Big Henry’s Big Day

Posted on May 23, 2020May 23, 2020 by Bill

Big Henry was sleeping as the sun came up in Woodinville, WA.

He woke up and threw off his blankets. “I’m going to have a great day today. In fact, I’m going to have a great BIG day!”, he said.

“But first, I think I need a big breakfast. I wonder what Bubbie is going to have”, he thought. Soon Bubbie started making a smoothie with all kinds of delicious ingredients. She used banana, avocado and other yummy things. Big Henry thought that might taste good. He offered to help Bubbie make the smoothie.

It was delicious! Big Henry “cheers’ed” with Bubbie and they both drank their smoothies.

After breakfast Big Henry wanted to play with his friends. He asked Caitlin if she wanted to plan Connect 4. He was excited when she said yes!

Big Henry should be careful, Caitlin might win this game!

Bubbie asked Big Henry if he wanted to watch the construction workers do their jobs. He did! So Bubbie got him a comfy chair and he sat on the porch watching the work.

In the afternoon, Big Henry asked Opa to turn on the TV so he and his friends could watch a show.

Do you see what program they watched?

Then Big Henry, Bubbie and Opa had dinner. Afterward Big Henry was very sleepy. It was time for bed. Bubbie read him a story. Then she pulled his blanket up over his shoulders and he drifted off to sleep. He had the most wonderful dreams about his big day!

Some real-world numbers

Posted on May 28, 2019 by Bill

We’ve had the car for a bit more than a week. It got to Boise on the 6th. I got down there on the 8th to drive it and pay for it. Without any real-world numbers on miles/kWh or charging rates, I planned a route for brining it home, a trip of about 500 miles. It would have been a fun adventure. Other family issues made us re-think our need and capacity for adventure at that time. So we shipped the car home.

It arrived on the 16th. We have about three hundred miles on the odometer and have charged twice at home and once on a public DC charger.

The car says it is getting 3.1 km per kWh. That’s 1.9 miles per kWh and the car can, in theory, spit out 76 kWh before calling it good. That suggests the range on 80 percent of a full battery is 146 miles. That’s way off the advertised 204 miles and the 212 miles the car says it has on a full battery. We need more time to sort out the real range of this thing.

We have a two 240V, 40A circuits in the garage with NEMA 14-50 receptacles. The car’s charging unit fits that receptacle. Technically, the ‘gizmo’ they give you is called an EVSE, electric car supply equipment. The charger is in the car. The ESVE has a NEMA plug on one side and a J1772 connector on the other. It has control electronics that keep everyone safe while charging and not charging.

The circuit we have should charge the car at 9.6 kWh. But we only get 4.4 kWh. That means a full charge should take around 25 hours, much longer than the 9 hours Audi advertises. I did notice the ESVE says “50%”, which is close to 4.4 kWh. I just can’t find any switch to make it work at 100%!

Today I charged at a 50 kWh DC EVgo station at the local shopping center. I was able to charge from 57% to 95% in 42 minutes. My math says that’s 36.1 kWh, but the charger says it delivered 35.3 kWh. Close enough. That’s 0.84 kWh per minute or 50 kWh per hour. At that rate, a full (20% to 100%) charge should take 90 minutes. A 150 kWh charger should be almost three times faster.

The cost of the 50 kWh charger, for 35 kWh was $13.40. That’s roughly 20 cents per mile. At $4/gal, my Q7 costs about the same to operate. The lesson here is — charge at home!

Bottom line

On the highway, two hours of driving will take you about 150 miles and run your battery down to twenty percent. It will take about thirty minutes to recharge that if you can find 150 kWh charger, 90 minutes otherwise.

Around town, the same 150 miles will take you two to three days in the suburbs and will require 17 hours to refill. It’s probably best to charge every night.

Overall impressions of the car

We love it! It’s super comfortable, luxurious actually. It drives well, is fast enough and handles nicely. The audio is good. Features are outstanding, it’s fully loaded. (We have the Edition One.) You do feel like you are driving the future of automobiles.

Negatives include CarPlay (which is flaky as heck), no user manuals and slow charging at home.

We need to find a 150 kWh charger and get more real-world mileage before we take a road trip. Spokane is a common destination for us. We see ElectrifyAmerica will have a 150 kWh charger on that route soon. But there is nothing high-speed near family in Spokane. So we can get there, but will need a long time to charge enough to get back to the high-speed charger. For now, this is an around-town car. But a really, really nice one!

Can’t plug that!

Posted on May 10, 2019May 10, 2019 by Bill

Apologies to MC Hammer….

So you need to charge your rolling battery. We discussed in the previous post that a bigger charger can add more miles, in the form of kilowatt-hours (kWh), than a smaller charger. Chargers sort-a, kind-a come in three sizes called L1, L2 and L3. L means ‘level’.

