Asankha Perera

10KW off-grid setup with parallel Growatt SPF 5000ES and GSO 48V 100AH LiFePO4 Batteries and REC 370 TP4 Solar panels

2023-02-19T15:48:00.002+05:30

Acknowledgments

This article is written to fulfill a promise I made to Samith Abeywickrama from the DIY Off Grid Sri Lanka group, and to Ryan Zhang of the GSO battery company of China. I would also like to thank Sofia Wang and Growatt China for the help provided on my DIY implementation of a 10KW parallel off-grid setup. I believe this will help any others from Sri Lanka, looking at the importation of Inverters and LiFePO4 batteries, or planning a setup of parallel inverter / battery off-grid systems.

Overview

Although I had joined the DIY Off Grid Sri Lanka group on Facebook for quite a few months, it was this post from Samith that really encouraged me to finally go ahead and start it. Of course, I cannot forget the 75 years of political leadership of Sri Lanka, and those who did it at its best (හොඳටම කෙරුවේ) in 2022, that really pushed many of us to finally go off-grid ;) !

My situation was slightly different from the average Sri Lankan DIY home user, since I setup two 5KW inverters in parallel with two 5KW batteries, and I also directly imported the inverters and batteries from China. Although I might not be able to reply to any questions promptly, I will still try my best to help anyone else who might find this information useful.

Importing from China

I operate a software company in Sri Lanka, which is only catering exclusively to the export market. Since the power interruptions in Sri Lanka started to adversely affect our operations in 2022 on top of the Covid-19 lockdowns, I decided to import off-grid backup power systems for the most critical members of our team, and to power our office premises, as we are under contract to provide 24x7x365 support to our customers outside Sri Lanka.

I imported 6 inverters and 6 batteries of 5KW directly from the manufacturers in China, by placing the orders under the name of my company and making payment through the USD income we receive through the export of our software. So, the first step was to register with the Sri Lanka Customs, which was a fairly straightforward process, and where both the GN and DS offices assisted us with the required forms without delays or inconveniences.

I registered at the Customs website and got the GS Forms 1 and 2 completed by the Grama Niladhari and the Divisional Secretariat offices. Since my company was already registered with a TIN and VAT number and we conducted a legitimate software export business for around a decade by 2022, we had no issues with this step, although it was our very first time registering with the customs and importing anything into Sri Lanka!

I then contacted Ryan Zhang over WeChat (+86 18715678909, sales05@gsopower.com) and he has been an absolute pleasure to work with! I am also very happy to say that the GSO batteries have worked very well for us, and that Ryan has promised to offer the best pricing for anyone else from Sri Lanka, who is interested to import from them directly. His contact details can be found at the end of this article.

Ryan was in touch with me proactively from the ordering to delivery and installation, configuration and even post installation support! I was also very lucky to be able to contact Sofia Wang from Growatt, since I had some trouble connecting with an English-speaking sales contact from Growatt initially. Sofia helped through everything very professionally, and also arranged contact with the engineers to provide the necessary technical support at all times. Also, she was very helpful during the importation process, since we had a few hiccups due to delays caused by the shipping lines and the economic situation of Sri Lanka during the time.

For importation, make sure you get a Proforma Invoice and make sure the name, address etc. matches exactly with those of your company, and lists the freight and insurance costs separately from those of the product, and that the country of origin is listed along with the HS code and any warranty etc. you want included. Here is the proforma invoice for the batteries, where I got a special price of USD 6,290 including shipping, for 6 Nos of 5KW LiFePO4 batteries. These are the exact same that Samith ordered, and his research and help saved me many hours of research, and I believe this information will help others in future too.

For 6 Nos of the Growatt SPF5000ES with the Shine wifi directly from the manufacturer, I paid USD 4,040 as per the following invoice.

When the shipment leaves China, and before it arrives in Colombo, you should receive the Bill of Lading. Make sure to ask for a 'Telex Release' so that you can clear it at the port through your agent. You will also receive a packing list and details of the vessel and its arrival details.

My batteries were handled by Magical Shipping Lines in Sri Lanka, who was the party assigned by the seller.

I had to pay the agents fees as shown below, and this is different from Customs duty or other clearing charges.

An amount of LKR 28,490 was charged by Seacare Forwarders, which did the processing of the inverters. A similar document set for those were processed, which I have omitted in this article.

In addition, we paid approximately $116 as bank charges for two outward remittances, and 10% customs duty and 5% PAL for the batteries, and 5% PAL for the inverters. After all costs such as local transport, clearing, warehouse etc. was added we had a net cost of USD 2,000.43 per 5KW Inverter (Growatt SPF 5000ES) and LiFePO4 battery (GSO GBP48-100W) pair, when ordering 6 Nos each. Four of these pairs were installed as 5KW units, and I combined two to build up a 10KW unit as described below.

Purchase of Solar Panels and Aluminum Structure

I purchased 14 solar panels from REC (REC 370 TP4) as it was recommended by one of my best friends, and since I had once visited their factory in Singapore many years ago, and knew it was a good product. For the solar structure, initially I got a quotation to lay them on a roof like structure on our rooftop, but later changed my mind to implement a ground level layout to avoid risks with wind, and also to be able to remove the structure if required and be able to adjust the angle of the panels during different months.

Swisstek Aluminum had all the parts I required as their ground mounted solar range was complete and came with an engineering drawing and first-class support from the engineer Yohan who advised me and helped me many times with my questions. Be sure to check the PDF of all the parts and how they are connected together. The only issue I faced was that the 40mm T clamp nut they provided was not exactly the length it was supposed to be, since my panels were 30mm high. So, Yohan found a place where I could get the necessary replacements from outside Swisstek since the direct replacements would have taken quite a long time. The final list of items I purchased are as follows, and Swisstek offered a generous discount which was very welcome.

Installation and Configuration

The installation and configuration, including the Solar panel structure and wiring was 100% DIY by me, with most of the wires, MC4 connectors etc. purchased from Sarath Enterprises Kirulapone. I purchased Schneider AC isolators and PV surge protectors from Bianco. I already had a good surge protection for the CEB connections, so I did not need new ones. I bought a 125A DC MCB, and good quality lugs and a wire cutter and crimp tool from Amazon which was really helpful since I had a complex wiring for the batteries in parallel.

The final wiring looks quite complex and includes a combiner box where the two LiFePO4 batteries are combined.

The objective is to make everything balanced - i.e. the length of wires to the busbar (combiner) box, and then the output from the busbar to the inverters, where again I used wires of exact same length. Note that there are two wires coming from the potive and negative terminals of each battery to the busbar (i.e. 4 wires incoming). Then from the busbar to each inverter another two wires each (i.e. 4 wires outgoing).

Since this was a 10KW system in parallel, I used 2 AWG / 35mm2 wires for all DC battery connections. All PV (Solar) connections were 12 AWG / 4mm2 as per specifications, and all outgoing AC wires were 8 AWG / 10mm2 from ACL.

Above is the wiring of the combiner box / busbar box. Note each battery is connected from the top and the bottom sides, and the inverters take the power through the wires connected to the sides. So, on average no more than 100A should flow across any location of the busbar.

