appears to have gone so very wrong. I expect they will become very bitter, like in swathes of Europe today, bitter at anything and everything they define as ‘other’.

What I think is next medium term for Europe?

Europe has clearly decided to remove the United States monopoly on the power to mobilise European armies as a single entity, and they have committed at least one trillion (yes, one thousand billion) euro to excising US hegemony from Europe. That is a very serious amount of money by any standard. It demonstrates genuine true commitment to the end goal. It means that this time, they really are serious about achieving this, unlike in the past.

From my best calculations, going forth from now Europe will spend in PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) terms more than the US spends annually on its military². Given how Germany went from negligible military power in 1933 to being able to conquer Europe by 1939, a decade from now Europe should be once again the most powerful, most modern, and most recently battle-hardened by modern warfare hard power on the planet. I expect at least 500 new nuclear weapons and delivery systems based on the French design to be secretly manufactured starting about now. Europe will eventually need to have about 2,000 nukes, I expect China to top out at around 2,000 nukes, and I expect the United States and possibly Russia to shrink their down to maybe 2,500 nukes each for the simple reasons that (a) maintaining them is very expensive and (b) two thousand modern nuclear weapons is more than enough to end current human civilisation: each bomb will vaporise a city. The United States has about 300 medium-sized cities; Europe has around 800 similar sized cities. Destroy all the cities and put radioactive nuclear fallout over anything which can grow food … well, no more current civilisation. Two thousand nukes is enough to simultaneously destroy both the US and China. You don’t need more.

However, due to lack of any singular command, Europe will be a highly impotent hard power incapable of fully directing itself at more than the most urgent of self interest. So, a bit like with how the Holy Roman Empire and how now the EU restrains Germany, how Europe governs itself will undoubtedly enfeeble its newly reacquired hard military power. Uncontroversial things like direct threats to European borders will galvanise support (and as a result, I think Russia’s recent expansionism is now doomed in the medium term), but for distant hard power projection I don’t see Europe being able to easily muster sufficient consensus unless it is completely uncontroversial. UN-backed peacekeeping missions etc will be the extent of concerted EU global hard power projection.

This will leave the relatively less potent military powers of China and the US competitive because they will have a single leadership able to focus on a single set of coherent objectives in a way Europe never will, barring a massive change in how Europe coordinates itself e.g. another Napoleon. I don’t doubt both the US and China will establish their regional spheres of influence, and rivalry will appear wherever those spheres intersect. In any case, the days of a single global hegemon will in the medium term be over.

[2]: A US dollar bought 45% more stuff if spent in the EU in 2023 according to PPP calculations because costs are 45% lower than in the US, so a US dollar ‘goes further’.

Will a three global hegemon state be stable long term?

Game theory says that only two actors can achieve stable outcomes. Three actors cannot. Physics agrees – two similar sized bodies in a gravitational system is stable. Three similar sized bodies is not.

However, the three future bodies will be anything but similar sized. I don’t see Europe as capable of jockeying for power at the edges of its sphere of influence like China and the US will be able. It simply will move too slowly, with too much uncertainty to compete with speed. Where it will undoubtedly compete instead is where its slow, ponderous processes work best which in my opinion is surely going to be expansion of its boundaries. Europe’s population is one of the oldest in the world, and will decline in population quicker than China’s and especially America’s. As mass immigration from outside the EU is deeply unpopular, the obvious solution is to admit more neighbouring countries into the EU. I can see Ukraine, Turkey, and even Russia joining the EU in the next few decades.

Yes – Russia. Due to so many decades of Atlanticism prevailing, people in Anglo-Saxon countries forget that half of Europe – and arguably more than half – naturally tends to illiberal Eurasianism in thought and culture. Having been suppressed for decades, that is currently most noticeable in the resurgence of the far right, however European illiberalism has never disappeared nor do I expect it ever will.

While American Atlanticism may currently consider Eurasianism a spent force, many towards the east of Europe think Eurasianism is on the cusp of re-ascendency. A Europe freed of US colonial influence would be acceptable to Russia, and Russia has cheap energy and raw materials and thousands of nuclear weapons all of which would be very useful to European soft and hard power. Europe has the economic clout and financing Russia lacks. Russia would correctly conclude that by joining, it could exert considerable influence over EU policy and direction from within, more so than by staying out, plus it would neuter the considerable military threat now growing right on its doorstep. Indeed, Putin’s equivalent to Mein Kampf for Hitler is arguably Dugin’s Foundations of Geopolitics in terms of a single book which lays out his preferred vision of the future and how to get there. Published in 1997, it is about pushing the US and Britain out of Europe by weakening them from within by sowing discord and misinformation within their liberally managed but not well educated polities, and forcing repeated crises which rock the establishment, and then ‘reverse merging’ the EU to regain all the lost Russian satellites back under its wing i.e. Russia gets everything its ruling elite have wanted since the Mongolian Empire ended – the Russian Empire restored, now including all of Europe, with a single continuous hegemonic platform from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Russia becomes able to project herself as a global power never possible previously with the insufficient economic heft Soviet Communism could generate.

Obviously that’s the dream, and reality will fall far short of any dream. But there’s a lot of mutual benefit to doing a deal if the US leaves the European stage – Russia has plenty of the stuff Europe wants both ideologically and in materials, and US withdrawal will leave a vacuum which shall be filled. Russia similarly gains, and post-Putin those running things on both sides will surely see a blue moon historical opportunity for a union. I think it highly likely that post-Putin and post-US, Russia will declare itself to have renounced all its bad ways, apply to join the EU, and I think the EU will accept after putting on a sufficient show of ‘being tough on Russia’. This could begin as soon as fifteen years from now, so maybe by year 2040. The historical dream of Eurasia will be finally achieved.

The founding of a stable Eurasia will disturb status quos – admitting Russia would give the EU an extensive land border with China, which may or may not be welcomed at the time. China’s government is generally pragmatic – a land border with an expanded EU may well be considered an opportunity as much as a threat, if China continues to think of the EU as it does now – rather ineffective, and therefore not much of a threat. That said, such a Eurasia would truly be a colossus globally speaking – the biggest economy, by far the biggest military, the biggest continuous land mass, and around one billion (admittedly rather elderly) citizens. China has always feared threats from its north, so such a titan appearing alongside may go down poorly. Hard to say this far out – it may insist on some sort of buffer state in between, as is likely for Canada to become between Eurasia and the United States.

I’m not at all sure how much I personally would like the EU with Russia and her supporting countries exercising her influence within, tilting the centre of political discourse and culture far to the right of now, and with distinctly illiberal elements. I think the new centre would be somewhat around Hungary’s present right wing, and I think such an EU would be quite distasteful to me personally. But I know from history that systems of equally sized powers lead to catastrophic war – you need somebody to be the biggest, baddest hegemon to ensure peace. An illiberal Europe as the global hegemon is better than nuclear ashes, and it will still be relatively liberal compared to many parts of the world. It is therefore better than almost all the alternatives I can think of, so I’d have to get over it.

There is also India, which is surely to become a great power sooner rather than later. I don’t currently see imperial ambitions, but I do see them expanding their sphere of influence to the detriment of China’s and Russia’s. And that will truly make the system a three body problem, which is definitely unstable. Long term stability needs to avoid equally sized powers.

What I think is immediately next for the US?

I can’t say anything useful about a potential US-Europe-China-India world as it’s too unpredictable, so bringing it back to what I care about i.e. family, friends etc, what happens in the next few years in Europe and the US?

It seems hard to believe that the US won’t experience a substantial economic contraction next. Never mind the tariffs, it’s the uncertainty which ruins economic confidence. Nobody can now trust that anything from the United States, including from its companies, will provide uninterrupted service after the current US President put a halt to even commercial supplies of services by US firms to foreigners (one example of several is when the US very recently prevented its companies supplying commercial grade satellite photos to Ukraine – something I personally have purchased in the past, and from now onwards I could not be sure I could purchase in the future). Why make your business reliant on goods and services from US firms when they could be suddenly halted, or their price suddenly rise by 20% or more? So I expect a hefty withdrawal by global buyers from anything US supplied, and there is nothing anybody can do to stop that now as confidence and trust have been lost.