Each level can charger faster than the one below.

L1 is your regular ol’ household outlet. That’s 110 volts at 15 amps. That’s 1.65kW, or, not much. I know my arithmetic is correct; 110 times 15 IS 1,650. But many web pages I see describe L1 having more like 3.7kW. They may be assuming 30 amps. Audi says an L1 charger can add 80 percent, 76kW, in 90 hours. I think that means they are assuming 0.84kW. Whatever… there’s clearly not a lot of ‘go’ in that plug.

A lot of chargers listed on PlugShare are L1. It’s helpful to set your filters to ignore these chargers. (See below.)

L2 uses more voltage and more amps. So way more kW. We have a 30 amp, 240 volt outlet in our garage. That’s 7.2kW. We need 76kW to go from empty (20%) to full. It should take 10 hours. And indeed, Audi says 9 hours on an L2 charger will fill the tank.

Both L1 and L2 are alternating current (AC). You know, the normal household stuff, but with a little more kick in the L2 case.

L3 is direct current, or DC. We generally don’t have this stuff in our homes. At least not in any wall plugs. ElectrifyAmerica and others are building nationwide networks of L3 chargers. EA has 50kW and 150kW chargers in metro areas and 150kW and 350kW chargers along major interstate highways.

Three-hundred and fifty kilowatts is, well, a lot. Fifteen minutes on a 350kW charger will deliver 87.5kW or more than we need to go from 20% to full in the Audi e-tron. We can cut our refueling time in half. Sort-of…

The other eighty percent

We already know that most EVs think 20 percent state-of-charge (SOC) is empty. L3 chargers slow down when the SOC reaches 80 percent. I’m not sure why. Apparently, L3 charges approach L2 speeds when the battery gets to 80% SOC. If the cost per minute of an L3 charger is higher than that of an L2 charger, it might be cost-effective to switch at 80% SOC.

A 350kW L3 charger can push the e-tron battery from 20% to 80% in just under 10 minutes. And that’s about 115 miles. If you had enough chargers along a route, you could drive 115 miles, charge for ten minutes, drive 115 miles, charge for ten minutes, etc. I’m not sure that’s better, but you are supposed to take frequent breaks!

You can plug that

There are a bunch of charger plugs out there. The one, or two, you want are dictated by your car. Tesla has their own adaptor. Ignoring that, you’ll find three plugs on public charging stations.

They look like this:


J1772	CHAdeMO	SAE Combo CCS

The J1772 plug is very common either by itself or in the CCS combo plug. Teslas have their own super-chargers and plugs, but they can use the J1772 with an adaptor. The e-tron uses the CCS adaptor. Which means it can also use the J1772.

The J1772 is an L2 plug. L3 chargers, other for non-Teslas, use the CCS plug. That bottom part of the CCS is the DC connector. The good stuff…

Nissan Leafs use the CHAdeMO plug. It does not fit the e-tron.

Bottom line

L3 is best, L2 is second best, L1 won’t cut it while traveling. The difference between L3 and L2 is substantial. Use L3 when possible.

Continue reading →

Huh, a killa-what?

Posted on May 9, 2019 by Bill

Oh, a kilowatt. Or kW. I see. So in electricity, a watt is a unit of power. It takes more power to light a room with a 100W bulb than it does with a 60W bulb. More power through the lightbulb, more light. A kilowatt is 1,000 watts. So ten 100W lightbulbs. Sort of.

A kilowatt-hour is the amount of energy we use when we push a kilowatt around for an hour. Light those ten bulbs for an hour, that’s 1kWh. Do it all night, that’s, um, more kWh. Depends on how long your night is. According to Wikipedia, so you know it’s true, the average US customer pays 12 cents per kWh. So ten 100W bulbs for an hours costs a bit more than a dime.

If I have a battery that holds, say, 95 kWh we can light those 10 100W bulbs for 95 hours. Or five of them for 190 hours. Or one for 950 hours.

This thing here:

Is a rolling 95kWh battery. It’s an Audi e-tron. It’s sitting in Boise, ID. We live near Seattle. It’s 500 miles. And we have a battery measured not in miles, but in kWh. Can we make it?

No.

Well, not in one fell-swoop, as they say. The key thing we need to know is, how many miles can you get per kWh. With a full charge, the car said it could go 250 miles. That’s 2.63 miles per kWH. Starting the car and running the A/C brought that quickly down to 212. Reviews on the web estimate 200 to 208. EVs (electric vehicles, if that wasn’t obvious) don’t let their batteries get below some threshold. Apparently a Tesla will use up to 90 percent or so of its juice. Rumor says Audi dialed that to around 20 percent. And they brag, a lot, about how little time it takes to charge the battery 80 percent. So let’s guess that they only use… 80 percent, or 76 kWh.