The batteries can be disconnected through the DC MCB. The power is supplied from the busbar to the top (connection #1 and #3) while the switch output to each inverter is taken from the bottom (connection #2 and #4). I had to take the thick wires in quite a large loop to make sure the switch was fixed in the standard manner (i.e. off when down and on when up) and to align it correctly with the wiring symbol on the MCB, where the higher potential voltage should be at the top - for this MCB and as per its diagram below printed on the front. ** UPDATE: See comment at the end **

The only problem I encountered after connecting the two batteries in parallel with a CAN connection to the inverters as per the GSO manual was an issue with the DIP switch configuration. I got a code 04 (low battery) and code 20 (BMS communication error). I contacted Ryan on a Sunday night, and he immediately told me what needed to be tweaked! I had to connect the master CAN to the Growatt inverter and the RS4581 to the slave battery RS4581. Then the DIP 00001000 for the Master and 00000000 for the Slave battery. The GSO manual needs to be updated to make this setting clear, but the support of Ryan on a Sunday night and within minutes was extremely commendable and shows how helpful he really was.

Below is the visiting card for Ryan Zhang / GSO, and I believe he will be happy to help anyone else with the purchase and installation of batteries in Sri Lanka.

Please also reach out to Sofia Wang (sofia.wang@growatt.com) from Growatt for any sales inquiries directly from Growatt. I am sure that importing directly from the manufacturers in China would ensure the best quality, service, warranty and price for any installation.

Operation

Although I configured the Growatt Shine dataloggers, I do not like the mobile app since its difficult for me to read the data. So, I use the website at https://server.growatt.com/login instead. For anyone looking for the 'key' requested for any changes through this website, its 'growattyyyymmdd'- where yyyymmdd should be replaced with the current date.

The above graph shows the energy trend for one of the inverters. As you can see, section A is during the morning sunlight when the Solar production (in blue) starts up and reaches its peak. The consumption (in red) is much lower, and the extra production charges the batteries. Section B is after the batteries are fully charged. Notice that the inverter does not generate more power than needed, so actually most of the power I generate during this time is wasted - unless it's used. Since each REC TP4 panel is 370W peak and the 14 panels generate about 5.2KW peak, even the use of three 24,000 BTU and two 13,000 BTU Panasonic Inverter ACs operating together does not require 5KW of power. So, although I designed the solar panels to allow an angle alteration as per the following solar angle each month, I might not need to change it, since I generate too much power than I already need.

Solar Angle to Mt Lavinia

Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun

67° 75° 83° 91° 99° 106°

Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec

99° 91° 83° 75° 67° 60°

I have configured the ourput source priority of the Growatt SPF 500ES to SBU in program #1 - i.e. Solar is used first, then Battery and finally Utility. The charger source priority in program #14 is set to OSO - Only Solar. So the batteries are charged only using Solar power.

Closing Remarks

I posted this on my blog since I couldn't find a good way to search through the DIY Off Grid Solar group Facebook page in Sri Lanka - but that maybe because I am not aware of how FB pages work. Anyway, I believe Google indexing this article will make it available to anyone out there.

I am still analyzing the output and performing optimizations as I learn, and I am thankful to everyone who has helped me in this journey!

UPDATE: Use of my polarized DC MCB is not correct

Thanks to Jaanaka Wimaladharma of the DIY group for the following comment which I paste below. I fully agree that I have made a mistake here, and hopefully this comment will help someone else avoid it.

To tell you the truth these kind of polarized breakers are not suitable for this purpose as polarized breakers expect the current to be flowing only in one direction (following the markings). However in case of Hybrid Off Grid inverters the current flow will be in both directions charging vs discharging.
There is a risk of the DC Arc not getting extinguished if the switch was operated when the current is flowing in the opposite direction.
That is to say if somebody switches the breaker off when inverter is drawing a heavy current from the battery there is a likelihood for the breaker to catch fire. Controlled testing has proven this point. So that is something to keep in mind if you decide to use polarized breakers in this configuration.
In that context even if you wire the breaker assuming that the current flow would be from the battery to the inverter, it makes no difference. So you could shorten the wires. However the risk which was explained above will remain.

A Project for Christmas 2019

2020-03-14T18:14:00.000+05:30

So this story is quite close to the Project for Chritmas 2008 .. and I just wanted to share what I did recently, now that I have more woodworking tools with me, and more space to work with! This is the final result - the new pantry cupboards in our house by Christmas!

We started by getting a pantry cupboard designed by Hafele Sri Lanka - and they did this for free, as we decided to buy the components and the electrical and other units from them, as they had reasonable pricing.

However, as usual Shyaminie wanted the cupboard to be built by a "professional". After we finalized the design with Hafele and confirmed the order for the hinges, drawers, oven and the sink etc they pointed us to about three "leading" pantry cupboard manufacturers they would usually recommend to customers for the actual construction. This part didn't go well at all - since I had just finished dealing with building contractors and finally ended up managing my own construction workers in building the AdroitLogic 4-storey building, as that way I could get exactly what I wanted!

Here are the "full" quotations sent by the three:
First

Second

Third

Forget about the English and spelling! But there is no detailed pricing for a customer to determine what items costs what, and how they come up with the pricing. So that was the end of the "professionals" :)

A carpenter myself!

Yes, my great grandfather had been a carpenter. So naturally I have some of it in my blood! I purchased a new circular saw which was quite a basic one - but it was a Makita 5806B. I also purchased a Miter saw - another Makita. I already had a small router, cordless and corded drills and other small tools. The Miter saw was a bit expensive but the main item was the standard circular saw. I also bought 2" x 1" aluminum bars to allow me to cut straight pieces from 8' x 4' "eco" boards - which are also called WPC - a wood composite. The WPC boards were made in India and sold my W.M.J Fernando and Co in Katubedda. They were a joy to work with! They would cut really smoothly, easily and without dust! I cut just one piece of melamine coated boards for the drawer bottoms and the dust from that was terrible! So I was happy that most of the cutting was on the WPC boards.

Actually cutting the large boards was the most difficult part - since I didn't have a table saw. I thought of buying one - but still a basic table saw didn't help cut 8' x 4' boards which were much larger. So I am currently thinking of making a sliding table saw when I have some free time, in preparation for my next projects.

The cost

I ended up spending less than a third or a quarter of the quoted prices by the "professionals" and only got the table top done by QJ Quartz in Mount Lavinia - which is proudly a Sri Lankan compay manufacturing Quartz sheets from local raw materials. They did a superb job for the counter top and I can recommend them for any project as they have a great management and a team that really is customer friendly. They do not have a showroom - as they do mega projects mainly for apartments, but when you visit the office, they are small enough to be a great partner to you. My main costs were the WPC boards, spray paint, thinner and 2K coating, nails and gum, as I had already purchased everything else from Hafele along with the design. The team at Hafele Sri Lanka in Moratuwa was wonderful, especially Kamalanathan Devapriyan ("Deva") who helped me immensely, along with his technical and sales team, and the designer Lakmini Nuwarapaksha. Deva was always the one-stop-shop for anything Hafele, and was a great person without whom my project could not have been possible. At first I didn't tell him I was going to do the construction myself, but afterwards, he showed me how things were done, and I could go to the showroom in Moratuwa, study the existing units, and take photographs for reference later, all because of him :)

Actual Construction

The construction was awesome! 90% of the parts sold by Hafele in Sri Lanka were from Blum - the global leader in the space. They have a great planning software called Dynalog which would show you the detailed cutting and assembly instructions once you enter the dimensions of the design.

In addition, for all the technical components such Blum Aventos HF, HK, TandemBox, Bluemotion and all of the lift, hinge and drawer systems, Blum had very detailed instructions, documentation and videos on YouTube, so it was really a great experience. The best thing is that if you followed the instructions to the point, the result would always be perfect!