Not only is anything from the US now unreliable, Economics teaches that fiscal deficits are financed by trade imbalances i.e. you can run a deficit in your fiscal budget if and only if you have a negative flow in your foreign trade so they cancel each other out. If you remove your trade deficit with foreigners using tariffs and/or by scaring them off to other suppliers, you have to also eliminate your fiscal deficit, otherwise you get a run on your currency and capital flees your economy (i.e. a stock and bond market crash combined with your currency crashing). That means the US government will have to close their fiscal deficit either by spending cuts or tax rises. Neither is good for economic growth. It doesn’t help that two of the major sources of US deficit financing – Europe and China – will be spending lots of money domestically going forth instead of putting it into US Treasuries which fills in the US government fiscal gap. There is a confluence of factors all at once very negative for the US economic outlook. In fact, I struggle to think of a parallel in Economic history where so many negative economic factors occurred simultaneously. From a pure Economist perspective, what will happen next is very exciting, but for real people on the ground in the United States I can’t see it being anything other than awful.

On that basis, it would seem reasonable that due to severe recession, the mid-term US elections in 2026 could put both houses under the control of Democrats, who would surely then impeach the current US President who by then would be very deeply unpopular with voters. I am sure some purging of his movement and ideology would then occur, some passing of new laws to reduce the powers of the ‘elected King’ going forth, and somebody more reliable put into the White House instead. Some fine words might be said about recommitting to US hegemony, but to be honest once enough of the ruling elite don’t want to do Empire any more – and by proactively enabling Trump v2 which they very easily could have stopped, they clearly don’t want to do Empire from now on – only more rapid withdrawal from the world is coming next for the United States. Only a crisis which existentially threatens the US can change that now.

What I think is immediately next for Europe?

Europe is about to receive a sustained fiscal firehose of money. Due to such substantial and sustained fiscal stimulus, it seems very hard to believe that the recession of the past few years won’t end as a result. Parts of Europe strongly tied to the US economy like Ireland will see recession, but Central Europe I think will roar to life as factories start churning out weapons by the million, and most of Central and Eastern Europe starts mandatory military training of its citizens. All that new spending combined with taking so many workers out of the workforce will surely be inflationary, so I think the cost of living is going to rise, and therefore so will interest rates to try and hold down inflation.

As supply chains diversify away from the US to more reliable suppliers, I expect China to especially benefit, perhaps even enough for its economy to exit the economic depression they’ve been faking that they’re not having. Their leadership is more than well aware of this once in a generation opportunity to end the unipolar world and the ‘collective West’, so they’ve been sending lots of high level representatives to Europe all of whom have been saying lots of nice things to Europeans about how poorly they’re being treated, and making it very clear that Chinese factories stand ready, and Chinese supply chains are reliable and trustworthy not like American factories. I see Turkey has been doing the exact same, pitching itself as a near shore supplier of anything Europe might need locally produced, and also talking up how poorly the Europeans are being treated. The Turks, like the French, are amongst the very few in Europe to have 100% US independent weapon systems to sell, and as a member of NATO all their kit will work with existing NATO kit without issue. All very canny of them, and I expect the military industrial complexes of France-China-Turkey will do well out of all this.

All that said, there is substantial external risk for Europe. If there is a run on US treasuries, the catastrophic consequences on the global economy cannot be overstated. I find it hard to believe that the US Congress wouldn’t do what it takes to prevent that, same as during the financial crash, but unlike last time they can’t just print a whole load of cash and throw it at the problem which was politically relatively easy to do. This time they’d have to drastically cut spending (most probably military spending, cutting anything else would negatively impact the economy more severely), also raise taxes up to European levels, and the Fed would have to severely raise interest rates to sustain the value of the US dollar. As the saying goes, when the US economy sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold, and that will remain true even after years of active economic decoupling by everybody else from the US. US decline is bad for all short term.

I’m getting the distinct impression that either there will be a temporary pause to the war in Ukraine while both Europe and Russia rearm as fast as they can, or there will be no pause at all and it’ll just grind on until Putin exits the stage. Either scenario suits European leadership, as they don’t really care about Russian and Ukrainian lives lost. So long as they keep the fighting in Ukraine so Russia doesn’t threaten other European countries is all that matters to them in the short term. It seems very unlikely Russia can sustain the current pace for five more years; and five years from now, European military might will far exceed Russia’s. Both together will force an end to fighting, Putin and those close to him will meet an untimely end, and I expect EU entry talks for a newly rehabilitated Russia to begin not long thereafter.

The ideal outcome in my opinion

I’m getting into very speculative territory now i.e aspirational rather than speculative. Everything above speculates Niall’s best guesses about the short to medium term, and that ultimately leads into ‘wouldn’t it be lovely if?’ territory. So here goes my aspirational ending of this essay.

The relative decline of a single superpower is invariably good in the short term for other powers, who can rise to occupy the vacant space just as how Spain-Portugal was replaced by France-Britain, who then were replaced by the United States as dominant global hegemon. As the United States retreats from its Empire, it is a fair bet that at least China, Europe and India will occupy a larger space than they currently do.

However, three bodies of similar size are not stable – and four bodies of similar size are profoundly unstable. This is very not good when those powers all have nuclear weapons. So the ideal would actually be for at least one power to be generally recognised as supreme over all the others, in the same way as the Holy Roman Emperor was recognised as above all other Kings. As with the Holy Roman Empire, for this arrangement to work well for everybody, that Emperor needs to be restrained sufficiently that everybody can agree to them being supreme precisely because they are ineffective. I can’t currently think of any better solution than that the direct descendent of the Holy Roman Empire, the European Union, becomes the globally recognised supreme power, precisely because it will be quite incapable most of the time.

If the EU expands to include Russia and Turkey and their surrounds, she ought to be very well placed to become the new global hegemon. Everybody will dislike her equally, yet all would conclude that with her in charge no one power gets too big to cause the others problems. EU dispute mechanisms are meandering and slow, but they are effective in the long term – there is a mutually acceptable outcome which is eventually reached, no matter the initial intransigence of the interlocutors. The rule of some commonly agreed law is what matters long term for preventing Armageddon.

The Holy Roman Empire, towards its end, had two main powers of Prussia and Austria, with lots of smaller principalities supporting it. When Napoleon emerged to threaten that Empire, Prussia looked away towards Poland instead of supporting Austria. It was the perceived indifference of mighty Prussia that caused smaller principalities to defect to Napoleon to avoid invasion, which resulted in Austria standing alone against Napoleon until defeat. The Prussians then became easy takings for Napoleon. Had they all stood together initially, Napoleon would have been defeated at the beginning, and all would have benefited. To put things bluntly, we may all dislike the current system, but by collectively agreeing to support said system, we all ensure our collective survival and prospering.

Even if the EU were to become the replacement global hegemon, at some future point it will fall apart and either something better will replace it, or a new Dark Ages will begin and it’ll be up to the next civilisation which emerges centuries later to do better than we did. But for right now, I can’t think of a better replacement for US colonial empire as the global hegemon than the European Union.

Conclusion

I can’t say that I started the process of writing this essay with my ideal outcome just described. I have somehow arrived at the conclusion that more EU doesn’t just solve European problems, but it also solves world problems. More EU – and I find myself wincing as I type this – is probably the least worst solution to a post American world order in my opinion at the current time.

This essay has ignored most of the future growth areas of the world – India, Africa and South America – concentrating only on the currently dominant cultural spheres of influence of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia as Orwell grossly oversimplified it. This does a disservice to those regions and especially their own histories which European colonial empire has suppressed in recent centuries, but surely will not in future centuries. The reason I didn’t get into them above is that none of them have shown interest past nor present in globe-striding colonial Empire, and this being an essay about that, they necessarily were omitted. There is another big reason – this essay is basically a reheated synthesis of the last one hundred and fifty years of mainstream conservative Western geopolitical thought, which only concerned itself with the three spheres of influence above. Representative works might be:

• Democratic Ideals and Reality: A Study in the Politics of Reconstruction (1919) by Halford Mackinder.
• America’s Strategy in World Politics: The United States and the Balance of Power (1942) by Nicholas Spykman.
• Diplomacy (1994) by Henry Kissinger.

