Fieldlines.com: The Otherpower discussion board
Homebrewed Electricity => Temporary power => Topic started by: JW on June 15, 2018, 10:37:08 PM
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When the power goes out, I have a temporarily system ready to go.
Im have a auto repair shop and stock like 6 Interstate batteries. I also have two battery's that I always keep fully charged. Each battery runs like over 6 hours with a high load, but way longer with a light load.
The inverter powers a smart TV like 44 inch and a DVD and Blue Ray player.
The TV system only pulls 66watts while running, it has a display on the inverter, Its a 12volt system.
I also use paraffin lamps.
I will take some pictures and update.
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I keep a couple storage batts..charged...my lamps use L.E.Ds...they only draw a few watts...couple candles ....and my exersize bike alt..charge batts..lights....small 50 watt.solar panel..and a windgen if needed...😜
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when the power goes out i take a nap. when the power comes back on i wake up
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Technically my non essential loads at my camp run on one one old Interstate battery that won't start a car any more. I get lights from that and can run a DVD and TV for several hours. And I can drag it down to death without any concern for its life.
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My inverter has an audible alarm and shuts down when the voltage drops to 11 volts. A deep cycle battery can be used when totally draining power, probably would have to use two 6 volt in series. Im just running 12volts auto battery.
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The simplest systems are often the best.
I spend several days per year without power. Various reasons, but mostly local lightning strikes and trees falling on lines. So over the years I've invested a bit every year and now can power the essentials of my house, even in winter, for a few days from the batteries. The batteries themselves were free - this wouldn't have happened without that lucky break.
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JW;
Good starting post!
We just for home camping kicks, shut down the incoming mains over a long weekend just because we can :).
We have 3 1/2 hybrid marine batteries. (the 1/2 is hooked to a different solar panel)
We also now have the cool Biolite 2.1 setup so we can charge our USB power anythings.
Lights are LED each string has it's own 18650 and a solar charge controller.
Fridge is a re-configured solid state unit. It's turned like a chest freezer. The cooling has been redone using some of those large computer cooling fins with small very noisy high-speed 12Vdc fans. & we insulated the heck out of it by adding an inch of the blue foam around everything but the door.
It doesn't need the startup power the mini-fridge did . The phase change ice packs will keep meat safe for hours at a time. Since we've redone the electronics, by separating the chip from the fans and split up the fans it's now a much better setup than it was when new, not just very "pretty".
Our setup for the 3 batteries is 12Vdc our old HF 100watt panels keep the batteries from dying, we do have several inverters sized anywhere from the little 100w up to the 900w MSW for using our 700w microwave.
I'm seriously looking at building/buying a boost converter to take the 5Vdc coming off the Biolite system up to 14Vdc just to see if it'll work for keeping an emergency charge on a battery.
We don't typically watch TV when outside, we're usually looking through the telescope or watching the glowworms(fireflies) flutter about.
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For the townhouse I have a 650-watt gasoline generator - enough to run the fridge, freezers, a few lamps (with LED lights) the TV or a radio (to find out when the power is expected to come back) and the pellet stove (with the automatic igniter switched off so it's just a fan and a computer and gets lit manually).
Also: The self-contained travel trailer - which doubles as disaster-housing, has a propane fridge, furnace, stove, and water heater, along with white, grey, and black water tankage for a couple days with shower for me and the wife or a week without, and a couple kWhr of battery (that's kept charged and equalized off the line when it's available). If things are expected to go longer I have some solar panels in a box in the garage, the truck's feed-while-towing, or borrow-that-650-watt generator, that I could hook up to bring the batteries back up. TV is 120V but we have a 300W inverter that can run it while nearly idling. (AC and microwave oven are dead without line power - as they would be on a camping trip.)
For the ranch I have a several kW gasoline emergency generator - mostly so I can run the 240V well pump in a long outage. The propane "fireplace" stove has a milliwatt thermostat, so it gets enough power to run the flame valve from the pilot light. It's located in a corner of the "great room" so convection and infrared are enough to distribute the heat if the power, and thus the blower, are out. (This is a "don't freeze the house" backup for the propane main furnace - set to 50F and the main set to 55F when we're not present). Stove and water heater are propane, too, and we have several candle lanterns and lots of batteries for a big flashlight stashed in a known spot.
All this because I've been to over-employed to have the time to actually SET UP an R.E. system for either house, yet. B-b
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Running car, a 2500w tripplite inverter, and a 100' extension cord.
I never needed it, knock on wood.
Brother in law did. His home was in a hilly Pittsburgh suburb. Power poles in back yards, 75(?) years ago. Trees grow a lot in that time. Ice storm, lines down.
Crews couldn't get to the lines, because of the hills and trees.
Little 4-banger cavalier. It would usually take a couple tries to get the inverter to deal with the fridge, then could add the tv, game boy and cell chargers, etc.
A couple times, he even ran the furnace, though I'm not sure how he managed that because he's not very "electrical".
He did it twice a day. It was enough, with common sense the rest of the day.
IIRC, it was out over 2 weeks, almost 3, but it was a long time ago.
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Hi Ghurd happy to see you posting
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For the 2 or 3 years we lived in the RV we never thought much about power outages since we were not on the grid. We kept ourselves more concerned with not using too much more than the array and bank could put out and on keeping diesel on hand for those times when more energy was needed.
After moving out here and being on the grid I've gotten lax on my alternate sources. last winter I called the power company to see about having a tree cleared from a line as the limbs were rubbing on it. I had also put in an order to see about having my feeder line changed out from the transformer to the meter since several years ago someone had installed a heat pump and Central AC ,the house had a 200 amp service panel but the feeder was the old 60 amp service 4 or 6 awg. Every time the AC vame on the TV would go off and the lights would dim. It was in the spring when a limb finally rubbed the service line in two. I called them and in a few minutes the truck showed up. Then his engineer showed up then another supervisor showed up then a bucket truck showed up. the Engineer said we will have your power bqack on in a few minutes but that line hack to be replaced and should be relocated.
I told him if you will look at the service order request you will find that I had put in a request for that very thing 6 months ago. They repaired the line and a few days later a convoy of trucks and workers showed up with 2 new poles a 000 quad service line since I had told them that someday I may be wanting 3 ph for a barn that i was planning on building.
They set the poles while I relocated my meter and outside panel to another wall and set a new 200 amp panel inside While I had the meter open I replaced the #3 wire with 0000 copper to my panels and up to the weather head. By the time we were all finished I had no more worries at least from my transformer to the house. new 25 KV transformer as well. Now should I decide to get 3 ph all they will have to do is set a 15 KV transformer and connect to the meter on the shop once it is built since where I had them set their pole to feed the house is also where the shop service will be dropped from.
My outside panel is set up so I can open the main and wire in a standby if we have a long term power outage. I haven't set it up with an auto switch gear since our power company has a pretty reliable service history. our power had only been out 2 times once when the wire was rubbed in half and once when we had a storm with 80 MPH winds it was out for a couple hours. but that is what candles are for.