This is a must-have tool, the Kreg concealed hinge jig - I got it from Amazon sometime back

One of these days during the construction, Minindi was asked by her school teacher to visit a වඩු මඩුව (a carpentry workshop), and I took her to mine. She ended up writing "මගේ තාත්තා වඩුවෙකි" ("my father is a carpenter") or something very similar which was nice :)

So the spray painting, plumbing of the sink and the installation of the Oven, Microwave and glass shelves were all done by me with advice and support from my wife Shyaminie, who wanted the design, the color white and decided almost everything else except the construction :)

How the UltraESB and AdroitLogic was born..

2015-01-19T07:23:00.009+05:30

It was the 19th of January 2010 when I first announced the UltraESB publicly! AdroitLogic itself was incorporated 5 days earlier in Singapore, and I was preparing the source code for submission to obtain copyright registration in the US. It was the first time that I had submitted a press release myself, paying a hundred and fifty dollars. It was also the first time that I wrote an EULA myself, with suggestions from Mr. Jayantha Fernando who was a board member of the ICTA Sri Lanka, and Lawrence Rosen who first pointed me to the AGPL license, which I would later use to license the source code. At this time, everything was done just by myself, with assistance from my wife - an attorney, and my brother who resided in Singapore; as I did not have money to spend lavishly on anything, including hiring any employees or office space. AdroitLogic was bootstrapped with all of my life savings, with a mortgage to pay for 16 years more, and two kids aged 8 and 6 at the time, who were schooling. The previous Christmas I made a couch, which I still use in my living room to date. But the UltraESB was not just a Christmas project. It was the work over about 5 months of intense work just to start it - a period in my life that I will always cherish.

The first backup of the source code I still have with me does not start any working ESB implementation, and was named 'LightBus'. This was written in August 2009. Writing an ESB was not the original intention I had when I decided that I should start my own company. I was inspired by a line of text from an article about my grandfathers life story, where he introduced me to the classic 'Think and Grow Rich' by Napolean Hill. As I was never a reader of books, I got the audiobook version instead, and just as a reference bought a copy of the low priced Indian edition as well.

Where I came from..

My grandfather started his life with difficulty, and as I've heard - he once didn't have money to travel to Colombo by train from his hometown Negombo, but nevertheless he got onto a train and promised to pay later. At the peak of his career as a life insurance salesman, he sold life insurance for over Rs 300,000 a month in 1954, starting with sales of about Rs 30,000 per month in 1942, becoming (as I am aware) the first Sri Lankan to become a member of the Million Dollar Round Table! I do not know how these numbers compare to the present day, but I guess its worth several hundreds of millions at the least. With the money he earned, he started a company called the Universal Metal Cork Company Ltd (UMC), which produced all of the crown corks (bottle caps) meeting the needs of Sri Lanka for a few decades. My father was employed at this company partly owned by my grandfather, as a daily paid labourer as his first job and earned Rs 3 per day from Oct 1962 till April 1963. My first job too was as an ordinary sales assistant in a store after a month since I ended my schooling, and I earned a gross salary of Rs 2,000 a month - about $15 today.

After the UMC was forced into financial difficulty by a large shareholder for a hostile takeover, it had to be wound up in 1983, resulting in my father loosing value of about 1/4 of the stock of the company, his job and the future of 4 children. My mother had to start a job as a teacher to feed and educate us. Being aware only about the manufacture of crown corks, my father had a tough time finding income to support our family, and had given up starting anything of his own, although I was waiting for that day many years of my childhood. Somehow this period of tough times affected me a lot, from when I was 8 years old, till the time I finished schooling. However, with all the hardships, I realized that without getting a proper education I would be nothing. After my schooling, I wanted to join the air force to become a pilot - but the war against separatist guerillas in the north and east of the country prevented my parents from allowing me to pursue it. It was then that I decided that I would follow my brothers footsteps to learn about computers to go abroad and earn enough to obtain a commercial pilots license privately - as my parents did not have that kind of money.

Due to these many reasons, I had lived all of my life with an aversion to risk - without being aware of it! It was Sanjiva at WSO2 who first pointed this to me, and this lead to an 'Aha moment' that would allow me to start taking risks in my life, and believing in myself more. I also learn't so much about technology, product management, pre-sales and running a company from WSO2 and Sanjiva in particular, and I am forever grateful for these lessons in life that finally connected many of the dots till then.

Selecting an idea..

Getting back to the main story, at first I tried to write supporting tools for Apache Synapse, including an Eclipse GMF based drag-and-drop style interface. I also tried to build a service simulator called Mocker, for which I still have the original code and hand written design notes. This was because I was a bit reluctant to try to write yet another ESB after contributing to Apache Synapse, and being employed at WSO2 previously for about two and a half years. However, it soon became clear to me that writing an ESB was what I've always wanted to, it was what my heart was after; and it was what I was meant to do in my life, after connecting the dots from being one of the first beta users of the BEA AquaLogic Service Bus at AOL in 2005.

"Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen" - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Once I had made the decision - there was no turning back! From the 1st of September the code was renamed UltraBus, and I have 27 zip files for each daily revision I made during this month. The ToolBox and soapbox (WS-Security) were also started around this same time. By the 2nd of October, the code was renamed the UltraESB and the daily zip files were put into a SVN repository. Unit tests and samples were written, and I was doing everything I can do to do things better. One of the most interesting things I did was to read and understand the Spring framework and how it handled transactions, so that I could tap into it to gain transactional support for the UltraESB. I spent over a week, and things were not looking as easy as I hoped, and I was tempted to give up many many times. However, the Ford determination described by Napoleon Hill, made me persist and decide that I will never give up until I got what I wanted. And soon, as if my a stroke of magic, what I was waiting for became a reality, and we still use this successfully today!

Also to make things more interesting, I wanted to experiment with ZeroCopy support of Java from Apache HttpComponents/NIO. I came up with the concept of a 'file cache' which would directly store the payload of a message read from the network interface through DMA. I wanted to minimize the dependencies, and removed all traces of binding to any SOAP framework. However, I implemented my own WS-Security implementation based on DOM, which actually performed better than the leading implementations at the time, for a subset of the features that were really used. The separation of the API from the core was one of the most important things we did early, based on suggestions and feedback from Eric Hubert, who helped me immensely with much feedback and suggestions. The most inspiring module I had ever followed in my life, the MIT 6.033, and Prof Jerry Saltzers design notes I had saved, and many of the MIT Entrepreneurial material I had collected during my visit to MIT in 2002 paid off big time, connecting the dots to where I wanted to be. I burnt all bridges behind me, staking the entire future of my family, on my ability to accomplish what I wanted.

These were the days...

These days were extremely inspiring, interesting and I was implementing code day and night at the speed of thought! The picture below shows my workspace, and when I had been seated for too long to get a back pain in one chair, I would move to the other and code. As you can see I am not in the photograph since I was the only one around to take this pic at the start of AdroitLogic. I had one laptop, one phone, one fan, one ADSL connection, one desk, one white board and one Dream! I would easily stay up till very early morning many days, and go to bed eager to wake up again and continue the rest. And there were many days that I woke up with more inspiration and ideas than when I slept.

Almost daily, I would listen to the song 'What a feeling' from Flashdance.

First when there's nothing
But a slow glowing dream
That your fear seems to hide
Deep inside your mind

Another great song that motivated me was 'The Moment of Truth' by Survivor from the film Karate Kid

Once in your life, you make a choice..

Ready to risk it all...