I should point out for balance’s sake that France, Russia and China all have their own independent schools of geopolitical thinking and literature. My own personal understanding is that they all agree on the same basic points as the Anglo-Saxon literature, they just reach different conclusions and recommendations. There is universal consensus, as far as I am aware, on the natural gravitational force to create Eurasia which only the Russian literature favours. Everybody else writes about how to counter, frustrate, mitigate and impede Eurasianism. Chinese geopolitical thinking, in particular, considers itself as closest to the classical British Empire as a maritime-focused trading power, and has been borrowing from British Imperial geopolitical strategy to keep its unruly neighbours at each other and therefore in thrall to China.

Due to a lack of academic literature, it is hard to imagine how things might play out globally if one of India, Africa or South America decided to begin playing ‘the great game’ – it depends on the accumulation of capital and wealth and therefore the means to disrupt the status quo. I think I’ll likely be quite old before how things could play out might become clear. With a bit of luck, myself, family and friends will all be happy, healthy and content. Ultimately, that’s what matters the most to me.

Addendum

I started writing this essay on the 9th March, the day after the post where I mentioned that I would write this essay. In the weeks since then, two things worth noting have happened.

The first is I was slightly annoyed to see an article in The Economist which pretty much is the analysis part of this essay with the future speculation parts removed. It felt a bit like somebody had cribbed off my essay … of course, in reality, they probably started writing exactly when I did and obviously they can’t publish the wild speculation parts in a magazine as respectable as The Economist. And almost certainly they’ve read all the same material that I have. In any case, the analysis part was almost identical to the above, so I guess despite being ‘out of the loop’ of dinner parties held by the ruling elites, I appear to have fairly well nailed what they’re all discussing internally. I guess that shows I’m on the button.

The second is that for a few days before the US vetoed the idea of a multinational peace keeping force in Ukraine entirely, it would appear that China was willing to commit a surprising amount of resources to enforcing peace in Ukraine as part of a European-led peacekeeping mission. Apparently thousands of very well armed troops were offered without being asked for it, and the quantity and depth offered was above what anyone had anticipated. Obviously social media went mad over it, but having thought it through, while it would be a bold move by China, it makes a great deal of sense for them on every axis I can think of. I don’t doubt that China’s many scenario planning strategists had cooked up this game play years ago, and having dusted it off and run it through the various committees of the party as a quick final check, President Xi gave final approval.

China desires most of all a multi-polar world made up of regional spheres of influence with its border to the North secure and supply lines safe. To this end, it has put Russia under its thumb economically to secure the Northern border; expanded its sphere of influence to the North, South and West and to a much lesser extent, its East; engaged in a directed social media campaign of propaganda across the world to favour its talking points, to the detriment of the collective West; and tried its best to set the stage for an anticipated and hoped for relative decline of US power. China’s best outcome from all this would be:

1. The USA’s soft power destroyed, with the collective West as a force ended and all its allies actively removing US influence from within themselves.

2. BUT with the bulk of US forces overseas tied up in Europe and therefore not relocated to Asia.

3. AND with the historical threat from the North firmly kept within its box (I believe the last successful toppling of Chinese rulers from outside China was the Mongol conquest – indeed most of the modern Great Wall was built after to prevent that ever happening again).

Helping out Europe with Ukraine at this time after the last few years of helping out Russia with Ukraine therefore makes sense. Europe is peeling itself away from US hegemony and will soon become a major world hard power – getting in early with helping them out is good politics and good business. The fact China was willing to put boots on the ground while the US was not would have had a superb return on investment in terms of both optics and further weakening US reputation and reliability – with a good chance that the Americans would be goaded into not removing itself from Europe, leaving Asia for China. Supporting Russia to peel Europe away from the US made sense until now, but now one needs to also tie up Russia in Europe and keep it away from thinking of what to do with all those troops who will be otherwise now kicking around – never mind the longer term concern of what if Europe and Russia unite? And finally, it surely has not been lost on the Chinese leadership that an even worse threat from the North would be if the US and Russia got together into an alliance against China.

As much as paying for a few thousand Chinese peacekeeping troops to be stationed in Ukraine going forth would have caused political problems at home, it would have been an inexpensive way of getting a whole load of bang for the buck. I don’t doubt that down the line, once Europe could ignore US requests, all the stuff the US insists Europe can’t sell to China as it threatens US interests could be dispensed with. Especially in gratitude for the Chinese being a friend when it was needed.

In any case, it became moot. What remains of the strategic analysis complex in the US recognised how catastrophic it would be for an ‘everybody bar the US has boots on the ground’ outcome, so they removed from discussion entirely the peacekeeping force proposal as an option. Even the quite unserious current US administration could see what terrible optics it would have, so they suddenly stopped demanding boots must go on the ground, and now demand that no boots must go on the ground. Hence whatever ‘peace deal’ for Ukraine which now emerges will no longer have a multinational peacekeeping force as a component.

My thanks to those who gave feedback on this essay and corrections of spelling and grammar: Megan Bean, Clara Douglas, Francis Douglas, Liz O’Sullivan, David Sankel, Chris Schumerth, Robert Seacord, Matt Thompson and Ruth Wright.

I hope you all found my little essay thought provoking. Here’s hoping the best possible outcomes arise from the current change in great power configuration!

#geopolitics

Saturday 29 March 2025: 18:50. This post is about neither geopolitics nor the house build. The geopolitics essay is written, it is about 7,000 words or so cut down from over 15,000 words. It’s currently in its final stages of review by various people I roped into proof reading it for me. I expect it should get published here maybe two weeks from now after I’ve merged everybody’s comments and feedback, and fixed up some of my less well explained paragraphs.

This is actually a much shorter post about Powerline Networking i.e. the power hungry adapters you can get to transport Ethernet over your power sockets. This is nearly the worst type of wired networking you can do, but it’s still proper wired networking and therefore of a different class to wireless networking (which is fundamentally less reliable). You would never fit Powerline Networking anywhere you have a choice e.g. if you own your own house, just fit Ethernet or Fibre. But if you rent and you’re not allowed to drill holes in your walls and roof, Powerline can be a reasonable solution – and it is better than Wifi in terms of reliability and consistency.

Powerline Networking

We fitted Homeplug AV1 500? into this rented house shortly after we moved in in 2013 precisely because I needed to get the internet from where the vDSL modem is (next to the front door) to where everything else is without problems caused by the very crowded 2.4Ghz Wifi dropping out due to us living within high density former council housing. That did work well, but the AV1’s would drop out any time the microwave turned on plus they were well slower than the vDSL connection (70 Mbps at the time). I therefore got my first set of AV2’s in 2014, they were AV2 600’s and they were still a bit slower than the vDSL connection, but impervious to microwaves so that was a win. Annoyed by losing internet speed, I then splurged on my first set of AV2 1200’s in 2015 and they were finally faster than my vDSL, as they could do about 100 Mbps in terms of TCP transfer bandwidth. And that’s where I stopped, as there is no point fitting something faster than your external network. And, in fairness, those AV2 1200’s have been utterly trouble free for ten years now. They ‘just work’.

About one month ago, our internet went totally dead. Out came the Eircom guy, he fitted a new line, which turned out to be flaky with the best connection speed at about 20 - 30 Mbps and it constantly dropping out. We had the exact same problem when we first moved in, and I had the Eircom guy out like a yoyo to fix it until they finally found some combination of wiring which was fairly stable – you’d still get occasional outages for a few minutes, but it was liveable and you generally got about 90 Mbps. To be honest, 90 Mbps is plenty enough internet for most use cases – you don’t need more, it’s now a ‘nice to have’ if it’s more. Indeed, if anything, the biggest issue now with vDSL is latency, you get an extra 10 milliseconds with vDSL or so for those few hundred metres to the cabinet which is a significant chunk of the total latency to anywhere in Europe.

I wasn’t in the mood to go through that circus again with getting Eircom constantly out to fiddle with the vDSL, so I looked into getting fibre installed into the home. I had fibre installed into the site last year where to avoid the install fee, you needed to sign up to a 24 month contract. Seeing as I very seriously hope that we are out of here a year from now, that would be a non-starter however thankfully only a year later, now the minimum contract length to get free installation has dropped to twelve months. So I signed up!

