I finally had my 240 volt charger installed for my Volt today. On 110 volts, the Volt takes up to 10 hours to fully charge. With the new charger it takes no more than 4 hours. This will make multiple all-electric trips during the day a lot easier.
The electrician had to bury the conduit from the box on the south-east corner of my house over to the garage, which meant digging a trench. While digging the trench, they broke the water main, cut the internet cable and broke two sprinkler lines. It’s all repaired now, but the trenches are still open until the City comes to inspect on Tuesday. Fortunately I can still use it before it is inspected.
The electric bill for May went up compared to April with the higher temperatures and with charging the Volt, but we also saved more than in previous months.
The total bill was about $87. Without the solar panels it would have been about $262, so we saved about $175!
The Volt costs between $1.00 and $1.20 to charge each day, depending on how much I drive, so that added between $30 and $40 to the total bill; about the same as 10 gallons of gas.
I told the story of Derek and me driving to Northern Arizona yesterday to see the eclipse in some detail in my previous post, and I mentioned that I took my Volt. Here is some info on what it was like driving an “extended range electric vehicle” on a mountainous highway.
As I’ve posted before, the Volt is an electric car that carries its own generator so when the battery is fully discharged you can continue to go. The generator is sized so that on average it provides enough power to drive the car as fast as you need — it’s 1.4 liters. That’s a lot more power than is needed to keep the car going on a level highway. When you need to accelerate or go up a hill, the car can briefly draw supplementary power from the battery to give a boost, and then when you are coasting the little engine can replace the energy it withdrew and prepare for the next boost.
This system works fine under normal circumstances, but when you are driving over 100 miles mostly up hill, the generator can’t keep up. The Volt is a fairly heavy car and 1.4 liters isn’t enough to drive it 80 miles an hour up a steep mountain highway.
So what Chevy did to solve this problem is add a mode called “Mountain Mode”. Here’s how it works:
As I was leaving Phoenix yesterday, somewhere south of Anthem, I shifted the car into Mountain Mode in preparation for the climb ahead. In this mode the engine produces more energy than it needs to move the car and partially recharges the battery. As you hit the hills and the engine can no longer keep up, it starts to draw some of that excess energy from the battery to provide supplementary power. As you crest each hill, or the road becomes less steep, the engine again puts energy back into the battery.
In this way I was able to drive 80 mph all the way to Flagstaff (where legal, of course), passing the “slower” cars with ease. I never felt under powered, and was able to accelerate up the hills. It’s no V8, of course, and there wasn’t strong acceleration at 80 mph going up a hill, but it was fine.
When I arrived in Flagstaff, we stopped for a snack and when we got back in the car I switched out of Mountain Mode and was surprised to discover that I had almost a half-full battery. I was able to drive beyond Flagstaff on only electricity before the engine had to kick in again.
On the way home I thought the road was downhill almost all the way, so I didn’t bother with Mountain Mode. This worked fine until we passed Camp Verde and started up that long climb towards the Prescott turn-off. About half-way up the hill the Volt flashed me a warning “Propulsion power is reduced!”, and we began to slow down — the engine couldn’t keep up, and the battery didn’t have any extra power to donate. I was doing 70 up the hill until then, but I watched my speed slowly drift down — 69… 65… 63… until we finally bottomed out at about 57, where the engine could finally just keep up. Once we crested the hill, we were able to once again accelerate to full speed and had no further problems.
(Simulated display)
I have completely blown my lifetime MPG with this trip, but that’s OK. A car is to be driven and it was a fun experiment to see how the Volt performs under challenging circumstances. With the one difference that you have to manage Mountain Mode, it ran just like any other car up the hill with power to spare.
I averaged 38 MPG for the trip — about 26 MPG going up and over 50 MPG coming down. Not bad. And I finally had to figure out how to open and fill the gas tank for the first time yesterday. After about 2500 miles, I have now burned about 16 gallons of gas.
Yesterday Derek and I drove up to northern Arizona to view the eclipse. We drove the Volt, but that’s another post.
This was an “annular” eclipse, meaning that the Moon was a little too small to completely block out the Sun as in a total eclipse. Seeing a total eclipse is on my bucket list, but this was still the best eclipse I have seen.
We could have seen the eclipse in Tempe too, but it would have just been a crescent. By driving north we were able to see a full ring, with the Moon completely within the disk of the Sun.
Here’s where we went:
The blue lines indicate the region where the Moon would be seen completely within the disk of the Sun. The red line indicates the line of maximum duration, where the Moon would be centered inside the sun. We were close enough to that middle that it didn’t make much difference visually.
We didn’t have very good optical equipment: A pinhole projector, and camera phones. I tried to buy welding lenses Sunday morning, but of course every Home Depot and Harbor Freight in the state was sold out. Next time I’ll go shopping early! We did meet some other people in the later stages who had eclipse glasses, and it was very cool seeing it directly rather than projected, but I was still unable to take pictures through the glasses.