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You should see the pile of crap transformer feeding my house and the neighbors... put in when both houses only had a 60 amp service too. Now we both have 200 amp but the transformer was never upgraded. When I send morse code on 2 meter ham band the lights flicker in time to the 1,000 watt amplifier pulling power... in BOTH houses LOL! Supposedly getting a new transformer... since that one has an install date of 1949...
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Ah Mary, you don't want to rush things like that. There's still minutes of useful life in that vintage transformer. ... Then it can go straight to a museum!
(When turfing out a van full of computers from my ISP some years ago I had a discussion with the Science Museum in London about whether it wanted any of them before they went to be recycled. In the end they simply didn't have space either!)
Rgds
Damon
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It can go to the museum after a toxic waste disposal unit... PCB city in that thing!
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Power goes out I turn on the porch light! I usually only find out when I tried to order pizza, now days to poor to order out for stuff.
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Got my dad a genny for his hundredth birthday. Champion dual fuel (gasoline, LPG - can be re-jetted for natural gas and run off the town's system), battery start. Big enough to run the furnace and his oxygen concentrator.
Got it 1/3 off at Cabellas because the box had been bashed in transit. (Genny was just fine.)
My youngest brother, dad's primary caregiver, is also an electronics type and can add the (included) oil, break it in, and hook it up if necessary. Dad's O2 system includes several hours of backup tanks (and a recharge compressor), and the service is on call and supposedly will deliver more in such emergencies. But belt and suspenders.
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Running car and ProSine 1KW true sine wave inverter, plus a 600 watt pocket generator from Home Depot that uses about 0.1 gallon gasoline per hour, plus the owner has the usual 5kw commercial gasoline unit capable of running the whole house.
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Here I have a few K of solar and a 4Kw inverter, so in the daytime I can keep the fridge and essentials powered. My storage is small, so I would run out of power quickly when the sun went down without feeding power from my cars 12V system through an inverter and then back to my 48V system so long as the gasoline lasted, I have sufficient 12V inverters from camping and such and isolated 12V chargers I could rig for that from an EV project of the past. Not the most efficient, but it would work in a pinch. Depending on the cause of the outage and the prognosis for restoration of power, I'd probably prefer to have power for just emergency stuff at night and save the gas for other purposes though, probably just run small camping lights and communications gear from batteries charged in the daytime. I also have additional solar panels in reserve that I could put into action if the outage persisted. Heat would be a bit more interesting in a cold snap, but basically I would rig a stove vent and burn stuff. Night in a big city with the power off would be, uh, interesting, if the outage lasted, I would probably have to stand guard over my stuff when I was not doing stuff to help out in such an emergency anyway so I would not likely be in the house too much anyway, and the danger would be of theft or pilfering of my stuff. I suspect many of my fellow citizens would be utterly helpless, and would need assistance. I am also sure that some would prey upon others in short order. I hope that we do not have an extended outage here as aside from my personal power situation, it would be difficult.
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I picked up one of these for extended outages
[attach=1]
I've tested it in our fireplace, not too bad when using dry sticks and will continue to charge while it hot enough.
Heat isn't great, without a fan to move the heat around but it'll do to take the chill off.
I'll not buy another , I can find better stuff to purchase. With our super efficient new HVAC system, I'm looking at a gas sipping genset.
Cheers
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Can't put out the solar panels. too many thieves close by. Put several good sized AGM batteries to use by wiring them to UPS of varying size discarded for battery failure https://www.apc.com/shop/us/en/products/APC-Back-UPS-6-Outlets-425VA-120V/P-BE425M older versions. Runs LEDs and computers for a long time
Next is the inverter genset, bought the good one and it never skips a beat https://www.apc.com/shop/us/en/products/APC-Back-UPS-6-Outlets-425VA-120V/P-BE425M came down in price for all the clones, sips the gas takes care of ref, freezer and some appliances
THe big stuff (basement ejector pump. 240v) gets an older version of this when needed https://www.northerntool.com/shop/tools/product_200585439_200585439 drinks the gas and noisy but gets the job done
Someone has to stand guard with gas gensets, so the UPS gets most the work
That's what keeps the turtle house glowing
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Edit timed out, yamaha inverter genset https://www.amazon.com/Yamaha-EF2000iSv2-Starting-Portable-Inverter/dp/B002RWK9N2
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On our farm we lose power 5-10 times every winter. I have a portable gasoline Honda 3500W generator that we use to power the well pump, and supply the critical house circuits (fridges, boiler, main lights, etc.). I've built a second house and shop and it's a pain in the butt to lose power now as I can't supply those buildings with power.
I looked into and put a deposit on a Tesla power wall. They took my money, never called back for installation, and never responded back to my calls and emails. I eventually had to get Visa to refund my deposit as Tesla wouldn't refund my money for non-delivery.
I am now looking into a propane powered generator that will supply everything with power, and feed off our 10,000 liter propane tank. Something in the 10KW+ range.
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It snowed pretty good here on Sunday about 5 inches. (east Tennessee US) The power was out for 24 hours Monday actually started about 4 in the morning. The House was pitch black I figured oh deal with this in the morning... When it got light I figure "oh *uck this. So anyway it was about noon and started figure out a game plan for this, I was not ready for It. We lost at first for 24 hours then had power for about 8 hours, then lost it again for 18 hours.
So anyway me and the neighbors are strolling around the area and everyone was going what now. I immediately went and got a Beer. :) I then proceeded to crank up my stereo system full blast. There all going how is he doing that.
I had about two car battery's charged and three that needed a charge. I was thinking what do I do when there dead. Ah it hit me I can charge them off with my truck, I have an excellent 20ft set of jumper cables. As long as I have enough gas I can just let it idle.
So I always have a 1000watt inverter "on hand" its not a sinewave type.
The phase change ice packs will keep meat safe for hours at a time.
That seemed to be the biggest issue. I have a pretty good size freezer but it did thaw a little bit.
The figures on the inverter weren't that bad. Needless to say it was pitch Black in the APT/Flat at night. I had to carry the battery's upstairs to power the inverter. Found this awesome light, that looked like a duel long florescent but was led type. It barely took an amp at 120vac there were two receptacles. The highest load I used about 6.6amps.
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Power goes out, lighting drops over to the 24 volt backups, freezers run off solar battery bank most of the time so no change, pellet stove drops over to the solar battery bank if it is winter. I turn off all but 1 computer monitor to conserve power and no CPU intensive operations/no graphic intensive operations that suck power. Web browsing is fine, YT vids are fine(keep them at 720p instead of 4k). If I have enough battery I can watch TV part of the night but the TV/Stereo are power hogs, uses less power to watch Sling on the computer.