Fibre to the Home (FTTH)

Fibre to the home is interesting stuff. Your traditional analogue phone line is a twisted pair of copper (and often copper coated aluminium in Ireland) cables between the cabinet and your house. It arrives into your house as maybe a 3 mm diameter cable. What fibre to the home does is physically replace that cable with an identical one, but with a fibre optic cable within instead. The big advantage of this is one to one physical compatibility – often reusing the existing hole in the wall as you simply pull out the old cable and push in the new cable. You can reuse the same terminating enclosure in the wall, same fixings from your roof to the pole etc.

In fact, fibre to the home is probably the only place where multi-mode rather than single-mode fibre is going to survive into the long term. Multi-mode fibre shines multiple frequencies of light down a single fibre, whereas single-mode shines exactly one frequency. My future house uses dual channel single-mode fibre throughout – it is nowadays same price as multi-mode as the fibre has become so cheap, and if you can run a fibre for each direction, then single-mode fibre is superior in every way. My very cheap 2.5 Gbps fibre transducers will do 10 km of fibre or so, so they’re way overkill, and with more powerful transducers you can do 10 Gbps over 100 km without issue. The multi-mode fibre used in FTTH swaps the ability to carry multiple signals within a single fibre for far shorter distances – 10 Gbps might only work over 550 metres or so – but now you can pack multiple links into each fibre. Run half a dozen fibres per cable from the cabinet to the pole, and you can give each home off that pole up to 10 Gbps each. As all vDSL connections are within hundreds of metres from the cabinet, multi-mode fibre really shines as a direct substitute in this case.

Anyway, this Monday they’ll be swapping my analogue cable to the pole outside for a fibre cable to the same pole and then I’ll have a 500 Mbps internet connection (which is the lowest still available in Ireland for fibre). Obviously a Powerline Network able to do only 100 Mbps would mean giving up most of the internet speed once again, so that’s what motivated me to look into the latest and greatest in Powerline technology to see what has replaced my AV2 1200’s.

G.hn

It turns out that there has been no replacement for AV2 in the past ten years! In fact, the AV2 consortium wound itself up in 2018, considering its work ‘done’. Their last AV2 release was AV2 2000 to supersede 1200, but as https://www.smallnetbuilder.com/tools/charts/powerline/view/ shows, it’s actually slower than the 1200 for short to medium distances and only really improves long distances.

There is however a new kid on the block: G.hn, which stands for ‘Gigabit Home Networking’. It has a very different lineage. It was originally for putting ethernet over analogue telephone wires i.e. rather like vDSL, and it’s much closer to vDSL in terms of implementation though still quite different.

That smallnetbuilder list of benchmarks above does show a G.hn entry, and it’s slower than AV2 1200. But not by much – 120 Mbps vs 160 Mbps. What has changed since is that there is a newer edition of G.hn called ‘Wave 2’ which uses MIMO, whereas original G.hn only used SISO. So it should now be rather faster than before. Unfortunately, there is a real lack of anything empirical on the internet about G.hn Wave 2. There are no reviews at all comparing different technologies on the same network. Some folk on Reddit and Amazon reviews were positive, some were negative. There was nothing conclusive – which is why I have written all this up, because nobody seems to have done any actual side by side testing despite that G.hn Wave 2 products landed in 2021 or so.

Benchmarking G.hn vs Homeplug AV2

I took a punt on a G.hn Wave 2 kit, once again from TP-Link, and I swapped the existing TP-Links identically for the new ones with an identical network and identical testing. It should be mentioned that I have two AV2 networks in the home, and I only replaced one of them for the testing, so the power cables are ‘noisy’ with traffic from the other AV2 network. I should also mention that I explicitly disabled vDSL compatibility for both AV2 and G.hn, which defaults to on for both, and I disabled power saving for both.

	PHY TX	PHY RX	iperf TX	iperf RX	Efficiency	ping TX	ping RX
Homeplug AV2 1200	387 Mbps	426 Mbps	75.7 Mbps	93.6 Mbps	~20%	6 ms	5 ms
G.hn 2400	731 Mbps	920 Mbps	230 Mbps	296 Mbps	~30%	14 ms	3 ms

That is about three times faster for TCP bandwidth than before, which is quite impressive. The ping times get better in one direction, but much worse in the other. Weird, though it could be the other AV2 network interfering.

It looks like I’ll get about half of my shiny new 500 Mbps fibre connection, which is still three times better than the vDSL when it was at its best. Probably more importantly, ten milliseconds should be lopped off latencies, meaning that the internet will ‘feel’ much faster.

And I guess we’re not moving out now until April 2026!

#powerline

Saturday 8 March 2025: 18:34. Still stuck in joist design for my house build, where we have been since November. There has been a break through thankfully, they will be reducing all the joist heights from 304 mm to 254 mm, and with a bit of rejigging the ceiling buildups we have avoided a redesign because none of the finished ceiling heights need to change (thankfully!). They’re working on finishing up the joist design, and then we can finally move onto foundation design. Who knows, might actually erect something by end of 2025!

I have completed migrating from the sixth to the seventh generation dedicated server architecture, and the sixth generation hardware will idle from now on probably until its rental expires in the summer. So far, so good – to date it’s running very well, and the difference in terms of email client speed is very noticeable. It was a fair few months to get it done, and probably at least fifty hours of my time between all the researching and configuration etc. But that should be my public server infrastructure solved until I’m fifty-five years old or thereabouts.

Also some months ago I happened to be reading Hacker News where somebody mentioned that ancient Roman coins are so plentiful that you can buy bags of them for not much money at all. That kinda led me down a bit of a rabbit hole, it turns out a surprising amount of ancient coinage has survived – probably for the dumb simple reason that it was valuable by definition, so people went out of their way to retain and preserve it. You can, off eBay, get a genuine Greek solid silver tetradrachm made during the reign of Alexander the Great for under €100 if you bid carefully at auction – complete with portrait of the man himself! As much as buying a whole load of ancient silver and gold coinage has a certain appeal, it is a horrendous consumer of both money and time for which I currently have much higher priority uses. But I did see you can pick up unwashed Late Roman Imperial ‘shrapnel’ for cheap enough I reckoned it worth buying a few as a teaching opportunity for my children.

So I purchased ten unwashed bronzes for fifty euro, an absolute rip off considering you can get a thousand unwashed bronzes for under a thousand euro, but I suppose there are claims that mine would come from a checked batch with more ‘good ones’ in it i.e. legible ones. Well, after the kids had scrubbed them with toothbrushes and let them soak in deionised water in between a few times over several days, here are the three best of the ten coins:

The first I reckon is a Constantine (unsure which); the second I think he’s Valentinian the third (425-455 AD); the third he’s not quite clear enough to make out, but almost certainly a Late Roman Emperor. A further three coins had a bust which could be just about made out, but not well enough to say which emperor, and of the remaining four, three only had some letters which could be made out with nothing else, and the last we could maybe make something out coin-like if you squinted hard enough – but neither writing nor bust.

Certainly an expensive way of learning about history, but hopefully one that they’ll remember. The key lessons taught were: (i) Long lived emperors turn up more frequently than short lived ones (ii) Emperors who debased their money by printing a lot of coin also turn up more frequently and (iii) we get a lot of Late Roman Imperial coin turning up because at the end of the empire, the owners of buried stashes either died in the instability or the stash simply became not worth digging up as Imperial coin isn’t worth much without an Empire to spend it in. Having hopefully communicated these three points to my children, I guess I can draw a line under this teaching opportunity.

Solar panel history for my site

In Autumn 2023 – can you believe it was nearly eighteen months ago now! – a virtual diary entry showed my newly mounted solar panels on the site. These eighteen panels are half of the future house roof panels and half was deliberately chosen as you cannot fit more than twenty panels per string, which implies eighteen on one string and twenty panels on the other string.

The Sungrow hybrid inverter has performed absolutely flawlessly during this time. The early days had many uncontrolled outages during the winter period as I hadn’t yet figured out quite the right settings (my first time installing and commissioning a solar panel system!), but by March 2024 I nearly had all the configuration kinks ironed out. Since then – apart from a ‘loop of death’ outage in November 2024 which was due a very rare combination of events – it really has been solid as a rock.