They also say owners get 1000 kWh free at ElectrifyAmerican charging stations and that amount of energy is roughly equivalent to 2,000 miles.

So… 2 miles per kWh. That’s 76 kWh (using the 20 percent floor) times 2m/kWh is right about 150 miles per ‘tank’. At 0.12 per kWh the cost is just over $9. That’s six cents a mile!

But what about getting from point A to point B?

First you have to find a charger every 150 miles. Ok, we have an app for that. The app lets you enter your start and destination addresses and details about your car (distance it can cover, how many miles you have remaining, when you start) and they find you chargers every, say 150s miles, along the route. Can any particular charger on the route get you the next, say 150 miles, down the road? Time for more math! You knew there would be math, right?

Keeping our 2m/kWh estimate, we need to get 75kWh into the car. If a charger produces 75kWh, it will take one hour to ‘fill the tank’. I’m making a boatload (technical term) of assumptions here about charge rates and the car’s ability to suck up the juice. But they match up pretty well with info Audi is advertising and publishing on the web.

Anyway, a 150kW charge needs a half-hour to add 75kW to the car. This exactly matches an Audi claim. That is, on a high-speed DC charger, you can add 80 percent distance in thirty minutes. Electrify America is Volkswagen (owns Audi) Corporation’s partial atonement for ‘diesel-gate’. They are investing $2B to build a (USA) nation-wide network of chargers. Their chargers will be 50kW, 150kW and 350kW units.

So, if we can find 150kWh chargers every 150 miles apart, we’re good to go. Let’s see… Maybe we can average 75mph on the highway. That’s two hours per leg of the trip. So we:

Drive two hours
Charge for one-half hour
Drive two hours
Charge for one-half hour
Drive two hours
Charge for one-half hour
Drive for two-thirds of an hour

And we’re home! EA charges $0.30 to $0.35 per minute. That’s nine dollars per charge. This trip costs $27 for fuel not counting the top-off at the end of the trip. Plus one and a half-hour in time. My Q7 gets 20 mpg on the highway at almost $4 per gallon. That’s about a hundred bucks but less time.

None of this reduces my enthusiasm for an electric car. And the e-tron is a great car. Good size, between the Q5 and Q7, all-wheel drive, lots of luxury features, etc.

So, are we going to drive it or ship it? Driving would be a fun adventure. But other things going on at the moment argue against an adventure at this moment. If we do drive it, we’ll describe the trip here.

In the meantime. I’ve done some research on charging ports, which matter, that I might post here. Plus specifics about charger levels, home chargers, getting accounts with charger companies. etc. More to follow…

We did that!

Posted on July 2, 2018 by Bill

We did not stay in Lewiston, not sure why it got its own marker. We did stay in Weatherford, OK, but regretted it.

States we visited

Georgia (1) [One night]

Alabama (1)

Mississippi (2)

Louisiana (-) [Just drove through]

Tennessee (2)

Arkansas (-)

Missouri (4)

Kansas (-)

Oklahoma (1)

Texas (-)

New Mexico (4)

Arizona (-) [Four Corners Monument]

Colorado (1)

Utah (1)

Idaho (4)

Washington (4)

Only one solidly blue state, and we live there anyway!

Day 26 — Back home!

Posted on July 1, 2018 by Bill

Whew! Made it. Forty-three hundred miles later we are back home. And it only took 207 gallons of gasoline. (20.77 MPG) We spent 13 nights in eight different hotels, not counting the DoubleTree at SeaTac Airport the night before our flight to Atlanta. We spent 12 nights with friends, family or in our own home-away-from-home in Boise. We washed the car four times. Got one chip in the windshield, which Boise Porsche fixed (for free!) Only one cop stopped us but we did have a few other close calls. No tickets. Some really good meals. Some meals in Whole Foods. Lots of visits to Starbucks. Saw one ballgame (KC) in person. Watched the M’s on TV once we hit Spokane. Hundreds of photos, some videos. Bought some t-shirts, postcards, shot glasses and other souvenirs and jewelry. The car runs like a top (as they say) but the infotainment system is random at best, cruel at worst. Hot and humid in the deep south. Hot and humid in the midwest. Hot in the southwest. Very pleasant in the PNW. Podcasts, Audible and Apple Music. Overall…

Lots of miles, lots of smiles.

Wrap-up post coming in a day or two.

Day 23, 24 & 25 — One ‘Spokane’ left to go

Posted on June 29, 2018 by Bill

We’ve had three very nice days in Spokane hanging out with the grand kids. We took our granddaughter to school all three days and picked her up twice. No, she’s not still at school! We also attended her year-end school picnic today and she went home in her parent’s car. We saw our grandson swim twice. He’s a baby, so swimming means holding one to one parent or the other in the shallow end of the pool. But he loves the water! Mostly we just hung out with the kids. And their parents…

Tomorrow is the last leg. One 290 mile trip. Or as we call it, one Spokane.