Deep in your soul, you hear a voice..

Answering to the call...

After implementing the first ESB in the world to utilize zero-copy proxying with Java NIO, I was reluctant to open source the code due to the fear of being copied. However, it was a user doing a POC for a very large US based telecom company who quite clearly stated that unless I open sourced the code, they could not consider the UltraESB. In his own words:

Open Source is their sticking point. This is a very good opportunity for you, but I suspect without open source they will pick another.
....
Personally I am extremely impressed with your product. It works. Everything is very professional. Your demo is fantastic, and this system you have architected I believe to be very powerful and appropriate.

Hence on the 24th of August 2010, I open sourced the code under the AGPL license suggested earlier by Lawrence Rosen. The very first team members of AdroitLogic were three interns from the University of Colombo from March through August 2011, and the UConsole was mainly developed during this time. Working as an external consultant to a few companies in Sri Lanka, and implementing the eCivil Registry for the Government of Sri Lanka through the ICTA helped me feed my family, and save for future expansion of AdroitLogic, as I was without any revenue for over an year. However due to my childhood experiences, I had learned to master the art of thriftiness, which to-date I have used to help a few of my friends as well, to move out of financial difficulties and to do better long term.

2011 was the year that I consider as getting our first investment. Unlike for many other start-ups, our investor Eric did not invest money; but invested his trust in the capability of a tiny company to build a much better product than its much larger competitors. He took a considerable risk making this investment, as a 24x7 platform doing 60 - 80 million of transactions each day was to be soon migrated to our platform. This is the BEST customer I've ever worked with, and today, they still run the ESB nodes 24x7 without downtime, since 2011! This also allowed me to hire Ruwan Linton on the 13th of September 2011 as our first employee! Ruwan was initially instrumental in the clustering implementation based on Apache ZooKeeper, and soon took over many of the technical responsibilities allowing me to focus part of my time on running the business as well.

AdroitLogic Today

Lately we have made much progress, and gathered new and large customers and engagements, and licensed our source code last year to one of the largest companies in the world with over $400B in revenues, proving that better design and clever code yields much better software. We have always done our best to ensure that we only ship quality products out of our doors, which perform better, and are easy to use and extend by our customers and end-users. This has been the secret to our success, which made large companies seek solutions based on our technology, instead from other competing vendors.

While Ruwan leads most of the technical aspects, Amila, Malaka and Manjula have now taken over the new UConsole, AS2Gateway and the API Director, while customer projects mainly remain under myself or Ruwan. Historically, this has allowed us to built extremely strong and understanding relationships with our customers - as they speak directly to highly technical folks, who are prepared to do anything it takes for the customers to be successful in using our technology. We have many technical positions to be filled up by graduates from the University of Moratuwa by April, and some have already confirmed their aspirations. We are now expanding our office to accommodate the new hires and have interesting projects lined up for them to start doing wonders!

We consider our team to be similar to a smaller, Special Forces team; instead of a large infantry team of a regular Army. This is because our engineers would not be just developing code - but build many different capabilities such as developing great code, unit tests, performance tests, documentation and customer interactions and pre-sales etc. This is different from trying to build many products for the same customer, as IBM did in the 60's by building the HW, SW and providing the services and personnel etc. We all sit together as one team without hierarchy, and empower each one to take responsibility and do their best to take the company forward. Each would review the code and design we collectively build to help each other improve and develop further. We do not have any room for any internal politics, and both myself and Ruwan directly see and review each and every employee of our company. We do our very best to hire and retain the most capable people, with a pleasant and winning attitude, since each of us will need to depend on each other as both co-workers and friends. At the same time, we will be as transparent as possible about everything we could, so that our employees could learn and someday start their own business and take Sri Lanka to a better future.

AdroitLogic Tomorrow

After spending about half of my life on earth, my wish is that AdroitLogic will continue to grow organically and healthily. It should always be an employee and employee-family friendly company, since each of us needs to have a healthy life outside of our offices as well. We should enjoy the technical challenges our work brings us, as well as the family, friends and kids who depends on us. That's why we have always practised coming to work early and heading home early - after a day of great work. We've always kept out of the office on weekends, although I've personally had to sacrifice a good amount of my weekends and weeknights while at home, for the good of the company, and I know that many others had done the same willingly many times.

We will also help our employees genuinely, and help them do much better in their careers and their lives, than they would have been able to do at any other company. We've remained bootstrapped, profitable and successful by choice - since we believe that our efforts would be paid back handsomely once we reach our goals. This also allows us to keep our focus, and do things right without a hurry or interference of any investors who are only after making more money. During my undergraduate years, one of my professors told us not to go after money, but go after our dreams and do what we believed - and money would then come running after us. I also believe in the Stanford marshmallow experiment and long term success. So one day it will be time for me to let go of AdroitLogic. Even the kids we raise with love and affection grow up to become amazing individuals with their own lives and dreams; and so will AdroitLogic. It is my belief that everyone who've toiled to bring AdroitLogic to where it is, will then be pleasantly surprised and well rewarded. Like Stephen Hawking says when the "Theory of Everything" ends, we would look back together, and happily say, "Look what we made.."!

To God be the glory!

How can I say thanks
for the things You have done for me?
Things so undeserved,
yet You gave to prove Your love for me;
the voices of a million angels
could not express my gratitude.
All that I am and ever hope to be,
I owe it all to Thee..

If you can do it, get up and prove it; Get up and show them who you are!

2010-09-16T10:28:00.000+05:30

"Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen" - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Exactly 2 years ago, on the 16th of September 2008 at 10:28am I sent out my last Notice of resignation to become an Entrepreneur! What a great decision it has been!

The ability to make clear, firm resolute decisions is as precious a gift as life itself. It is what enables human beings to take control of their lives, to rise above chance and circumstance and to chart a destiny. Those who fail to make conscious choices may as well not have any free will, for they squander the gift of decisiveness.

Decision can be called choice by design. Lack of decisiveness is choice by default. It is also a choice. It is the decision to choose unhappiness, mediocrity and commonality.

Once in your life, you make a choice..

Ready to risk it all...

Deep in your soul, you hear a voice..

Answering to the call...

If you can do it, get up and prove it..

Get up and show them who you are!

AdroitLogic Announces the Availability of a Simple to Use - High Performance Enterprise Service Bus [ESB], UltraESB

2010-01-19T16:31:00.001+05:30

Introduces Zero-Copy Proxying with Non-Blocking IO and a Custom WS-Security Implementation, to Act as a High Performance Intelligent Layer 7 Router and Load Balancer

Singapore - January 19, 2010 - AdroitLogic Private Ltd. announced today the availability of the first public beta release of its Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), UltraESB. The UltraESB allows Zero-copy proxying of messages using Non-Blocking IO, to scale and support extremely high numbers of concurrent connections over HTTP/S. In addition, it includes support for B2B integration with AS2, and a custom WS-Security implementation, designed to yield better performance when used as a corporate security gateway.

By moving away from a canonical message format, the UltraESB natively supports multiple types of payloads over transports such as HTTP/S, JMS, File, FTP/S, SFTP and Email (POP,IMAP,SMTP). In addition, it can act as a B2B AS2 (Applicability Statement 2) connector to integrate backend systems, securely with trading partners over the Internet. Fully supporting REST, SOAP, XML, Binary, Hessian, EDI, Text, HTML etc as payloads, the UltraESB ships with a load of ready-to-run samples and documentation. A graphical test utility 'ToolBox' bundled with the UltraESB, contains a HTTP/S client for REST/SOAP/Hessian etc, a TCP dump and capture utility, a load generator, and other useful utilities for testing and experimentation.