Basically my life doesn't change much beyond pulling enough beer/coca cola from the fridge to last 2 days so I am not opening the fridge doors. Drop it in a cooler with some frozen gallon jugs of water. If the fridge starts getting warm I add ice blocks to it. I have a third freezer that runs off grid only that is overflow in fall during veggie harvest. Most of the space in it is taken up by ice blocks/bags of ice for drinks. If it thaws I have a bunch of cold drinking water... but I tested it and it can go 4 days before the ice in gallon jugs starts thawing in earnest. If needed I can plug it into the inverter during the day when I have excess power available t get temps back down to -20.
Then there is winter... all else fails stuff goes out in the brew shed in boxes. I only heat that space on brew days. Right now it is -19f in there and being super insulated it will stay colder than outside for a day or two! -7f air temp right now so it is 12 degrees colder... I use it as overflow fridge space on holidays LOL set a cooler out with stuff I want kept at fridge temps. It will take 24 hours before stuff starts to freeze.
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What's a powercut? When the primary input stops operating?
(https://i.imgur.com/83DTC7H.jpg)
My backup is 7kVA, 20ishkWh,
After that I've 3.5kWh in LFP gensets and another 1.5kWh in a campervan.
+ Gas + Oil resrves.
5.25ish kW of solar all unified across installations.
I don't even conserve power until day two...
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Grid here drops 20+ times a year... it is why I put in solar to begin with(not to save the planet ;D) power company has been sued multiple times over it, substitution that drops from the cross state lines to the local HV lines feeding 6 towns is overloaded. They keep blowing crap up in it and since we are such a rural area they refuse to replace it, they dig in the scrapyard for parts take out of service in the Minneapolis metro area to keep patching it. Dropped out last night for an hour dropping my already cold bedroom down to grab the sleeping bag rated for 30f temps. It was 45 in there before power came back on. South wind makes it hard to heat that room... I have yet to figure out where the air is coming in through! My latest suspect is the kitchen bay window roof, I bet when they added it they just tore the siding off and didn't add any tar paper behind it to slow wind infiltration. Next summer I am going to foam in that area when I replace that small roof that has decided to leak this winter. Get a spray foam kit and slowly build up layers until it is 8" thick, use whatever is left for another layer on the foundation and in the porch.
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Basically my life doesn't change much beyond pulling enough beer/coca cola from the fridge to last 2 days so I am not opening the fridge doors. Drop it in a cooler with some frozen gallon jugs of water.
Thanks for being on topic.
You Guys are very advanced, I notice the "kw" you are running.
I started this topic/thread for the lay person. Im like keep a 1kw inverter on hand, etc.
And dont ask why I put freezer packs in the freezer :)
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I now have the welder/generator in the shop for a power outage (no wind or solar or inverter failure etc). I just walk to the shop, start the generator, throw 3 switches on the panel and im running off diesel fuel.
[attach=1]
Here is my panel interlock device to keep me from blowing something up. The 100a main breaker is inverter power from the house. One side breaker is the generator input. One is the backfeed line to the house for charging batteries and powering loads.
So the 100a has to be off before either of the others can be connected. (Fyi it isn't 100a, it has a 30a breaker on the other end to protect the 10 awg wires.)
I have only used it once so far for backup power. Christmas time we had 14 people staying here and no sun or wind for 3 days. It works like a dream and heats the shop up nicely.
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It works like a dream and heats the shop up nicely.
How're you doing that outtov curiousity Big Rock?
Genset inside: exhaust gas outside?
Genset outside: heat exchangers inside? Exhaust and coolant recovery?
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If you guys could select the best invertor for temporary use 12v@1200w what would it be. Low idle current etc. For the sake of use a car for power, jump to main power.
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BRCM,
Simple and elegant. Thank you for posting that.
Stupid question... inspected or not inspected?
I am pretty sure I know the answer but if I'm wrong that would be excellent news, too.
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If you guys could select the best invertor for temporary use 12v@1200w what would it be. Low idle current etc. For the sake of use a car for power, jump to main power.
Zing! (https://www.ebay.ie/itm/255071475527?hash=item3b6371d747:g:zewAAOSw8v1hA6WU)
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Oh...110V! Well I wouldn't recommend using 110V it's like 230v but half as good. :P
Samlex True Sine or Xantrex ProSine (often rebranded as StatPower) then. The yellow Xantrex are good..the rest aren't
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Genset inside, exhaust piped outside. [attach=1]
Not inspected. Probably not even close to code. I believe engines inside need to be in a 3 hour fire rated room or something crazy like that. This is saskatchewan and kind of the wild west so probably don't do what i do, but it works good for me.
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JW
More like this:
https://www.ebay.ca/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m570.l1313&_nkw=Xantrex+ProSine&_sacat=0
Since you and I need 60 Hz.
Which just makes it 20% better than anything Scruff can come up with!
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Harsh, but harsh! ;)
Rgds
Damon
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Genset inside, exhaust piped outside.
Fair play. Simple.
I definitely woulda over-complicated it..but having a 90dB rotating mass in the corner would drive me bonkers.
We often have big lecky atmosphere heaters running off a genset...it's crazy the waste heat coming of the genset to supply the radiator 30m away.
The stage managers never let me park a 160kVA twinset in the VIP lounge to warm bottoms on. ::)
More like this:
https://www.ebay.ca/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m570.l1313&_nkw=Xantrex+ProSine&_sacat=0
They're insanely reliable...get a used one they go for about $400
Which just makes it 20% better than anything Scruff can come up with!
I had to think about that so hard 1 hurt mys€lf Sp@rW€b.
3 phase 20% better than single.
400V 50hz. :P
Small cables brother, half the inverter transformer weight.
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I recently bought a 2kW sine inverter for when the power is out for more than ~2 hours and the fridge starts to warm up. We usually loose it once a year for a few hours. I should be able to run it off the 1.7 kWh Li-ion battery I just built for a while since it only draw about 210 watts while the compressor is on. I tried it out a few weeks ago for the afternoon and it worked well. If that gives up, I'll run it off a car, probably the 01' BMW 740iL with the water cooled alternator that's rated at 150 amps. I also have a 400w and 150w inverter for my work computer so i don't have to spend $40 driving to work.
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If you are a ham radio operator or listen to shortwave go Samlex PST series, it has the least amount of radio interference. The Xantrex lived in my house for all of 2 days before I sent it packing, way to much radio interference!
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Genset inside, exhaust piped outside.
Fair play. Simple.
I definitely woulda over-complicated it..but having a 90dB rotating mass in the corner would drive me bonkers.
We often have big lecky atmosphere heaters running off a genset...it's crazy the waste heat coming of the genset to supply the radiator 30m away.
The stage managers never let me park a 160kVA twinset in the VIP lounge to warm bottoms on. ::)
More like this:
https://www.ebay.ca/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2380057.m570.l1313&_nkw=Xantrex+ProSine&_sacat=0
They're insanely reliable...get a used one they go for about $400
Which just makes it 20% better than anything Scruff can come up with!
I had to think about that so hard 1 hurt mys€lf Sp@rW€b.
3 phase 20% better than single.
400V 50hz. :P
Small cables brother, half the inverter transformer weight.