To be clear, if less radiation falls from the sky than is consumed by the security cameras and internet connection there, yes the batteries do run down and eventually the system turns off. I call this a ‘controlled outage’ because the system detects it will soon run out of power and it turns everything but the inverter off. It then recharges the batteries up to a minimum threshold before restoring power, and at no point does the system get confused. This is different to an uncontrolled outage where the inverter does not recharge the batteries for some reason, and enters into a fault condition requiring me to manually intervene on site.

That ‘loop of death’ I mentioned is an example. Previously, I had the system configured to never let the battery drop below 5% charge, and that worked fine. Unfortunately, last November what happened was a sudden drop in temperature after when the battery had reached 4% charge or so. Lower temperatures mean less battery capacity, so that 4% suddenly became effectively zero. This caused the computer inside the batteries to physically disconnect the batteries to prevent them getting damaged. When the sunshine reappeared, the physical switch connecting the batteries was tripped, and there was no ability to charge them. I didn’t notice this for a few days as it was an especially dull week of weather, only when it kept not coming back did I drive out to investigate where I was obviously appalled as if I couldn’t get any charge back into the batteries, I couldn’t prevent the physical safety relays from firing. That would turn several thousand euros of battery into bricks. That was quite a stressful morning. Still, I got them rescued, and I tweaked the configuration to henceforth never let the batteries get below 20% charge instead. That worked brilliantly – the entire winter 24-25 period of little solar irradiation passed without a single further uncontrolled outage.

Anyway, Sungrow offer an optional cloud service integration which provides remote management and remote monitoring via a phone app and/or website. If enabled, it records every five minutes the following measurements into its history database:

1. Volts and amps on PV strings one and two.
2. Volts and amps on each phase of the three phase AC output.
3. Total DC power in kW.
4. Total AC power in kW (from this you can calculate inverter efficiency).
5. Battery charging or discharging power in kW.

You can get a whole bunch more measurements from the cloud interface, but as far as I can tell, the above are the only ones stored in a long term time series database. Said database is downloadable into your choice of CSV or Excel, however their export tool only permits thirty minute granularity if you’re downloading a month or more. That’s good enough for my use case, which is attempting to estimate how much power those panels could gather if all the power they could generate were used.

Daily hours of light

For obvious reasons, if the sun isn’t shining then solar panels cannot generate power. As we live quite far north, there is considerable variance in daylight hours across the year: approximately 7.75 hours at the winter solstice up to 16.75 hours at the summer solstice. That is 32% of the day for winter, and 70% of the day for summer. This is a best case – while solar panels work surprisingly well in bright cloudy days, they do not work well in dull cloudy days. A short day means less opportunity for thick cloud to pass within the hours of daylight.

Solar panels, interestingly, develop their maximum voltage if radiation lands on them exactly perpendicularly. If it lands oblique to ninety degrees, you get less voltage, and indeed much of the recent technological progress in solar panels has come from increasing the voltage developed over a wider angle. Voltage will appear with almost any amount of light – indeed, as my time series history clearly shows, a full moon on a clear night will generate more than fifty volts across those eighteen panels. You won’t get more than a few watts out of it, maybe enough to charge a phone, but it’s not nothing. I can also see that peak voltage – around 730 volts – clearly happens in winter, whereas summers might not beat around 690 volts. This is because these panels are mounted at 45 degrees, and when the sun is high the angle is quite oblique to their perpendicular. In any case, we can tell when light reaches the panels by when voltage appears on the PV string, and for our graph below we count the number of half hour slots with more that 500 volts appearing on the PV string.

The next bit is harder. The batteries start charging as soon as enough power appears on the panels that it is worth sending some to the batteries. Having stood next to the inverter, I can tell you it appears to determine how much load it can put on the panels by incrementally scaling up how many amps it draws from the panels, and if the voltage droops it backs off. I can tell this from relays clicking, and a volt and current meter attached (note that standard consumer multimeters cannot handle > 500 volts! You need a trade multimeter for this). Obviously, the time series we have doesn’t capture any of this, and only reports how many kW was flowing into the battery at any given time. And once the battery is full, it stops charging it.

This tends to mean that only the very beginning of each morning charges the battery, and therefore our only measurements for estimating how much power these panels can gather are for the very start of the day only. This matters, because solar irradiation has a curve like this:

… where zero is the horizon, and that curve is for June 20th at my latitude. This means solar irradiation reaches two thirds full strength four hours into the day, so measuring capture for only the first few hours of the day will grossly underestimate total capacity to capture for a whole day. I therefore need to ‘undo’ that curve which looks to be approximately x² or x⁴.

Anyway, I chose x^0.25 and here is the year of 2024 (I actually tell a small lie – Jan/Feb are actually 2025, because of all the uncontrolled outages in Jan/Feb 2024. It’s why I was waiting until March 2025 to write up this post):

As previously described, the blue line is the total number of 30 minute periods with more than 500 volts on the PV string – this strongly tracks the number of daylight hours, unsurprisingly, with the variance due to cloud cover. As mentioned above, ignore the dip in November with the ‘loop of death’, and do bear in mind that for Nov-Dec-Jan-Feb there can be occasional gaps in the data due to controlled outages due to lack of power raining down from the sky. Obviously if there is no power, there is no internet, and the numbers then don’t appear on Sungrow’s cloud service. This artifically depresses those months, but it also artificially boosts them because the batteries will often suck in 8 - 10 kWh in a day during those months which makes that day look unusually good.

Something perhaps surprising about the blue line is it ranges between 20% and 60%, rather than between 32% and 70% as described above. The answer is simple: geography. We have tree cover to the west which chops off the end of the day in the summer, and mountains to the south which chops off both sunrise and sunset in winter. The panels are mounted on the ground so they are particularly affected by geography – once onto the house’s roof, that effect should be markedly diminished.

The red line is the estimated number of kWh available per day based on the rate of charging in the morning descaled by x^0.25, and then linearly adjusted to match this estimate of solar PV production from my house’s PHPP computer model of its predicted performance:

This is for thirty-seven panels, so divide everything by two to get what PHPP thinks ought to be the solar PV yield for this location. I matched my estimated graph such that Jun-Jul matches what this graph predicts (~27 kWh/day), as does Dec-Jan (~10 kWh/day).

So, the obvious elephant in the room is that the curves of both graphs don’t match! To be honest, the PHPP graph looks like the sunrise graph whereby due to how the planet rotates whilst also going around the sun, sunrise gets earlier quicker in the beginning of the year. This might be a bug in PHPP? I have a second set of kWh per day estimations for the house from the Easy PV website:

Now that looks more like my graph! There is an off-centre bias towards Apr-May, and a similar raised tail Aug-Sep to the PHPP estimate, but it’s less pronounced. Easy PV also thinks a bit less power will be captured in summer, but especially in winter (the red is contribution back to the grid; the green is charging of battery; the blue is consumption).

My graph does show a raised tail Aug-Sep, but no off-centre bias towards Apr-May. But do you know it could be as simple as that the weather in 2024 in Apr-May was unusually cloudy? It’s entirely possible, each year’s graph will have its own shape, and only by averaging say ten years of them might you get the shapes that Easy PV and PHPP show.

Perhaps a future virtual diary entry here might average all the annual results and find out?

The next virtual diary entry

Which brings me onto the likely topic of my next virtual diary entry here.

I haven’t written here about geopolitics in a very long time, certainly decades. It’s not that I haven’t been keeping up to date and well informed, rather to be honest I don’t think my thoughts on it are worth typing up in my very limited spare time. If I am to invest multiple hours clarifying my thinking onto this virtual paper, generally it is because of:

1. I need a searchable record of my past thinking for future projects. This has been 65% of everything I’ve written here in certainly the past fifteen years.

2. It helps me to clarify what I am actually thinking by writing out prose to describe that thinking, even if I never expect to need to refer to that thinking again in the future. This might be as much as 30% of everything I’ve written here in the past fifteen years.

And because my thinking on geopolitics usually really doesn’t matter, it isn’t worth investing a non-trivial amount of my free time to write it up.

I am one of the few I believe to have correctly predicted the current secession of the United States from its colonial outposts in Europe in approximate timing, form and nature. Because I never wrote any of that down, only the people who know me well enough to have heard me blabbing on about all this since a few years after the financial collapse will be able to confirm it. I made the suspicion roughly after returning from working for BlackBerry in Canada, it got confirmed with how the first election of Donald Trump came about, and obviously we are right now in the beginning of said secession.