The UltraESB has been designed and developed from scratch by its architect, using the knowledge gained by contributing over 70% of the original codebase of the Apache Synapse ESB, as well as supporting its users for almost 4 years. Without requiring the users to learn a new XML configuration language, or write-compile-and-deploy code, the UltraESB is configured with a Spring configuration, and allows mediation to be specified as Java code right within the configuration, separately or as compiled byte code. By supporting JSR 233 scripting languages, it allows the user to use languages such as Groovy, Javascript, Ruby etc. for mediation as well. The UltraESB allows intelligent IDE integration with auto completion and validation, Java mediation editing, and debugging right from within the IDE. Its dependencies have been kept to a minimum set of stable libraries, to enable regular release cycles and quick builds. With JUnit tests currently covering half of the codebase, the UltraESB makes it easier for end users to write unit tests to automate most types of end user testing. The UltraESB is easily managed, monitored and controlled via JMX, and provides advanced support for JTA or local transactions, including suspension and resuming of transactions by different threads of execution.

AdroitLogic offers a range of service and support options for the UltraESB. These include consulting, custom development, sponsorship of feature development, development & production support and training. Additionally, AdroitLogic hosts public user forums, articles, samples and other material on the use of the UltraESB at its website http://adroitlogic.org

The UltraESB is offered free of charge for unlimited production deployment. AdroitLogic believes in working closely with real enterprise users of its software, and thus invites them to participate in defining its road map, schedule and features for releases. Becoming a parter with AdroitLogic, offers users access to its source code.

About AdroitLogic
AdroitLogic Private Ltd. is a young and innovative technology company based in Singapore, that believes in, and proves that better design and clever code yields much better software. Being a self-funded startup, AdroitLogic is driven by entrepreneurial spirit, personal dedication and commitment of its founders, who are personally involved with its design, development and support.

Contact Information
Asankha Perera
Email: info@adroitlogic.com
Tel: +94 722 805724
http://adroitlogic.org

I have a dream!

2009-12-24T16:59:00.001+05:30

Some dreams live on in time forever
Those dreams, you want with all your heart
And I'll do whatever it takes
Follow through with the promise I made
Put it all on the line
What I hoped for at last would be mine..

So will the Sun JDK be known as the Oracle JDK in the future?

2009-04-22T11:37:00.003+05:30

I guess Oracle could infuse some of the JRockit tricks into the Sun JVMs too.. But I wish IBM bought Sun!

http://www.oracle.com/sun/index.html

Sun's Garbage First Collector Largely Eliminates Low Latency/High Throughput Tradeoff

2009-04-22T11:34:00.001+05:30

Can't wait to try this with JDK 6 u14!

In a recent podcast, James Gosling highlights the importance of G1 for certain kinds of large-scale Java applications, such as financial exchanges, which are characterised by large amounts of live heap data and considerable thread-level parallelism, and are often run on high-end multi-core processors:

"...the deep hidden secret about many of these Java apps is that they don't really use databases. Instead of databases they use huge amounts of RAM and push the garbage collector like mad because they cannot afford to touch the disk ever. When you are doing many, many thousands of transactions per second it's all about keeping everything in RAM, using hash tables, getting as many cores focused on the transactions as possible, and they usually have big issues about transaction latency."

More details: http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/04/g1

Getting back the iPhone!

2009-03-06T17:52:00.002+05:30

My first generation iPhone running firmware 1.1.4 hacked to work in Sri Lanka, started to give trouble from a few months back, and taking almost a day of being kept switched off to magically recover! I never understood why a 8hr switch off was different to a 10 minute switch off.. but then again, people even suggest keeping the iPhone in the freezer to make it recover :).. I only tried that for 5 minutes..

Anyway on the 10th of February, I upgraded to the new version 2.2.1 firmware.. and immediately realized I had done something really bad.. by Wifi was not working at all.. I then tried down grading to 2.2 - but still no luck.. then I tried going back to v.1.1.4 by even installing an old iTunes version and downloading the ipsw image files.. but trying quite a lot of hints, I was never able to get my modem firmware downgraded.. it had got to 04.05.04_G and I was stuck! Then things got even worse.. the phone would not ring.. but silently record missed calls.. then I gave up everything, and was waiting for someone to find a fix patiently.. I realized that the phone does ring, when its kept unlocked - but that soon drains the battery.. another option was keeping it connected to the charger.. so I did both of these until today the 6th of March..

.. and today, I felt lucky! suddenly.. I felt my phone ring again!.. and I tried it a few times to make sure.. and yes, it has started to work again :).. then I tried my Wifi.. and thats back too! I hope this will help someone else who is like me to get back their iPhones.. the secret being patience! I'm happy to have a real ringing phone back with me.. and I will not try any more upgrades for a loooong time.. its currently running 2.2.1(5H11), Carrier 2.9 and Modem firmware 04.05.04_G

The Secrets of Housing Loans and Taxation

2009-03-05T15:09:00.004+05:30

Ever wondered how much a housing loan would really help you get your OWN house, AND save you tax? Well I've been looking for answers on this topic from many years ago, but was only able to fully figure out everything once I got my own housing loan and tax file some years ago.. All this time I have been secretly giving out information to my friends on this, and today I am going to make it publicly available..

First for some history on this topic, I wrote a tiny Java Script EMI calculator few years back, and its still available on my GeoCities website, which I haven't updated for quite sometime :)

I've also blogged about "How to Get a Loan in 3 days" previously, and would recommend reading it for anyone who is considering this in Sri Lanka

So now for the goodies..
The worksheet has been made available in M Excel format - to support those who still pays Microsoft for software provided free by many others, and is much better most of the times.. It allows you to first key in your EMI details - i.e. how much you want to borrow, how much interest the financial institution is asking for, and the duration of the loan, and then you can calculate your monthly EMI (Equated Monthly Installment)

Search Google for more information on what EMI is and means - its a very fair scheme, where you pay interest for what you really get in a loan. Each month you pay the same amount, but during the start of the repayment, most of this money is counted as interest, and a little as capital repayment, and towards the end of the loan, most will be counted as capital repayment, and less as interest. Thus if you take an EMI loan for 20 years, and pay it for 3 years and want to exit, you still would have to pay back a large sum of the amount you've borrowed - but hey - its a FAIR calculation.. a bank is not your relative, to give you free money!

Next, enter your salary details, and see how much you will save as Tax. BUT this comes at a price.. you will need to open a Tax File and ask for a salary direction to your employer, so that PAYE tax will not be deducted from you each month.

A Tax file is like a Driving License in Sri Lanka, they never expires :).. so thereafter, each year you WILL have to send your tax information to the Inland Revenue Department. These people sometimes even ask people who has died to keep filing tax as well, probably to cover up the massive VAT fraud the officials of this department helped themselevs into. But then again, officials in Sri Lanka rarely resign, even AFTER they are found guily by the supreme court!.. but we know of one who had to bite the dust finally!

So finally .. here is the goodie I promised.
http://people.apache.org/~asankha/personal/Salaries_and_Tax_DEMO.xls

Please let me know if you have any corrections, or suggestions for improvement.. and feel free to share it with others, but please do respect the copyright notice and the name of the original author.

Dead men may not tell tales.. But dead JVMs do!