I was in the genset room a few times at the casino when it started up... big Cat 6 cylinder diesel that could run a town of 1,000 people. When it fired up it was LOUD, there was a 5 second warning to cover your ears then the slats over the 10'x10' radiator in the wall would slap open and forget hearing anything for awhile. We HATED when we dropped to generator, some of the slot machines had issues and we would have to go around and reset them royally irritating the players!
The other big genset for the hotel was outside, another big Cat 6 cylinder that had problems way to often. Cat finally overhauled it on site. Pistons the size of 5 gallon buckets in that one! They replaced pistons, the entire head assembly, new crank, machined the block on site in a special jig on a flatbed trailer... it was interesting to watch
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This is really loud.
[attach=1]
Eight J79 jet engines (out of ten). I was there for a rare startup of this historic site. This was before they knew what a gas generator was supposed to look like. Exhaust blows on a 40 foot fan, no direct connect. Only two were made. ASME has a book on historic gas generators and this one is not in it!
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a rare startup
:o
Where's the iphone charger?
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I wonder how big of solar panel would fit in an outdoor glass table? You could leave a hole for an umbrella during spring showers. But otherwise, most lawn furniture just soaks up the sun. Maybe put LED bulbs around it for ambient night lighting.
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Neat idea, Matt,
It wouldn't be hard to test how much the glass of the table drops the output. If it's only a few %, then that would be a really nice-looking and useful mod.
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We moved to our retirement lake home at the beginning of 2020. In fall 2021 we installed a large community backup power system for lake residences, resorts, restaurants and marinas on the lake. The lake we now live on is a quite large lake with over 100 miles of shoreline. The layout is such that county roads run on the south and western shores of the lake for 47 miles. The lake has a large island with about 30 residences on it. We own a large estate on the east shore with 640 acres and a mile of shoreline property. My wife is president of the Lake Assn.
This area is very rural and the condition of the power distribution is not very good here. It was run by an electric utility with purchased power from Xcel Energy. The HV interstate transmission lines are extremely vulnerable to lightning strikes, which destroys substation equipment and knocks out power to large areas. The economic impact of an extended power outage is quite severe for the businesses on the south and west shores of the lake.
So my wife spearheaded the effort for the Lake Assn to form our own power cooperative serving 1,337 members. We purchased two Caterpillar 3516B generators, 2.25MW apiece on prime, 2.5MW apiece on standby at a cost of $1.3 million each. We installed them at the substation that feeds the lake businesses and residences. These are distribution voltage generators operating at 7,200 volts. The switchgear bypasses the substation transformers that are usually damaged by lightning strikes. The Lake Assn covers three townships along the lakeshores, so we also got financial help from the townships. Previous to formation of the new power cooperative the uptime of the system was 94% with 22 days per year when the system was down. The generators were installed in Sept 2021 and to-date have accumulated 96 hours of running time with an uptime of 99.9% for the cooperative. I maintain and operate the diesel generating plant for the Lake Assn, and am president of the power cooperative.
Localized grid backup systems have been largely ignored in modern times. The system we purchased and installed powers about 270 miles of lines in three townships and is very cost effective, easily competing with cost of power purchased from Xcel. It is much more environmentally friendly, cost effective and efficient than the 1,337 services it powers all putting in their own individual backup systems. The only downtime involved when a transformer or HV fuse link is blown, is the time it takes to start the generators and bring them online. The cost of its installation, maintenance and operation is paid for thru Lake Assn fees to members, so it is a true community owned and operated cooperative that covers several hundred square miles.
In the engineering world this is called "economy of scale". "Economy of scale" is why standalone off-grid power costs many times more than utility power. The environmental impact per kWh also goes hand-in-hand with "economy of scale". When the backup system is online, we power 1,337 electrical services on only 0.15 gal/hr per service, which costs that homeowner or business less than 12 cents/kWh at today's diesel fuel prices. With vastly improved uptime over the old system that relied on central power generation from Xcel in another state.
When we purchased our lake home it was off off-grid. Typical with off-grid homes, especially those the size of ours (3,200 sq ft split level), it was very expensive to operate the power system costing us about 62 cents/kWh. After forming the cooperative we laid an under-water cable 1.5 miles across the lake from the big island to our place and 7 other residences on the east shore to provide utility power services. All the new services were buried so there is no unsightly powerlines on poles. It was one of the best moves we ever made as we can now enjoy fishing and boating, working in my shop and going about our life without worrying about batteries and cleaning snow off solar panels.
The seven residences on this side of the lake, including ours, are all 1.5-3.0 million dollar lake homes originally built by doctors, and they were built off-grid because the utility power didn't exist here. We bought our property from an estate and weren't really too worried about the off-grid aspect since we were used to that. But the cost of operating it, and labor time required, was astronomical. After we got the utility power, over the winter we sold our twin Outback Radian inverters, forklift batteries, solar panels, controllers, etc. to somebody who can make better use of them. The only thing we kept is our 150KW Caterpillar diesel generator which now supplies power to the cooperative when the standby system is running at the substation. It reduces the overall load on the Cat 3516B's. There are 46 other cooperative members that also have standby generators, which we incorporated into the standby system much like we did ours.
it is testament to the reliability, efficiency and cost effectiveness of distributed local power generation managed by communities instead of large utilities. The six other residences that were off-grid still have their solar panels, inverters, batteries, etc.. But it is very difficult for us to integrate that into the cooperative system because their output is not reliable or constant, and it is insignificant in the big picture. As president of the cooperative I have worked with those homeowners on a solution to allow them to use their systems to receive a break on utility rates. But the fact is, they can't generate power at the same cost we can, and as a small cooperative we can't subsidize them like the government can with taxpayer money. So at the present they use their systems to disconnect from the utility at certain times. But they are on the utility more than off it, even though each one of those homes has $70,000 worth of off-grid power equipment. Previous to the utility power they just ran generators like we did.
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Nice to hear from you Chris.
And yes what you have done is good for your community.
Here in Europe, mostly Germany and Spain, there are many community Electricity generating/distribution projects where the community have taken to a 'not for profit' organization. And pay credit for PV, and green/RE generation within the community. They are still connected to the main countries Grid and can sell surplus or import when required especially in the Winter months.
Chris, your endeavours over the years have always inspired me to achieve better things.
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Here in Europe, mostly Germany and Spain, there are many community Electricity generating/distribution projects where the community have taken to a 'not for profit' organization. And pay credit for PV, and green/RE generation within the community. They are still connected to the main countries Grid and can sell surplus or import when required especially in the Winter months.
Our goal was to get back to the REA of 1936 to provide reliable service with time proven generating capacity. This eventually went to corporate conglomerates operating a national grid system. They don't care what happens in rural areas because the cost per subscriber goes way up in rural areas due to the miles of transmission line and infrastructure that has to be maintained.