Most of such ‘pub bar talk’ material is harmless and irrelevant – a hobby thankfully usually not punished for doing it publicly in the collective West, unlike in most of the rest of the World. But when trillions of euro will be spent and billions of lives are about to radically change from the trajectory they were previously on, now it actually matters enough to be worth writing up here.

My family, but also my friends, my neighbours, my colleagues and indeed my people will now not live the rest of their lives along the patterns previously assumed. Seeing as they rather matter to me, I ought to clarify my thinking on this topic in order to have my best guess at what will happen in the future before I die. Only then can I guide those I care about in the right directions as best I can.

So I need to write something up. It will likely take me several weeks to phrase it correctly. But I do think it needs doing.

If you’re interested in such things, watch out for that here. If you’re not, remember to skip the next post! Until then, be happy!

#house

Sunday 23 February 2025: 11:39. I am writing to you at this moment from my new colocated Raspberry Pi servers which have been serving this website for a few days now. I’m still in the process of migrating over email, calendar and other services from the Intel Atom based servers, but there shouldn’t be much more work left in it.

This post will be mainly about testing the seventh generation of my public server infrastructure. I previously discussed last December the current economics of the market driving me towards a colocated server solution for the first time ever, which showed quite the shift in exigencies in recent years. As you will see, this new solution has big gains in some areas, but a few regressions in others.

Firstly, to summarise past posts a little, what has shifted is that obsolete servers offered as budget dedicated servers have been rising in price as datacenter electricity has risen in price. This is because obsolete hardware whilst nowadays very good at idle power consumption, they can still consume a fair whack of power if doing anything, so their peak power consumption makes them expensive. If you can reduce your space footprint down to two credit cards and your power consumption down to fifteen watts or especially ten watts or less, there are colocation options available nowadays far cheaper than renting a budget obsolete server.

I gave a list of those I could find in previous posts, and I ended up choosing the cheapest which was FinalTek in the Czech Republic at €1.97 inc VAT per server per month if you buy three years of colocation at once. This, as my noted in earlier posts, is a 100 Mbit ‘unlimited’ shared service on a 1 Gbit switch, so you get 1 Gbit between the two Pis but up to 100 Mbit to the public internet. I’ll quote their setup email at this point for requirements:

The device must meet the following parameters:
    - it must be in a box (not a bare board with exposed circuitry)
    - the power adapter to the device must be for Czech power grid (EU power plug)
    - dimensions must not exceed 15 x 10 x 5 cm
    - must not have a power consumption greater than 5V / 3A
    - must be set to a static IP address
    - send the device to the address below

If the device uses an SD card for operation, it is advisable to pack spare cards with a copy of the OS in case the primary card fails.

As mentioned in previous posts, it is the 5v @ 3a requirement which filters out Intel N97 mini PCs which probably can be configured to run under 15 watts (and definitely under 20 watts), but they generally need a 12v input. They’re far better value for money than a Raspberry Pi based solution which is around one third more expensive for a much worse specification. You can of course fit a higher spec Banana Pi or any other Single Board Computer (SBC) also able to take 5v power, but none of those have the effortless software ecosystem maturity of the Raspberry Pi i.e. an officially supported Ubuntu Server LTS edition which will ‘just work’ over the next four years. So, to put it simply, the one single compelling use case I have ever found for a high end Raspberry Pi is cheap dedicated server colocation. For this one use case, they are currently best in class with current market dynamics.

Even with the very low monthly colocation fees, this hasn’t been an especially cheap exercise. Each Raspberry Pi 5 with case cost €150 inc VAT or so. Add power supply €10 and used NVMe SSD off eBay €35 and you’re talking €200 inc VAT per server. Over three years, that’s equivalent to €7.64 inc VAT per server per month which is similarly priced to my existing rented Intel Atom C2338 servers (~€7.38 inc VAT per server per month). So this solution overall is not cheaper, but as previous posts recounted you get >= 2x the performance, memory and storage across the board. And, the next cheapest non-Atom rented server is €21 inc VAT per month, and this is one third the cost of that all-in.

Assuming market dynamics continue to shift along their current trajectories, in 2032 when I am next likely to look at new server hardware it’ll be interesting to see if wattage per specification will let me reduce watts for good enough hardware for a 2030’s software stack. In the list of colocation providers I gave in previous posts, many capped power to ten watts max or price went shooting up quickly. That’s enough for a Raspberry Pi 4, but they’re as slow as my existing Intel Atom C2338 rented servers plus they can’t take a NVMe SSD. Seven years from now, I would assume there will be a Raspberry Pi 6 and/or cheap colocation for 12v ten watt max mini PCs might be now affordable. It’ll be interesting to see how trends play out.

In any case, server capability per inflation adjusted dollar continues its exponential improvement over time. The fact I can colocate a server for the cost of a cup of coffee per month is quite astounding given I grew up in a time where colocation space cost at least €10k per 1U rack per month. I reckon they’re fitting ten to twelve SBCs per 1U rack, so that’s ~€20-24 per rack slot per month. Which is 99.8% cheaper than in the 1990s! In case you’re wondering, a 1U slot with max 100 watts power currently costs about €30-40 ex VAT per month, so I guess FinalTek are relying on those Pis to not draw all of their fifteen watt power budget to make a profit!

Raw storage device performance

The Raspberry Pi 5 has a single PCIe 2.0 lane available to be connected to a NVMe adapter. Much debugging and tweaking has been done by RPI engineers in the past year to get that PCIe lane running at 3.0 speed and working without issue over a wide range of NVMe SSDs. The most recent significant compatibility improvement was only in December 2024’s firmware, so this is an ongoing process since the Pi 5 was launched in Autum 2023.

Most – but not all as we shall see – original RPI NVMe SSD compatibility issues have been worked around such that compatibility is now very good. Just make sure you install a year 2025 or newer EEPROM firmware and you should be good to go with running PCI 3.0 on any of the after market NVMe expansion kits. I ended up fitting a 256 Gb well used Samsung SM961 off eBay to europe7a and an official Raspberry Pi 512 Gb NVMe SSD to europe7b after wasting a lot of time on a Samsung PM9B1 SSD which nearly works. It turns out that the Samsung PM9B1 actually has a Marvell controller, and that is very finickety: it doesn’t like the RPI, it also doesn’t like one of the USB3 NVMe enclosures I have, but it’s happy in the other USB3 NVMe enclosure I have. I think there’s nothing wrong with the SSD apart from limited compatibility, and as the PM9B1 was an OEM only model they only needed it to work well in the OEM’s specific hardware.

The official Raspberry Pi NVMe used to be a rebadged Samsung PM991a which is a superb SSD. Unfortunately, at some point they silently swapped it for a rebadged Biwin AP425 which is an industrial SSD. The Biwin is fast in smoke testing, but it doesn’t implement TRIM so I’m unsure how either its performance or longevity would hold up over extended use. It is also a RAMless design, and having a RAM cache on the SSD particularly benefits random reads for the Pi from testing. So the used Samsung SSD with about 80k hours and ~25Tb written (i.e. 100 total drive writes, which the firmware thinks is 9% spare threshold used) ended up going into the primary server, and the brand new Biwin SSD into the failover server.

For the 256 Gb Samsung SM961

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/nvme0n1 bs=1M count=10000 oflag=direct
10485760000 bytes (10 GB, 9.8 GiB) copied, 15.1569 s, 692 MB/s

Idle is 0.3 watts, write load is +3.6 watts.

dd of=/dev/null if=/dev/nvme0n1 bs=1M count=10000 iflag=direct
10485760000 bytes (10 GB, 9.8 GiB) copied, 12.6483 s, 829 MB/s

Idle is 0.3 watts, read load is +3.3 watts.

For the 512 Gb Biwin AP425 (official RPI NVMe SSD)

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/nvme0n1 bs=1M count=10000 oflag=direct
10485760000 bytes (10 GB, 9.8 GiB) copied, 14.5891 s, 719 MB/s

Idle is near zero, write load is +0.9 watts.

dd of=/dev/null if=/dev/nvme0n1 bs=1M count=10000 iflag=direct
10485760000 bytes (10 GB, 9.8 GiB) copied, 13.4262 s, 781 MB/s

Idle is near zero, read load is +0.8 watts.