Day 19, 20, 21 & 22 — Back in PDT (& WA)

Posted on June 27, 2018 by Bill

Boise was fun and uneventful. We hit a few favorite places to eat, got the car tended to & washed, and saw a movie. Ocean’s 8 is entertaining. Not great, but fun enough. Boise was also the coolest, temperature-wise, place we’ve been on the whole trip. Only one of our four days in town hit more than 90 degrees.

Upper-left (part of the country)

Today we made the drive from Boise to Spokane. There are two main routes. The longer of the two takes less time because it’s Interstates all the way. The short way takes longer because it’s more fun. Ok, it’s more fun because it’s more of a back road way to go and thus slower. We averaged 52 MPH over almost 400 miles. We averaged over 70 on other long drives. We also got pulled over for the first time. Fortunately the cute one was driving and we got a warning. And not even a written warning. Whew!

The route today took us through four distinct geographies. From not-far-outside-of-Boise to McCall (ID) you follow the Payette River through forested lands. Very pretty. The road rises and falls, but mostly rises, with lots of twists and turns. Boise is at around 2,500 feet of elevation, McCall is around 5,000 feet.

From McCall to White Bird the trees fall away and the terrain become more mountainous or at least more hilly. You descend to around 1,500 by White Bird. And then it gets FUN. Over six or seven miles you climb an average 7% grade until you reach 4,200 feet. The road twists and turns and the drop-offs are steep. This is the kind of road our car was made for. We passed everything.

From there the terrain becomes high prairie and you enter the Nez Perce Reservation. We had our traffic stop on this stretch. Eventually you drop down to something like 700 feet of elevation and into Lewiston (ID). By now you’ve left MDT and entered PDT. Our fourth time zone.

Leaving Lewiston you climb quite quickly and enter The Palouse. The Palouse is mile

Palouse

after mile, after mile, of rolling, green hills. They look like sand dunes. In fact, they were formed by the same sort of forces that form sand dunes. They are tall enough to impress but small enough to plant wheat from top to bottom. At this time of year you see three shades; green, dark green and yellow. We’re not sure what the yellow crop is. We forget that whole crop-rotation section from grade school. In a few weeks the hills will turn brown as the wheat matures. The photo here is from the famed photographer Nancy Palouse-y. Hey, the jokes are free. You get what you paid for.

We’ll stay in Spokane for a few days and hang with the grandkids. And their parents. And maybe get the car washed again. And then one last drive, on this trip, to home. It’s unlikely we’ll blog for the next few days.

Day 18 — Ah, Home (Away from Home) Again

Posted on June 22, 2018 by Bill

We made it to Boise! The drive from the Salt Lake area (we stayed in Ogden) was nicer than we recalled from five years ago. The Utah part takes you through rolling hills that were mostly green today. The Idaho part is mostly high-desert scrub, primarily brown. The speed limit is 80 for most of the drive. 🙂

Over the weekend we plan to hit a few favorite places, check out the market, take in at least one movie and otherwise chill out. We expect the high temperatures to be in the eighties, which is most welcome after being in the deep south, mid-west and south-west for more than two weeks.

On Monday the car gets a ‘spa day’ at the dealer. We picked up a bunch of bug splats, of course, but also some goo that might be tar and might be berries or similar. Plus we have a chip in the windshield to tend to. We’ve driven over 3K miles so far and the exterior of the car is showing it.

And then on to Washington state! Unless something amazing happens, we won’t post for a few days. Mañana…

Day 17 — Climbing the Ladder

Posted on June 21, 2018June 24, 2018 by Bill

We started on I-20 around Atlanta (and Montgomery and Jackson, MS.) We crossed I-40 in Memphis and I-70 in Kansas City. We got back to I-40 in OKC and took it across the rest of Oklahoma, the Texas panhandle and a lot of New Mexico. Today we crossed over I-70 again and then I-80. In a few more days we’ll cross over I-90. We will also cover I-85 to I-5. It’s a big country…

It’s always 103 in Moab, UT

Utah-Red

It was when we came through in 2013 and it was again today. The area around Moab is incredible. If you want a fantastic drive, pick up US-191 in Monticello and drive 90-plus miles up the Spanish Valley, through Moab and up to i-70 at Crescent Junction. You’ll go past Canyonlands and Arches National Parks. Even if you don’t hit the parks, you’ll see amazing land formations and colors. It’s hard to capture on ‘film’ because of the scale. The photo here is the backdrop to a parking lot in Moab. Just another day in Utah.

We’re staying in Ogden, just north of Salt Lake City. It’s our last night in a hotel on this trip. The land north of here is more high desert. That will carry us into Idaho and to our place in Boise. We’ll have another spectacular drive in a few days when we head up to visit the grandchildren. And their parents of course! More to follow…