My position was that while we cannot afford to subsidize individual PV installations, the cooperative can install our own at the generating plant. This gets back to economy of scale. But keep in mind we are regulated by the Public Service Commission and this requires approval of the members of the co-op.
Another problem with PV is that it is anything but so-called "green energy". This is not widely addressed by "green energy" advocates. PV is a toxic nightmare of unrecyclable heavy earth metals. A PV array produces 300x more toxic waste, per kWh of generating capacity, than nuclear power plants. PV is more environmentally toxic than leaking underground diesel fuel storage tanks. So to operate a utility scale PV array we have to have a hazardous materials site cleanup plan, be bonded and insured for eventual decommissioning and/or replacement. This makes PV financially impracticable without government subsidies, and diesel power to be more environmentally friendly, especially with the modern Tier IV Caterpillar G-drive engines we have. They are state-of-the-art low-emissions engines.
Do our members want to go there? That hasn't been decided yet. While the fuel source for PV is "free", the amount of diesel power it takes to mine the raw materials, process them, manufacture and transport to final point of use, manufacture batteries and inverters, then dispose of them at end-of-life and figure out what to do with the toxic materials - you may as well run a diesel generator. We need government subsidy for "green energy" to make it financially practical.
Regardless, our cooperative project is a success in improving the reliability of our rural infrastructure for the Lake Assn and our 1,337 members. Where we go with it in the future remains to be seen. But we have managed to make not necessary elaborate schemes involving PV, inverters, batteries, or even home standby generators, to deal with extended power outages by putting in a reliable backup source at the supply point. You're not necessarily at the mercy of the large power conglomerates if the local community can be rallied to take control of the situation, and we managed to do just that in a sparsely populated rural area that covers several hundred square miles. We know we have several areas where there is problematic overhead 7,200 volt lines. But we are already in the process of replacing those with buried 7.2KV lines - something that would never happen under control of Xcel, because Xcel doesn't care about this area. This is an example - my wife and I drove over 200 miles of lines, shooting video of them to identify problem areas that are future power outages waiting to happen. Here we have power poles leaning out over the lakeshore. We are taking the pro-active approach, these are coming down and being replaced with trenched-in lines - this infrastructure is over 50 years old.
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Interesting stuff Chris. The infrastructure here is very similar, and just last week, rural residents went without power for 6 days on account of overhead lines failing. It was a pretty epic ice storm, but underground would have been fine.
Our cost of diesel is higher, and our distances are way longer per user, so i would be interested to see how the numbers work here.
I have a little sunnier outlook on solar panels than you. From what i understand, the recycling is just gettting started, since it has only been maybe 20 years since solar became a large thing. Most panels are usable for 50 years, so the recycling stream is just getting started. I know my panles from 20 years ago are all still making power and not getting scrapped any time soon.
Any more details on exact costs to the end users vs normal grid service would be very interesting. In this area, you might have a service on every ten square miles, so I'm thinking it might not be as feasible as where you are.
My dream would be a small grid scale solar install and a small hydroelectric dam with pumped hydro for storage. Get maybe 100 neighbors signed up and see how it competes with normal grid power. You'd still have the challenge of maintaining the power lines though. At some magic number of distance between users, it becomes more economical for everyone to just be off grid.
To me, that is the most elegant renewable grid setup. Seeing as how i have no grid connection, I'm mostly just an armchair observer.
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Chris I have tried to get my town to put in its own small generator, like you I am on Xcel's crappy system that dates back to the REA days(older than I am!) with MANY outages each year. They whine that it is to expensive despite the constant damage it causes(I need a new TV AGAIN thanks to Xcel!). There is a problem substation on the distribution lines that feed 4 small towns and when it goes down it takes all of the towns offline. They keep digging replacement parts out of the scrap piles in their storage yards... and buying up 70 year old junk from other utilities to keep it running. MPUC is after them to sell this area off to the local REA that has excellent up time and service. REA tech could be here in 30-45 minutes. Xcel's technician takes 3++ hours to get on site to even start assessing damage.
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Being we are regulated by the PSC, our rates are determined by them. We are a non-profit where any profits are either invested into the system, or returned to the cooperative members via dividend checks at the end of the fiscal year. So at the present, our rates are 4.3 cents/kWh over Xcel's commercial interstate rates as we are a reseller of interstate power. What we do with that 4.3 cents/kWh determines how we operate our system. If the members vote to replace lines, then we replace lines. If we need to procure financing for a project, like our generators, then we procure financing like any other business and we have loan payments to make.
This project was financially feasible for us because the service area in the Lake Assn is more densely populated around the lakeshore than the townships in general. This is a tourism area. Our lake is the premier walleye lake in northern Wisconsin and it attracts millions of tourism dollars from the Twin Cities area. It is an incredibly beautiful place to live and the water clarity is 40-50 ft visibility. The water is so clean that most of the residences pull their water directly from the lake and the water quality is better than what you get from a drilled well.
So this area is not exactly what you'd call "poor" or under-financed. The lakeshores are dotted with $2 million dollar lake homes. Lake Assn revenue is over $4.5 million per year thru taxes and Lake Assn fees to maintain the pristine conditions of the area. So money is the least of the worries here.
When my wife took over the Lake Assn in late 2020 one of the primary things on her agenda was to improve the aging infrastructure here. It was thrown in haphazardly over 50 years ago and has never been maintained unless it breaks. The people living here always assumed we were at the mercy of Xcel (formerly Northern States Power). We educated them on the fact that it is not the case. I was unanimously appointed to take over the power cooperative that we decided to form, a position I do not wish to hold long term. I have gotten the ball rolling to make it reality, but in the long term we moved here to enjoy the pristine beauty, fishing and boating and outdoor activities that this area is famous for. We are retired and we're only 62, we retired at age 60. So we intend to enjoy it.
At the present PV recycling might be getting started, but it is not a pretty picture at this point in time. It may get better with time, that remains to be seen. My position is that we could operate a PV array at the generating plant, but it is up the members to decide if they want that. My job as president of the co-op is to research the financial feasibility of it and present this to the members to make the decision. The cost and benefits has to outweigh the liability. At the present time, without subsidies from the federal or state level, that is not the case. But that does not mean we can't improve the reliability and condition of the infrastructure to keep the power on, just that PV is not the way to accomplish that unless we can get a "free ride" thru federal subsidies.
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Chris I have tried to get my town to put in its own small generator, like you I am on Xcel's crappy system that dates back to the REA days(older than I am!) with MANY outages each year.
Mary, I am 100% familiar with how Xcel operates. The only thing they care about is the bottom line for their shareholders. They do not care about these rural areas they serve, they only fix it if it breaks, and then all they do is a patch job.
In the early days of the REA there was localized backup and primary generating facilities. Some were hydroelectric. Some were diesel with Fairbanks-Morse generators running on HFO. It worked really well. Then the power companies became huge conglomerates and they strung up 300KV interstate transmission lines all over, went to central nuclear, coal and natural gas fired plants. But those substations they feed have never been maintained or upgraded for lightning protection. Those interstate lines are huge lightning attractors and when a bolt hits one the surge blows a 80 ton transformer right off the pad at the substation and leaves it in a smoldering heap with burning transformer oil all over the place. Been there, done it, seen it, dealt with it. And then Xcel claims the only replacement transformer is in Milwaukee and it's gonna take a week to get it here.