Remarks

Raw bandwidth is approx 2x that of the SATA SSD on my Atom C2338 servers. As it’s NVMe instead of SATA, latency will be orders of magnitude lower too, but milliseconds to microseconds won’t matter much for a web server.

RAM does consume power, and you see it in the idle power consumption above. The Samsung SSD is approx 4x less power efficient during reads and writes than the Biwin SSD which in fairness uses very, very little power in smoke testing. Obviously the amount of time your internet server spends doing sustained reads or writes will generally be minimal, so apart from peak power consumption calculations to ensure you fit inside the max colocation power limit, the idle power consumption will be what is used almost all of the time.

I tried battering the Biwin SSD with sustained writes and yes after a while you start seeing power consumption spikes of about four watts while write performance nose dives. After you leave it for a while it recovers. This suggests that it does have some form of SLC cache to enable fast burst writes at low power consumption. If so, why on earth it doesn’t also implement TRIM is beyond me as a SLC cache implies a block storage emulation layer internally.

Filesystem storage performance

I only run ZFS on my public servers which has been the case for many years now, principally for ZFS’s awesome auto-replication feature whereby ZFS filesystems can be mirrored very efficiently across multiple machines. I have ZFS replication running between the two public servers every few minutes, and from public servers to home and from home to public servers. I therefore have multiple offsite backups of everything down to a few minutes of lag, which I learned after the year 2020 two week outage is very wise.

The slow Intel Atom C2338 with LZ4 compressed unencrypted ZFS was surprisingly okay at about 348 Mb/sec reads and 80 Mb/sec writes. It did rather less well with encrypted storage at 43 Mb/sec read and 35 Mb/sec write, this is because the ZFS in kernel 5.4 wasn’t able to use the Intel AES-NI hardware acceleration functions so everything is done in software.

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS comes with kernel 6.8, and if I was on Intel its ZFS would now use AES-NI hardware acceleration. Unfortunately, as https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/12171 which adds AArch64 hardware crypto acceleration to ZFS is unmerged, we still fall back to software cryptography. LZ4 compressed unencrypted ZFS reads at about 448 Mb/sec and writes at 144 Mb/sec – a 28% and 80% performance improvement - but encrypted reads are 84 Mb/sec and encrypted writes are 51 Mb/sec which whilst still a nice improvement, they are not the ~500 Mb/sec rates which that ZFS patch if merged would produce.

Still, it is only the email storage and a few other bits which use encrypted ZFS. Most of the system uses unencrypted LZ4 compressed ZFS and it uses highly compressible data, not the random bytes I used for the testing. So in practice you’ll get much better performance than the above.

Indeed, this RPI can saturate its 1 Gbit NIC from the ZFS filesystem with ease, something the Intel Atom C2338 wasn’t quite strong enough to do. I suspect kernel sendfile() improvements are also at work as the Intel Atom C2338 + ZFS could only push 59 Mb/sec down its NIC if the file content had to be read from the SSD or 80 Mb/sec if the file content was in ZFS RAM cache. A quick google search just there seems to confirm that ZFS copy_file_range() support was merged in Ubuntu 24.04, so kernel zero copy byte range splice support is indeed just fresh out of the oven as it were.

But aren’t we on a 100 Mbit capped public internet connection, so does it matter if the board can saturate 1 Gbit?

FinalTek network performance

I performed these benchmarks at 1am BST 2am CET to ensure a relatively quiet public internet. Firstly, between adjacent Pi servers I get 936 Mbit, which has since been confirmed many times by scp that yes the switch is 1 Gbit as promised.

The sixth generation server has a ‘up to 1Gbit’ NIC. It is located in Amsterdam, whereas the seven gen is in the Czech Republic. There is 22 milliseconds of latency between them which is surprisingly high given the distance between them is under 1000 km (approx 5 ms latency). It turns out that traffic routes via Vodafone’s backhaul who are a British company, so I suspect traffic takes an elongated route far from a geographical straight line. That said, I measured 96.6 Mbit from dedi6 to dedi7, and 887 Mbit from dedi7 to dedi6.

Yes, that did make me think I had made a mistake too. So I ran the same test from my site’s fibre internet, which has a 1 Gbit downstream and 100 Mbit upstream. There is a 38 millisecond latency between my site and FinalTek, with 61 Mbit from site to dedi7, and 226 Mbit from dedi7 to site. Here is how traffic is routed:

traceroute -4 dedi7.nedprod.com
traceroute to dedi7.nedprod.com (46.167.244.57), 30 hops max, 46 byte packets
 1  217-183-226-1-dynamic.agg3.mlw.lmk-mlw.eircom.net (217.183.226.1)  2.395 ms  3.295 ms  0.691 ms
 2  eth-trunk137.hcore1.lmk.core.eircom.net (86.43.253.148)  9.729 ms  5.629 ms  4.578 ms
 3  eth-trunk13.hcore1.dbn.core.eircom.net (159.134.123.9)  13.517 ms  10.842 ms  8.655 ms
 4  *  *  *
 5  dln-b3-link.ip.twelve99.net (62.115.32.200)  9.360 ms  7.846 ms  8.852 ms
 6  vodafonepeering-ic-356964.ip.twelve99-cust.net (213.248.98.129)  8.622 ms  9.161 ms  7.572 ms
 7  ae25-xcr1.ltw.cw.net (195.2.3.129)  38.989 ms  37.176 ms  37.839 ms
 8  ae37-pcr1.fnt.cw.net (195.2.2.74)  32.413 ms  29.676 ms  30.388 ms
 9  ae4-ucr1.czs.cw.net (195.2.10.233)  36.986 ms  36.364 ms  36.577 ms
10  vodafonecz-gw3.czs.cw.net (195.2.12.42)  38.170 ms  39.950 ms  41.302 ms
11  ip-81-27-200-59.net.vodafone.cz (81.27.200.59)  37.554 ms  36.569 ms  44.476 ms
12  tachyon.finaltek.net (77.48.106.250)  40.717 ms  38.654 ms  39.420 ms
13  europe7a.nedproductions.biz (46.167.244.57)  40.171 ms  39.042 ms  39.527 ms

(cw.net is Cable & Wireless, the internet backhaul subsiduary of Vodafone. Between Eircom and them is twelve99 which used to be the familiar TeliaSonera of yore, now called Arelion who are Swedish)

I did a bit more testing, and it looks like Finaltek only throttle inbound to 100 Mbit, not outbound. That means the public can download from my website at up to 1 Gbit. This was quite unexpected for the monthly cost – I had assumed a straight 100 Mbit throttle per MAC address with maybe a minimum bandwidth guarantee of 5 Mbit, like you might get at OVH et al. Apparently not.

Obviously FinalTek have promised nothing other than ‘up to 100 Mbit shared’ so network performance can absolutely worsen in the future and they’re still within claims. But consider me very impressed for the money!

I run CloudFlare on front of the website in any case, so it doesn’t actually matter if the NIC is faster than claimed except when CF is fetching uncached content, which is for two thirds of all requests according to its dashboard (I am on the free tier). I have no idea if there is any DDoS protection from FinalTek – I would assume not, but again CloudFlare should take of that too at least for the web site part of things.

Final words

I’m not sure what more there is to say other than that I am very pleased with the considerable performance improvements in the seventh generation of my server infrastructure. It should be good for at least seven years once I’m fully migrated over, then I’ll be releasing the sixth generation from rental (I have already released all the VPSs I used to rent to provide redundant DNS now that CloudFlare and Hurricane Electric provide redundant DNS for free with far lower latencies than any VPS could). Despite the nearly five hundred euro outlay on new hardware, over four years it will be cheaper than the present rental costs and over seven years it should be far cheaper. Let’s hope that the hardware is reliable and trouble free during that time!

Re: house build, that is still stuck in joist design as it has been since November last year. I don’t know when it’ll get free of that, it isn’t for a lack of me nagging people. My next post might be on the eighteen solar panels I’ve had installed on the site since Oct 2023, as I now have two winters of measurements to analyse as the inverter captures lots of data every ten minutes or so, so I have a large time series database now. I think it worth a post here trying to figure out what I might be able to infer from all that data.

Until the next time, be happy!