2009-01-21T12:39:00.000+05:30

During the last couple of days, I was troubleshooting a critical server crash encountered by an airline, on behalf of a software consulting firm which requested my help. The symptoms were that WebSphere 6.0.2 was crashing with an Out of Memory (OOM) condition, sometimes reaching 100% (or a very high) CPU utilization level in addition. Although you can profile an application with excellent profilers such as JProbe, it becomes much more difficult when you are unable to re-create the issues in any other environment but they keep happening on the live production instances, to which you only have limited access.

Luckily the IBM JVM's generate a Portable Heap Dump (PHD) on an OOM, and has an array of extremely helpful tools to analyze information from heap/thread dumps and and other information offline. Thus it is still possible to detect memory leaks in applications, even when they only occur in live production systems. Sometimes the cause would be heap fragmentation, where even if a considerable percentage of memory is still available, a contiguous chunk of the size required cannot be freed.

The above image shows the IBM Heap Analyzer, detecting a memory leak by the WebSphere DRS / Session Replication, where 923MB of heap has been consumed by 14,011 HashMap#Entry objects held onto by the WebSphere Data Replication Service, used for HTTP session replication.

It is also interesting to look for the use of Xalan 2.6.0 by any application code, as I have at earlier instances found memory leaks that are typically more difficult to trace - but which occurs primarily due to a well known bug in 2.6.0 of Xalan.

A project for Christmas 2008

2009-01-05T18:57:00.000+05:30

During the last Christmas holidays, I wanted to use my vacation time to build a corner sofa set for use at home.. however, due to many unexpected obligations, I couldn't finally find any time for it.. So this year, I got a deadline to either build it before the 24th, or to buy it! Since I finally had to get someone else to build the pantry cupboards (which I wanted to do - if I had the time) as well, I decided not to let this opportunity pass by.. after all, I am working as an independent consultant now, and it was holidays around the world anyway!

So I started to look for a simple software to design the structure, the Google Sketchup came in very handy! I also used the measurements I took some time ago from the corner sofa set bought for the WSO2 office in Colombo. I had to spend on the fabric, wood and the foam and it cost around the equivalent of $500.. it took about a week to come into shape, and finally my wife helped with the sewing of the fabric and the cushions. I did stay up all night on the 23rd, to ensure that everything was ready by the morning of the 24th :)

Here are some pics taken during the construction.. if you need the Sketchup files, let me know

Finishing off with padding and foam..

Making the frame..

Cutting the wood.. with the use of support 'templates' to get correct edges with the circular saw..

A new beginning..

2008-11-01T22:51:00.000+05:30

After a bit over two and a half years at WSO2, I am starting my own consulting practice today as an independent consultant! The past couple of years has been both very interesting and challenging.

I worked mostly on the Apache Synapse Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and built the WSO2 branded version of it as WSO2 ESB, and took both of these through many releases. The development of the non-blocking http/s transport was the most challenging problem we solved, that allowed Synapse to scale to support thousands of concurrent connections utilizing a small thread pool of workers. The NIO transport now supports constant memory throttling, utilizing some of the very cool features of the Apache HttpComponents/NIO. I learn't a lot about the complexities of NIO and the issues with the HTTP/S protocol from Oleg Kalnichevski who contributes immensely to HttpComponenets. I've also worked on implementing the JMS transport, the Mail transport and the File system transport for Synapse and Axis2, and also built an abstract transport framework that allows one to write a new transport with minimal effort.

Ruwan, Indika, Chathura, Upul, Evanthika, Chanaka, Saliya and Dinuka were my team mates from WSO2, and both Sanjiva and Paul helped me immensely during these years to reach my targets. We beat both proprietary ESB's as well as other open source ESB's during three rounds of performance testing we carried out, and these tests have now become a defacto standard for ESB's, followed by both BEA (now Oracle) and Mule who ran the same tests.

I will continue to work on Apache Synapse and be available for consulting, training and development assistance around Apache Synapse, open source middleware, enterprise Java and performance testing and tuning. Thus, I have setup my consulting partnership http://adroitlogic.org which is officially starting today.. This is the first time that I am leaving permanent employment after working for over 10 years for IBM Sri Lanka, the National Institute of Business Management, Virtusa (Nasdaq:VRTU) and WSO2.. but I am confident that I will reach my objectives, while enjoying more free time with my kids and family.

So I leave my boats behind
Leave them on familiar shores
Set my heart upon the deep
Follow you again, my Lord!
[http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-EEadyvswaKcb8ZXz15O_?p=1]

Why doesn't an executor reuse a thread after completing your task?

2008-08-26T11:05:00.000+05:30

This could happen if your task throws a RuntimeException.. then the Java Executor will not reuse that thread and would create a new thread. Consider the following example, if you comment the line "throw new RuntimeException("Runtime");" you will get the following output:

This is some thread : TG-ID-1
This is some thread : TG-ID-2
...
This is some thread : TG-ID-20
This is some thread : TG-ID-20
This is some thread : TG-ID-20
This is some thread : TG-ID-20
...
...
This is some thread : TG-ID-20
..
This is some thread : TG-ID-2
This is some thread : TG-ID-1

But if you leave the RuntimeException, your outpur will be:
This is some thread : TG-ID-1
...
This is some thread : TG-ID-71
This is some thread : TG-ID-72
This is some thread : TG-ID-73
...
etc..


import java.util.concurrent.*;
import java.util.concurrent.atomic.AtomicInteger;

public class TestExecutor {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        new TestExecutor().test();
    }

    private void test() {
        BlockingQueue blockingQueue = new LinkedBlockingQueue();
        Executor executor = new ThreadPoolExecutor(
            20, 100, 5,
            TimeUnit.SECONDS,
            blockingQueue,
            new NativeThreadFactory(new ThreadGroup("My-T-grp"), "TG-ID"));

        for (int i=0; i<100; i++) {
            executor.execute(new Runnable() {
                public void run() {
                    System.out.println("This is some thread : " + Thread.currentThread().getName());
                    throw new RuntimeException("Runtime");
                }
            });
        }
    }


    public class NativeThreadFactory implements
        ThreadFactory {

        final ThreadGroup group;
        final AtomicInteger count;
        final String namePrefix;

        public NativeThreadFactory(final ThreadGroup group, final String namePrefix) {
            super();
            this.count = new AtomicInteger(1);
            this.group = group;
            this.namePrefix = namePrefix;
        }

        public Thread newThread(final Runnable runnable) {
            StringBuffer buffer = new StringBuffer();
            buffer.append(this.namePrefix);
            buffer.append('-');
            buffer.append(this.count.getAndIncrement());
            Thread t = new Thread(group, runnable, buffer.toString(), 0);
            t.setDaemon(false);
            t.setPriority(Thread.NORM_PRIORITY);
            return t;
        }

    }
}

Major bug with Ohloh makes it almost useless?!

2008-06-13T01:28:00.000+05:30

Apache Synapse became a Top Level Project (TLP) of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) a few months back, and thus we had to change our SVN url. Although our SVN contains history spanning back to almost three (3) years back, Ohloh only sees the project as only 5 months old!

I have complained about this to Ohloh 4 months back, at which time they stated

..We are unable to follow development activity across branches or directory moves..As far as I can tell there is no workaround. This affects a lot of projects, and I desperately want to get this fixed, but it will take some time.

Like they claimed, this affects many many projects! For example check Apache HttpComponents, ServiceMix, MINA..etc! This list will go on and on, since each new project started at the ASF will first go through incubation and then graduation, followed optionally by a move to become a TLP, and at each of these stages, the SVN url could possibly change.