That is why I put in two Caterpillar generators.
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Chris I have tried to get my town to put in its own small generator
Mary, unfortunately I don't know if your town can put in their own generator unless they have some sort of power cooperative, or are the power company for the town or city. Do you get your bill from Xcel, or from the city?
It also requires more than a small generator. The generating plant has to be able to handle starting inductive loads with either a staged soft-start switchgear, or the modern electronic engines can increase their fuel rate to many times normal rated power when they accept load. This puts tremendous strain on your plant to get refrigeration compressors, blower motors, well pump motors and the like all turning again after the power went out. The generators have to be capable of feeding your distribution line voltage (either 4160 or 7200) to bypass damaged substation transformers. I like the Cat 3516's I think better than the Cummins QSK60's. While the Cummins plants are proven backup for hospitals, high-rises, etc., the Cat plants have over 4 billion operating hours worldwide on prime duty over the last 40+ years and Caterpillar has a service network second to none. You can go to Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station and what do they have in the power plant keeping everyone alive down there? Cat 3516's and 3512's. How do they get the fuel to those generators in the most inhospitable off-grid place on earth? With overland transports from McMurdo pulled by Cat Challengers over 1,000 miles.
Anyway there is quite a bit of planning that goes into installing utility-level generators. Building for the power plant housing generators, switchgears, cooling system, fueling. The Caterpillar plants are a pleasure for your power plant operator to service and maintain because they never break. They last 100,000 hrs on prime duty and when they are needed they just run and can accept full rated load in 30 seconds.
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We have another bit of a problem with our new power project. It has nothing to do with keeping the power on, but it has to do with a telecom that has traditionally provided wired landline telephone service and internet to homes and businesses, and they have leased space on the utility poles to run their wires below the powerlines. When those old power poles are taken out and we go to trenched-in lines, the telecom cannot bury their wired services in the same trench behind the trencher with power wires. The underground power wires are not the problem with electrical interference, as those are coaxial type cables with a center conductor and grounded shield with an insulation layer over the shield. The bigger problem is having communications lines in the same trench in the event we have to service an underground break in a power cable at some point.
In this area, people consider wired communications services to be obsolete. It has been replaced by cellular and cell data. And some people, like us, have StarLink internet. So the telecom is fighting us tooth and nail because now if they want to continue offering wired services they have to find their own right-of-way lease along the county highway. And they have an under-water communications cable that runs from the mainland to the mansions on the big island. The residents of the big island don't use it anymore and have voted to have it discontinued. The Lake Assn, and Wisconsin DNR, is requiring its removal, which is quite expensive but is the telecom's cost.
In many areas, telecoms are notorious for just abandoning existing infrastructure to put in new (like copper twisted pair replaced with fiber). How the telecoms can get away with this is beyond my understanding. But they're not gonna get away with it in our service area. Within five years we want the area to be totally absent of unsightly and dangerous overhead lines and wires and poles. We're going to force them to either do it right, or remove their stuff and clean it up and recycle it because it's not needed or wanted anymore anyway - and it remains a lightning hazard with overhead lines connected to businesses and homes. They are going to take us to court over it because they think they have the "right" to abandon it and just stop paying the right-of-way leases. But it's not going to work that way.
Civilization has constructed a literal rat's nest of copper, aluminum and steel wires most of which is aging, unreliable and some of it abandoned. Somebody has to start somewhere with cleaning this mess up. In some European countries, especially the Netherlands and Germany, they have taken a proactive approach to burying power cables instead of running overhead. And their power services are much more reliable than in the US. So the telecom is going to have to deal with it because those overhead lines have reached end-of-life, much like the telecom's local wired services. But legacy is a hard thing to break.
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Chris I have tried to get my town to put in its own small generator
Mary, unfortunately I don't know if your town can put in their own generator unless they have some sort of power cooperative, or are the power company for the town or city. Do you get your bill from Xcel, or from the city?
It also requires more than a small generator. The generating plant has to be able to handle starting inductive loads with either a staged soft-start switchgear, or the modern electronic engines can increase their fuel rate to many times normal rated power when they accept load. This puts tremendous strain on your plant to get refrigeration compressors, blower motors, well pump motors and the like all turning again after the power went out. The generators have to be capable of feeding your distribution line voltage (either 4160 or 7200) to bypass damaged substation transformers. I like the Cat 3516's I think better than the Cummins QSK60's. While the Cummins plants are proven backup for hospitals, high-rises, etc., the Cat plants have over 4 billion operating hours worldwide on prime duty over the last 40+ years and Caterpillar has a service network second to none. You can go to Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station and what do they have in the power plant keeping everyone alive down there? Cat 3516's and 3512's. How do they get the fuel to those generators in the most inhospitable off-grid place on earth? With overland transports from McMurdo pulled by Cat Challengers over 1,000 miles.
Anyway there is quite a bit of planning that goes into installing utility-level generators. Building for the power plant housing generators, switchgears, cooling system, fueling. The Caterpillar plants are a pleasure for your power plant operator to service and maintain because they never break. They last 100,000 hrs on prime duty and when they are needed they just run and can accept full rated load in 30 seconds.
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Currently billed form Xcel but we could form a co-op... only 100 houses here plus the grain elevator who would really like constant power during harvest. I am familiar with that size cat generator, the casino ran on 2 of them! They claimed we could power 1,000 houses if the casino wasn't drawing power. 10 second start time on them!!!! If you were in the engine room an alarm went off and it was wise to head for the door because it was going to get really loud and windy in there! We ran a week off backups and had way to many small power drops(major pain for my department, we had to make sure every slot machine restarted properly... all 1800 of them...).
They actually did hook in one small town where a lot of tribal members lived, and on reservation housing was all on the backup generator for the hotel. I remember when that one ate a piston, Cat sent out a team and they took it all apart, moved the block onto a flatbed they spent 10 hours leveling and locking in place. Machined out the block, checked for cracks, put in the new larger pistons(old ones were like 55 gallon drums in size!), and reassembled it all over a 3 day span. Turns out it was an engineering defect that caused the piston to burn thru, the radiator fan was kicking on to late letting the block get to hot due to a bad from the supplier sensor that was reading 150 degrees low.
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We have another bit of a problem with our new power project. It has nothing to do with keeping the power on, but it has to do with a telecom that has traditionally provided wired landline telephone service and internet to homes and businesses, and they have leased space on the utility poles to run their wires below the powerlines. When those old power poles are taken out and we go to trenched-in lines, the telecom cannot bury their wired services in the same trench behind the trencher with power wires. The underground power wires are not the problem with electrical interference, as those are coaxial type cables with a center conductor and grounded shield with an insulation layer over the shield. The bigger problem is having communications lines in the same trench in the event we have to service an underground break in a power cable at some point.