Here’s what it looked like with the moon about half way in (there are multiple holes of various sizes in our pinhole projector, producing multiple images of varying brightness and clarity):
And here’s at the maximum coverage:
At this time it was noticeably darker and cooler. A half hour before, the sun shining on our bodies was hot and I was wearing sunglasses. At maximum coverage I had to take my sunglasses off, and I could barely feel any heat from sun.
We also had a lot of fun with shadows. The following picture was taken when the sun looked like a ring. Derek and I were standing on a hill casting our shadow on the hill below us. Look carefully in the middle and you can see at least two rings of light in the middle of the shadow. Basically, the gaps between our limbs were acting like pinhole projectors, and creating an image of the sun in the middle of the shadow. Notice too the weird shapes the shadows create, and how the edges are extremely blurred.
We noticed another effect as the sun was reduced to a narrow crescent. Normally a shadow is blurry on all edges the same amount because the sun is a circle in the sky and the symmetry blurs the same in all directions. But when the sun is narrow in one direction and long in another, the shadows become asymmetric.
Look at Derek’s arms in the following two pictures. When his arms are extended upper left to lower right, the shadow is fairly distinct, but when they extend from the upper right to lower left the shadow becomes much blurrier (the big rectangle in his right hand is a piece of cardboard).
You can also see several crescents throughout the images. Again, projected images of the sun. Notice that the line of the crescents is parallel to Derek’s arms at maximum clarity.
The trip was well worth it for me. I’ve seen 4 or 5 eclipses before, and this one is by far the best so far — it’s the first one where I was positioned to see the moon fully inside the disk of the sun.
But now I want more! People say that on a scale of 1 to 10, a crescent eclipse is a 5, and an annular eclipse is a 9. A total eclipse is a thousand. It is said to be almost religious in its effect on the viewer as waves of shadow sweep across the land, the stars come out and the sun’s corona becomes visible.
There will be a total eclipse sweeping across the central US in August, 2017. I hope to see you there.
I know I just posted yesterday about my new DVR. Well, this is big enough that it requires a separate post.
Dish just announced (and downloaded to my DVR) a new feature: “Auto Hop“. This is basically automatic commercial skip. It only works on the prime time shows recorded with “Prime Time Any Time”, and it only starts working a few hours after the programs were recorded, but then when you start playing a show you are given the option to skip commercials.
I can’t believe that the networks and their advertisers will let this stand, but I’m going to enjoy it while I can. I hate commercials and always skip them anyway, but this takes the hassle out of it.
Dish network just released a new DVR (the Hopper), which I upgraded to yesterday.
There are two improvements that stand out for me.
1) I can get HD on my remote TV. Before, the remote TV just received an SD signal, so this is a big improvement up in our bedroom.
2) Prime Time Any Time. The system records all the Prime Time shows on ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox from 7 – 10 each evening (Arizona Prime Time), and saves them for 8 days. During that time it still leaves 2 tuners free, so I can record up to 6 programs at the same time during Prime Time. This is a big deal, as I was always juggling programs around and having to decide which shows to record and which to skip during prime time. I’ll probably also sample some new programs that I haven’t bothered to record before, since they’ll all be there ready to view any time.
Other incremental improvements include faster interface, 2 TB of storage, and multiple USB ports, but 1 and 2 above are the biggies for me.
At the rist of completely boring everyone with more talk of my Volt, here’s a cost comparison I have worked out with my previous car (Acura MDX) and the prototypical gas miser, the Toyota Prius.
Comparing the cost to drive my Volt (at 2.5 cents/mile) and the MDX (25 cents/mile), I have saved $360 this month driving 1600 miles. At this rate, I would save $4320 in a year. Compared to a Prius, at about 45 MPG on regular at about $3.75, I have saved about $93 for the month.
But I’ve been driving 40 miles to see Mom in the hospital almost every day. Past history shows I actually drive on average about 1000 miles/month. In addition, summer electric rates are higher, increasing my costs in the Volt to about 3.9 cents/mile. Averaged over a year, it comes to about 3.3 cents/mile.
Here are tables showing the savings this month, and then in a typical month.
Every summer we get ants in the house, especially in the kitchen where they like to harvest Apollo’s leftovers. We hate to spray insecticide around where Apollo and we eat, but hate having ants in the house too.
Last year we found Ecosmart Ant and Roach Killer at Home Depot. The active ingredients are peppermint oil and rosemary oil. Without much hope, we bought a can to try. We were very surprised. It is quite effective in killing any ants that are present, and it discourages ants from entering where it has been sprayed. I suspect that the neurotoxins the big chemical companies market may work better and last longer, but this seems fine and I feel a lot better spraying it around the house.
It makes sense, when you realize that plants developed many of their chemicals to discourage insects from eating them. Fortunately these particular chemicals are benign to humans, and in fact we use them to flavor our foods. They smell a lot better than the petroleum-based sprays too.