Since the code metrics reported for so many of thes open source projects are just plain wrong, how can any of the information presented by ohloh be useful to anyone?

I sure hope someone at ohloh recognises the importance of this, and fixes this ASAP!

Limiting permissions to Java programs with policies

2008-06-11T17:45:00.000+05:30

I wanted to limit the permissions for a Java program to only connect to a certain host.. and the way to do this is by defining your own policy file, and passing this as an argument to the Java command as follows:

temp.policy
grant {
//permission java.net.SocketPermission "69.147.112.160:80","connect,resolve";
permission java.io.FilePermission "<>", "read, write, delete, execute";
permission java.util.PropertyPermission "*", "read, write";
permission java.lang.RuntimePermission "*";
permission java.lang.reflect.ReflectPermission "*";
};

The above policy will not grant the process any SocketPermissions, however, if you only wanted it to connect to a specific IP address or hostname, you can uncomment the first line, and edit it appropriately.

For more information refer to: http://java.sun.com/developer/onlineTraining/Programming/JDCBook/appA.html

Now to start your program using the above policy file, use:

java -cp some.jar -Djava.security.manager -Djava.security.policy=temp.policy MainClass

How to get a loan in 3 days?

2006-07-18T09:30:00.000+05:30

[Please note that this entry is written for the Sri Lankan context and hopefully will not apply outside of Sri Lanka]

Couple of days ago I bought my first house… from the day the property was advertised in the paper, until the day it got written under my name, it took 17 elapsed calendar days. Although I took an express 24 business hour housing loan from the NSB – paying an extra fee for the ‘express’ service, I actually got the loan only after about 31 business hours as opposed to the advertised 24! But note that although the NSB advertises the service as the three business day service, they inform you well ahead that it will be on the 4th day after submission that the cheque will be ready. (i.e. 4 calendar days since one business day is 8 hours) The service begins only after all required documents are ready and accepted by the bank, and getting these documents ready itself could take a few more days at the local government and land registries etc., so do not ever assume that you could really get everything done in 3 or 4 days!

After many years of searching for a property within a particular area, and fluctuating housing loan interest rates, we finally came across a property that we liked on the 12th of March. By this time, I was ready with all documents necessary to apply for a housing loan from the NSB, and had all documents required to prove my income, ready.

After initial inspection of the property on Sunday the 12th of March, we were able to get a copy of the deed and the plan by the 14th. After an initial validation from the NSB on the loan amount and the offer price for the property that we considered, we also validated this through an external valuer (as we couldn’t get in touch with the NSB valuer in time) – just to be safe about the loan amount being pursued from the bank, for the property concerned. To also ensure that the property has a good title, we started our search through the land registry ahead of time, and thanks to my mother-in-law, we were able to request for the necessary extracts ahead of the confirmation of acceptance of our offer. We were informed that our offer has been accepted on the 20th of March, and were able to collect the relevant documents from the vendor on the 21st to acquire the other documents from the municipal council.

The next few days were hectic as I was running around with my mother-in-law to the land registries, municipal council, surveyors and lawyers! As the bank looks for clear title for 30 years, sometimes you may need to check the deeds for more than 30 years if you are unlucky. Usually at the land registries, some documents become ‘lost’.. but if you are really interested to ‘find’ these.. they mysteriously appear back again in an instant! And you may sometimes come across a situation where a particular deed required cannot be located. This may be a troublesome event if you cannot locate the lawyer who wrote this particular deed either, and if it has been written by a lady lawyer before she got married.. Good luck! As she may have now changed her name, and you will not be able to locate her in any telephone directory or service either! If you come across this situation, you should go to the registrar generals department in Fort, and go through the list of lawyers, and locate the land registry where the 2nd copies of the particular lawyer are held. Again like the registration information at the land registries, the 2nd copies play the same old lost-and-found trick!.. if you keep your eyes open at a land registry, you will surely see why so many attorneys goes near or sometimes even inside the record rooms and almost touches the clerks.. keep your eyes open when you notice the above and you will realize how lost records are mysteriously found at the Sri Lankan land registries! You may sometimes hear stories about how certain records become damaged at the registries.. and then you will hear about the specially trained mice who are given this task to destroy ‘some’ of the records mentioned above.

Getting copies of your extracts on time could be a task of its own.. though the photocopying section of the land registries (at least some) are supposed to be somewhat privatized, they still function according to the ‘old laws’. If you are in a hurry to get your copies, either you should speak to the registrar and explain your situation and get an endorsement on your receipt from him, or go through ‘other means’.. Even if you get the registrar himself to endorse and prioritize your extracts, you then need to wait and waste hours near the photocopy section.. again some of the folios you may have checked the day before may again get ‘lost’ just as they are about to get photocopied.. Waiting for your copies near the photocopy desk, you will surely see how some people get their copies through a ‘same day’ service, while those who goes by the book will have to spend at least a week or more to get their copies! But to your surprise you will note that these special ‘same day’ services are neither documented nor informed to any person officially, though you see many posters from the bribery and corruption commission at these registries. I wonder if all that the present bribery commission does is print these posters and paste them around the infested spots, since if they just visit some of these locations they could save the cost of these prints as well as stop all corruption. But then again when Sri Lanka is unable to even appoint a commissioner to the above commission and so many others in time, and when you hear how the Sri Lanka Inland Revenue heads are being arrested for involvement in the largest tax fraud of South Asia, you will realize why these institutes function as I have mentioned above.

After you collect the necessary deeds and extracts you may also need to go through previous plans pertaining to your property.. However in the case of surveyors, no copies are maintained at the Survey Department etc. as deed copies are maintained by the land registries. Hence if a particular surveyor who has written a plan is no more, you may have very less options!

After all legal documents mentioned above and related survey plans are found, your lawyer will need to study these in detail and prepare a Title report and a Pedigree report of the property.

You will also have to spend some time at the local Municipal Council to get the relevant documents to obtain your housing loan. Note that the COC – Certificate of Conformance for a house is requested by the NSB – but is not included in their guide book.

The other documents which are required but are not mentioned in the NSB guide book is as follows:

1. A standing order form from your bank – if you are paying the installment through one

2. A copy of your NID and that of the vendor.

It is strongly suggested to meet a credit officer at the NSB on the day prior to your submission of documents, to check that all are in order. Note that some documents you hand over to the bank (e.g. the deed) could be photocopies - as long as they are certified by a Notary. Also make sure to get copies of your bank statements etc. as you may want to keep the originals with you for future purposes and just hand over copies to the bank. Any original documents that you submit to the bank will be filed and will not be returned to you.

Loan Day 1 (Friday)

On the day you submit your documents, it is suggested to arrive at the bank by 8:30am in the morning, just as they open for business. It would be then possible to meet the same credit officer who reviewed your documents the previous day. Your documents would then be filed in a few hours. (Mine took 2 hours). Since we opted to write and process our own Title Deed, we were able to save 1% of the purchase price which would otherwise have had to be paid for to the NSB as legal charges for the deed. Due to this reason we tried very hard to find out which of the legal officers would process our loan, so that we would be able to synchronize with them to make the process smoother. However, the legal department at NSB seems to lack the customer friendly attitude of the Housing loans section so far, and seems to operate according to the ‘old regime’ system of governance. However, we were asked by one of the officers to submit a draft of the deed on Monday.

They will then ask you to get a Mortgage Protection policy, and you may want to select Ceylinco over SLIC. However I choose SLIC, and went there straight away and got an appointment with Durdans hospital for them to conduct the medical checkup required for the policy.