In this area, people consider wired communications services to be obsolete. It has been replaced by cellular and cell data. And some people, like us, have StarLink internet. So the telecom is fighting us tooth and nail because now if they want to continue offering wired services they have to find their own right-of-way lease along the county highway. And they have an under-water communications cable that runs from the mainland to the mansions on the big island. The residents of the big island don't use it anymore and have voted to have it discontinued. The Lake Assn, and Wisconsin DNR, is requiring its removal, which is quite expensive but is the telecom's cost.
In many areas, telecoms are notorious for just abandoning existing infrastructure to put in new (like copper twisted pair replaced with fiber). How the telecoms can get away with this is beyond my understanding. But they're not gonna get away with it in our service area. Within five years we want the area to be totally absent of unsightly and dangerous overhead lines and wires and poles. We're going to force them to either do it right, or remove their stuff and clean it up and recycle it because it's not needed or wanted anymore anyway - and it remains a lightning hazard with overhead lines connected to businesses and homes. They are going to take us to court over it because they think they have the "right" to abandon it and just stop paying the right-of-way leases. But it's not going to work that way.
Civilization has constructed a literal rat's nest of copper, aluminum and steel wires most of which is aging, unreliable and some of it abandoned. Somebody has to start somewhere with cleaning this mess up. In some European countries, especially the Netherlands and Germany, they have taken a proactive approach to burying power cables instead of running overhead. And their power services are much more reliable than in the US. So the telecom is going to have to deal with it because those overhead lines have reached end-of-life, much like the telecom's local wired services. But legacy is a hard thing to break.
My small rural town just went fiber... they literally did abandon all the copper, all of the boxes in the alleys are still there, many of the house are fed by lead sheathed cable so it IS an environmental hazard. Nothing was overhead, the telephone office downtown was already fiber going out of town for the last 15 years and they have had buried cables here for a long time due to ice, wind, lightning damage.
It sure is nice not having to disconnect internet now during thunderstorms. I can hop on my tablet and still surf the net or watch a movie. With DSL I unplugged the modem, way to big of a lighting strike risk coming in on their lines(even buried telephone lines are a huge avenue for a lightning strike. If it hits the ground over a cable the voltage on that cable rises a LOT!). When I first got on the internet I could tell if a thunderstorm was within 20 miles by the crackle on the phone line as the modem connected. That phone company got bought out and upgrades started right away. Now with Arvig out of Otter Tail county in MN, they cover half the state with phone/TV/internet/wirelss alarm monitoring etc Kind f interesting to see their history going form a small telephone company located in their house to what they are now https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vSaTK1TnqK3o7KpsekG8ZzfI1HAsiJT-NlXHLGZQDfRhFRXsoowsoeL1uqOdgiPmuIRiTezrJu9_sxL/embed?start=true&loop=true&delayms=5000#slide=id.g7ccef7ecd0_1_4
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Abandoning that old infrastructure seems to be a common theme with telecoms.
It is quite interesting that your telecom shares much of the same history timeline as the one here. But being this is more rural, wired services have become pretty much obsolete. Everybody has gone to cell. And people aren't buying computers anymore - they've gone to mobile devices instead. And I guess we're no different. We don't even have a TV in the house anymore. If we want to watch something, we watch it on our iPads, and those have built-in cellular.
We do have a Mac mini desktop computer that my wife used back in like Feb to do our taxes on. And I do use that for running digital modes on my ham radio (I got a new FlexRadio 6400 SDR for Christmas). But for just rag chew on the radio I even use the SmartSDR client on the iPad for that. And that's what most people seem to have gone to - smart phones and tablets. If a person still uses a laptop, that's like 20 year old technology now.
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But being this is more rural, wired services have become pretty much obsolete. Everybody has gone to cell. And people aren't buying computers anymore - they've gone to mobile devices instead.
There is an exception WIFI
I run 5 machines and a single WIFI Router. All can transmit and receive in succession there is no penalty. and the connection/s are secure.
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Something also comes to mind, my Grandpa always paid for a subscription to both Popular Mechanics and popular Science for years.
At all the time hardwiring is considered it was predicted that a single COAX line could support phonelines Cable TV and Internet at the same time. That time has come and gone and this is how I get my telecommunication system. But its one phone line internet unlimited and 2 cable box, Im getting ripped off.
I don't use any mobile devices but not being able to receive a text message causes problems for me.
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There is an exception WIFI
I run 5 machines and a single WIFI Router. All can transmit and receive in succession there is no penalty. and the connection/s are secure.
We have wifi in the house because we have StarLink. But frankly, I think it is a waste because we're not using it that much. We have the first generation round dish that we got on the "better than nothing" beta. We would give it to one of the neighbors who can use it, but if we move it from our place it stops working. They have it geo-locked with GPS to the original location and it can't be moved. The newer ones with the rectangular dish can be moved and re-registered at a new location.
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Ya im using a NETGEAR 16 my business provider they were like that's the only router that will work, which is BS
We have the first generation round dish
I had a dish at one point but had to have DSL for 2way communication, which was hard wire.
They have it geo-locked with GPS to the original location and it can't be moved. The newer ones with the rectangular dish can be moved and re-registered at a new location.
I just want to understand how text messages are secure and how there different.
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I had a dish at one point but had to have DSL for 2way communication, which was hard wire.
I just want to understand how text messages are secure and how there different.
What we have is a little different. It's called StarLink from SpaceX.
https://www.starlink.com/
Text messages are not secure or encrypted. They are a method to send short messages, or even multimedia like pictures, from one cellular device to another just by knowing the phone number of the other device. They don't actually go over the internet, although they can. They are a form of cellular data. Many people use them these days instead of the traditional email. Like I can send a message to my wife's iPhone from my iPhone - I just open the Messages app and talk to the phone saying what I want to send, it converts my voice to text and sends it to her.
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Many people use them these days instead of the traditional email. Like I can send a message to my wife's iPhone from my iPhone - I just open the Messages app and talk to the phone saying what I want to send, it converts my voice to text and sends it to her.
What im experiencing is code or encryption key so if i go on Match.com they send a onetime code as a text, without that the process things can not be verified. Just using that as example lots of other applications use the same form of digital key.
Ya if I could receive the onetime text code from a land line would be great, just don't think its possible.
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No, a verification code like that cannot come to landline. It is a text message, which is a form of cellular data for cellular devices. The message can be generated someplace by an internet server and sent to your mobile device. That's how they verify that it's really you and not some imposter. They know that it's really you because if your mobile device gets stolen, like a modern iPhone is impossible to break into. The FBI and CIA, or some other three-letter government outfits sued Apple to try to get them to break the encryption on iPhones for crimes before, and even the government can't crack it. So if you get a verification code like that and you respond to it, the chances that it's really you is better than 99.9999999%.