#raspberry_pi #rasppi #server

Saturday 18 January 2025: 21:25. First post of 2025! We were a week and a bit in Cornwall over the Christmas break with Megan’s family, then straight back into work so it’s kinda taken until now to have much to write about here. There has been some forward progress on my house build, which last moved forwards last November when we exited the Structural Engineering after four months, and entered the queue for joist design.

What came back to us is this first draft of a joist design:

… which, obviously enough, arranges all the joists left-right. Which, for any normal house would be fine, but in our specific case we have a highly insulated fresh air duct for the ventilation because it carries most of the space heating. Which means it’s fat, especially in the hallway just outside the utility room where it comes from the MVHR. There, the fresh air duct is approx 280 mm in diameter after the insulation, and myself and my architect had solved this by running the joists up-down just for the hallway, and left-right elsewhere.

Normally you should always orientate your joists in the same direction as the ridge of your roof, so if the ridge runs left-right as it does in this house, so must your joists. This is because the roof trusses will be perpendicular to your ridge, and you then want the floor joists to be perpendicular to those again to brace them.

However, due to the vaulted areas in this particular house, we have two steel portal frames either side of the vaulted area with steel beams pinning both of the house ends to those frames, and then two more steel beams pinning both portal frames together (really this is a steel frame house). Because the steel takes on most of the bracing work, you should be more free with the joist orientation. This is why myself and my architect took advantage of that during duct routing.

Unfortunately, my TF supplier was adamant that if we wanted up-down joist runs in the hallway, we’d need to fit steel, and that steel would need to be custom designed by a specialist engineer, and coordinated with the joist design to fit. That sounded (a) expensive, no designer in this current busy market is willing to take on new work unless their fees are at least €5k and steel is hardly cheap either and (b) it would be months more of delay, at best.

So that now meant we needed to get those ducts through a 304 mm tall joist which has an absolute maximum of 300 x 210 mm clearance. Otherwise months more of delay would occur and large unexpected additional sums of money. Wonderful.

High end custom made industrial ducting

Here were the choices before us:

1. Custom steel joist design. Cost: five figures. Lead time: months.

2. Increase joist height from 304 mm to 417 mm. Cost: five figures. Lead time: weeks (mainly to redesign all the ceilings). Also: you lose a fair bit of ceiling height.

3. Instead of insulated circular steel ducting, use high end custom made industrial ducting. Cost: four figures. Lead time: days. Would need a bit of rejigging the duct layout as the 300 x 210 mm pass through limits airflow to an equivalent 160 mm diameter duct.

So option 3 was the obvious one (well, initially I didn’t know how much it would cost, but I asked for quotes got back numbers and now I know it’s four figures of added cost. Painful, but less than the alternatives). Within Europe, there are a number of prefabricated preinsulated duct manufacturers all supplying the standard DIN sizes cheaply, but if you want custom dimensions they get expensive. Indeed, the gap between their cost and the ultra fancy Kingspan Koolduct gets reasonable. That stuff is the second highest end insulated duct on the market, due to it using a special heat resistant and stiffened phenolic foam cut by CNC machine and then hand assembled into the finished form. As the hand assembly is done by western Europeans using foam blown in western European factories, it isn’t cheap. But in terms of performance for the space, it’s very good and much better than can be achieved with conventional fibreglass wool duct insulation:

• @ 10 C, 0.022 W/mK (vs 0.037 W/mK for ductwrap)
• @ 25 C, 0.024 W/mK
• @ 50 C, 0.027 W/mK
• @ 80 C, 0.031 W/mK (vs 0.046 W/mK for ductwrap)

The only better performing duct material is vacuum panel at 0.007 W/mK. It’s superb, but you could buy a fair portion of a whole house with what it costs.

52 mm of this phenolic insulation delivers these u-values:

• @ 10 C, 0.423 W/m²K
• @ 25 C, 0.461 W/m²K
• @ 50 C, 0.519 W/m²K
• @ 80 C, 0.596 W/m²K

I assumed 18.5 m² of fresh air duct for my calculations (this is pre-recent layout changes). If so, one would leak the following amounts of energy out of the ductwork, thus not delivering it to the outlet if the house is at 21 C:

• @ 10 C, 7.826 W/K, so -86 watts.
• @ 25 C, 8.529 W/K, so 34 watts.
• @ 50 C, 9.602 W/K, so 278 watts.
• @ 80 C, 11.03 W/K, so 651 watts.

Are these losses acceptable? It depends on the rate of ventilation air flow because the losses are fixed to temperature difference, but the amount of energy transported rises with more air flow:

Duct air temperature	200 m3/hr		400 m3/hr		600 m3/hr
	Heating	Losses	Heating	Losses	Heating	Losses
10 C	-645 W	11.74%	-1290 W	5.87%	-1936 W	3.91%
25 C	235 W	12.814%	469 W	6.40%	704 W	4.27%
50 C	1701 W	14.41%	3403 W	7.20%	5104 W	4.80%
80 C	3461 W	16.54%	6923 W	8.27%	10384 W	5.51%

I would expect the system to run at no less than 150 m³/hr unless the house is unoccupied, so losses to ductwork of greater than ten percent are distressing. The next Koolduct size up is 60 mm which is 15% better, but now you swap air pressure loss for thermal efficiency. I’ve been a little unreasonable in this design by aiming for a 0.5-0.75 Pa/linear metre pressure loss which is excessively loose (less than 2 Pa/metre overall is what you need to achieve). But it’s for good reason - the boost fans can increase the air flow for a specific outlet or inlet very significantly, and you want enough slack in the ducts to cope. Also, due to me not having the modelling software, I’ve ignored friction, bends and several other factors which cause additional pressure loss over linear metre calculations.

There is also the cost angle: the 52 mm Koolduct costs about €110 ex VAT per metre. The 60mm stuff I would assume would be maybe €126/metre. Given that standard DIN size preinsulated ducts (albeit with EPS instead of phenolic board insulation) cost about €60 ex VAT/metre, one is paying a big enough price premium already to fit these ducts inside the joists.

I think, to be honest, it’ll just have to do.

The new duct routing

So, having digested all of that, I have drawn in to correct scale a potential duct routing with sufficient dimensions for the flows which definitely fit through and between the draft joist layout above:

Unfortunately, that’s not the end of it. Obviously the above are not ‘CAD quality’ drawings despite the fact that they are exactly to scale and indeed of identical resolution to the original CAD file (Inkscape is surprisingly good). And in any case, we shall need a 3D design in order to send the exact order for the Koolducts through, because there is vertical detail omitted on that 2D layout.

Hence I’ve come to an arrangement with my architect to do some additional work to turn this into 3D and adjust the joists (in some places they just don’t make sense). Hopefully he can deliver that next week, and then we can unblock forward progress with the joist design.

Here’s hoping!

Raspberry Pi colocation

You may remember my recent post on upgrading my internet server infrastructure in which I said I was researching whether to replace my rented Intel Atom 220 based public servers with colocated Raspberry Pi 5’s. Well here they are nearly ready to be dispatched to the colocation:

These will be my seventh generation of public internet infrastructure. One will act as primary, the other as failover. Both will be in the same rack so they get a 1 Gbps network connection between them, but external internet will be clamped to 100 Mbit shared with everybody else on that rack. For under €9 ex VAT/month, I can’t complain.

As you are concluding, after quite a few head scratches I got my full public Docker Compose based software stack up and working with offsite ZFS replication running well. They are very noticeably faster than the current Intel Atom 220 infrastructure, plus due to having double of pretty much everything (RAM, SSD, CPU etc) they have room to grow. Barring unpleasant surprise, these should last me until 2028 when the next Ubuntu LTS upgrade would be due, and possibly for a second four year period under whatever the next Ubuntu LTS will be then (28.04?). The aim will be to have one returned, it upgraded, sent back, migrated, then have the second one returned and upgraded. We’ll see how it goes.

I hope to post them on Wednesday – I am waiting for another NVMe SSD for europe7b because the one I got off eBay wasn’t compatible as it turned out (nearly compatible, and it cost me staying up to 4am one night going WTF? a lot before I realised it wasn’t me and it isn’t the Pi). So I’ve ordered an official Pi SSD which is really a rebadged Samsung 991A SSD. Should work very well, and should arrive on Monday just long enough for me to get the second Pi also configured and ready for dispatch.

#house