The Weekend, ..

After 14 hours of fasting, I went for the medical test at Durdans early morning on Saturday. The Bank official was also able to make his inspection on Saturday, and the valuer on Sunday. I assume that if I had not submitted my documents on Friday, these two would have taken more time, and would not have been available to the NSB by the morning of the 2nd day of the Express loan system.

Loan Day 2 (Monday)

I met with the credit officer again and tried to get any feedback on the draft of the deed, but was unsuccessful. I was not able to get any feedback as the still ‘the file has not come to the legal section’. I then tried to go to the SLIC, but unfortunately it was towards the end of the lunch hour at this still not so privatized institution. After meeting with the relevant person, and then getting the medical report verified through the SLIC doctor, they stated that it needs to go through re-insurance as the Total cholesterol/HDL ratio was 0.06 over its regular value, though no other tests indicated any significant risk. Hence I was asked to come again tomorrow.

Loan Day 3 (Tuesday)

Again I met with the credit officer, and found that still the file had not gone to the legal section, as it was still going through a process where about 6 to 8 people had to approve the loan, all the way up to the chairman! Hence again I went to the SLIC to pay my premium as I was asked to bring this particular policy on the day the loan would be disbursed, by the NSB. However, I find that still SLIC has ‘not made a decision’ on the policy. Then I spoke to a few officers and an AGM of the department, and overheard a conversation at the AGM’s office on how they were going to loose a life insurance to Ceylinco! Getting my own insurance policy last year after considering all leading insurance companies in Sri Lanka, including SLIC, I immediately knew they were playing a loosing battle! I also spoke to the AGM and the other officials on the delay, and said that if the so called ‘Leaders in insurance’ is like this.. what we should expect as customers. I also commented that I should have opted to get this policy from Ceylinco, as at least they would not have made me waste my time like this. Note that Mortgage Protection policies are processed only at the SLIC head office.

D-Day (Wednesday)

I went early in the morning to the NSB, and found that my file has still not reached the legal department after 24 business hours! It was around 11am when it finally reached the legal division as the Title insurance information had to be processed and inserted into the file, and only one of the officers out of three were present at the time. Following the file to the legal division, we were able to finally meet the legal officer who was to process our application. At about 11:15am we were called and informed that there was a discrepancy between the second schedule of the deed (which states the right of way) and the Title insurance policy – which has stated that we would have access through all roads shown in the survey plan. However, the latter is incorrect as we had the right of way only through one of the roads shown in the plan which was over 10 years old. But, as the legal officer insisted, we were compelled to insert a single line into the deed so that it matched the (erroneous) title insurance, to avoid a delay in the processing of our loan. We were then asked to come at 2:30pm to sign the deed and the mortgage bond by the legal officer.

After paying the necessary stamp duty and collecting the insurance policy from the SLIC (finally) we came to the bank again with the Vendor at the stated time. After signing the deed, we were surprised to see that the mortgage bond had been printed erroneously by the NSB legal division, with the wrong amount! Hence to cover up and prevent further delay, we were asked to sign on an empty bond which they would fill-up later and then began the eternal waiting…

Eternal waiting…

At 3:15pm I was given a receipt to pay for the legal charges, and the cash counter was about to close by 3:30pm. When I went to the cash counter, the cashier was already in a mood to go home, and was almost closed for the day, and reluctantly started to accept the payment, saying that he had to catch some train… I guess these are normal ‘happenings’ at the ‘still in the government sector’ though we never hear such stories in our private sector places of work.. ever! Then the legal officer asked me to go back to the housing loans section, where they wanted me to get a fresh letter of vacant possession from the vendor, and then I had to pay the Title insurance and Fire insurance premiums. Now the same cashier was in a really bad mood and said that if I wanted to pay, I needed to pay the ‘exact’ amount in cash! But to his surprise I was able to make this amount , and a senior official then came and asked him to process the receipts quickly.. the cashier was still talking about the stupid train… After I produced the receipts again at the loans section, they found out that the Title insurance amount they asked me to pay was Rs. 500/- less than the actual amount, and then I was asked to pay this balance again.. How I wonder how a bank makes mistakes in something like “amounts”!! This is the second time they made such a mistake! Now again I went back to the same cashier at the fourth floor and he was almost on the train by now.. but to my luck, the senior officials were again present, and closing the days balance, and they were very helpful in asking this cashier to process the balance as a late payment fee, which he very reluctantly had to do. Then after producing the receipt again at the loans division at the third floor I was told that everything was ready and that the cheque would be given in the fourth floor by the legal division and for me to go upstairs and wait. The time was around 4:25pm.

However after some time, since the cheque never arrived, I went back down stairs, and then was asked to which account it should be written.. and then the person typing the cheque took around 12 minutes to type about three lines of text on the computer and print the cheque.. I was about 10 feet from the computer and I could hear them trying to take the cursor keys up and down and delete some of the text they have typed in the wrong place.. !@#$ Then finally after the cheque was printed and signed, it lay again in the tray until someone came to pick it up and take it to the legal division again.. the time was past 4:50pm by now.. and I just saw the credit manager waking by and once he saw me still standing, he came and called for someone to take the cheque upstairs… I went along with the peon to the legal division.. and then after about another 5 minutes the legal officer came and started to apologize to the bank official who was to hand over the cheque stating that there was a delay since ‘we’ did the title deed ourselves!

Now having proof that the 24 business hour loan didn’t even reach the legal department in 24 business hours, and seeing that the legal division was unable to correctly print about 25 words on a pre-printed mortgage bond correctly in three hours, we wondered how they could have completed and printed a Title deed as well (correctly) and still deliver the loan faster than this?? Then finally the cheque was handed over to the vendor at around 5pm after 301/2 business hours after acceptance of the express loan.

So can you really get a housing loan in 24 business hours?.. well according to my calculations of 8 working hours per day, you cannot… not even in 4 days!... but my wife was able to correct me through her experience working at a government institution sometime back.. the fact I missed was that on any 8 business hour day at a government or semi-government institution - only 6 are ‘working’ hours  !!...Aha.. now you do your math!

For a loan of x,x00,000/- with a House worth y,y00,000/- (i.e. a Total of z,x00,000/-) I had to pay the following charges to obtain the housing loan through the (not so) express service. Note that I have left out the loan and purchase amount intentionally ;-)

Valuation fees 3,980
Inspection fees 550
Title investigation charges 500
Credit information bureau charges 240
Special levy 28,875
Mortgage bond registration fees 1,500
Initial amount payable when handing the loan application 35,600
Title insurance 25,526
Fire insurance 16,323
Legal charges (0.75% of the mortgage amount) ~0.75% of ‘mortgage’ amount
Stamp Duty ~3% of ‘purchase’ price

Note that I have left out usual legal charges of 1% of the value of property for the Title deed (usually charged by the bank) and all legal and other costs and charges for the preparation of the Title report, Title deed, land registry searches, local government taxes and payments, surveyors fees and lawyers costs etc.

Also see.
(1) EMI calculations
(2) Tax calculations
(3) Tax benefits and directions with housing loans

My first Blog!

2005-05-09T15:00:00.000+06:00

Hi to all ..

Just wanted to get to know more about blogging, and what better way to do it than to start my own blog! So I hope to add more and more interesting stuff in here and that people will find my blog interesting to read!

cheers!
asankha

For more information about me: check www.geocities.com/asankha or www.asankha.com