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Ya for that reason I'm going to buy a $60 phone at walmart with 30bucks a month. Im thinking I will just use it for an as needed thing. But you brought up a good point if its used intermittently and lapses it will attract unwanted attention.
the whole thing with GPS and cell tower verification I don't feel comfortable about. So if I got the thing I would leave it home everyday. Ive seen some pretty advanced stuff.
But ya there are some well whatever things im not sure about.
Oh ya when you use a wifi dongle to USB use a single freq not dual channel. There working now to obsolete single wifi dongles. I have a single wifi key USB that I use as needed on each machine. Always use a VPN as I login.
I have had at least 3 machines operating at the same time with multiple dongles and things run just fine. Its the router that gives the bandwidth.
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Ya for that reason I'm going to buy a $60 phone at walmart with 30bucks a month. Im thinking I will just use it for an as needed thing. But you brought up a good point if its used intermittently and lapses it will attract unwanted attention.
the whole thing with GPS and cell tower verification I don't feel comfortable about. So if I got the thing I would leave it home everyday. Ive seen some pretty advanced stuff.
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. But if you're worried about cell phone tracking it's Google that does the tracking, so just get rid of everything Google out of the phone and don't get an Android device. Otherwise the phone will still provide its GPS location for emergency services calls, but you can turn that off too.
The reason people have gone to cellular is because a modern cellular device replaces your traditional wired internet and computer, wired phone and wired or satellite TV all in one device. It is why we don't even bother to have a TV set anymore. If we want to watch TV we watch it on the iPad and we have any number of different streaming TV services we can use, even out in the middle of the lake on the boat. It is why I question why we have the StarLink internet. It is redundant and we just don't use it except for our Mac mini desktop computer, and we don't actually need it for that either - we can simply create a local WiFi network with one of our iPads or iPhones and the Mac mini desktop is on the internet. I've told my wife we should discontinue the StarLink.
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Ya your probably right Im worried about nothing with the tracking.
The power went out a couple weeks ago. I always keep a good charged battery and used my 1100 watt inverter to power my entertainment center. The neighbors were like how is he doing that. Also I keep a good led light that makes alot of light if it happens a night atleast I can see.
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Abandoning that old infrastructure seems to be a common theme with telecoms.
It is quite interesting that your telecom shares much of the same history timeline as the one here. But being this is more rural, wired services have become pretty much obsolete. Everybody has gone to cell. And people aren't buying computers anymore - they've gone to mobile devices instead. And I guess we're no different. We don't even have a TV in the house anymore. If we want to watch something, we watch it on our iPads, and those have built-in cellular.
We do have a Mac mini desktop computer that my wife used back in like Feb to do our taxes on. And I do use that for running digital modes on my ham radio (I got a new FlexRadio 6400 SDR for Christmas). But for just rag chew on the radio I even use the SmartSDR client on the iPad for that. And that's what most people seem to have gone to - smart phones and tablets. If a person still uses a laptop, that's like 20 year old technology now.
Gotta have my TV(75") and surround system to watch movies! My own mini home theater! And I have a desktop computer running a decent CPU/Vid combo and 3 monitors LOL to used to multitasking, and if I work on code for the insurance company I can write on the middle main monitor, test on the left and have the upload site on the right to make changes on the fly to be tested by the company. Right now it is youtube on the main monitor, this is on the left, right side has WSJT running and FT8 to see what I can hear on 6 meters with the solar flux rising(currently just some locals CQing...)
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Winter time when it's 20 below outside we'll curl up on the couch in front of the fireplace and watch Netflix on the iPad or something. But otherwise we're big outdoors people. We have this right out our back door and it's up to us to keep it beautiful for future generations.
[attach=1]
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I used to be big on the outdoors, but the more crippled I get the less I go out in the cold...
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Chris
What are you doing about the cold cold months when the Diesel starts to thicken?
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I don't know about Chris, but here the fuel suppliers blend winter diesel that's good down to about -40.
If you want to run colder than that, it's a good idea to add some extra antigel additive. I have a brand I'm particular to but it is Canadian and I'm not sure if the rest of the world can get it. DSG 4+ polar max.
Lots of the northern projects run diesel's down to -50c and lower. Diesel is the easy part when it's that cold. Even the propane doesn't want to flow.
I'm interested in what Chris says too. I've never had much to do with the large stationary stuff.
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Chris
What are you doing about the cold cold months when the Diesel starts to thicken?
It's not a problem. The power plant has a 20,000 gallon tank which takes a really long time to cold soak 130,000 lbs of fuel. It's about the same principle as why municipal water towers still work at -40.
But, of course, diesel power has been used to power places in Antarctica and Alaska for many decades. These diesel plants are dead reliable running in the most inhospitable places on earth. Consider Amundsen-Scott, they are truly off-grid. Solar does not work because in the dead of winter it's dark 24 hours a day for six months. The sun sets at Amundsen-Scott on March 30 and doesn't rise again until Sept 21, average temperature in winter is -72F.
Many years ago they experimented with a NPS wind turbine at the south pole. But it only produced 3,092.8 kWh for the entire winter, which one diesel generator produces in about 2 1/2 hours. Wind power doesn't work at the south pole because the place is on 2 miles thick ice, nothing to anchor it to, and the elevation is 9,200 ft with a density altitude of 11,000 ft - there's no power in the wind there. If it weren't for these, life at the south pole would be impossible.
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I had to look in my specs book. What most people are used to in cold weather for little diesel engines doesn't apply to big ones. The fuel flow rate from the tank with both generators running is a little over 400 gal/hr. The engines burn 208 gal/hr at full load (combined - 104 apiece). The other ~200 gal/hr is used to cool the ECU's, rail pumps and injectors and returns to the tank at 150-160F. So even in extremely cold weather the fuel in the storage tank, with engines running, never gets much below 10-15F.
If the engines didn't run for an extended period the fuel would eventually cold-soak, but that never happens. I've run them 10 hours a month regardless of whether or not they are needed, they ran 33 hours in January when Xcel's lines had a glitch from ice, and it was -28F then. I've never ordered anything but straight #2 on the tankers, no dilution with #1 or anti-gel additives at all in it.
@bigrockcandymountain is correct - these things will run when propane won't vaporize at all. Little diesels might choke up in cold weather with their tiny fuel lines and fuel filters. But the megawatt class engines are in a different category and can run an anything from HFO to JetA with no adjustments to the engine required. We just burn dyed-red, non-taxed #2 in them because it's easiest to get. I can order a 7,600 gallon tanker load today, it will be here tomorrow. Or if I order it first thing in the morning it will be there that afternoon.
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Chris
I do remember the deuce 1/2 & 5 ton ARMY trucks only needing a 60sec pre-ignition before they would just go ,,, whether it was +90f or -15f in Germany. Remembering your posts from your former homestead, I wondered how well these would do.
During my years of driving my old Mercedes and using both pump diesel & Bio-diesel, I did not have issues with it (Our Winters here in St. Louis rarely see -10 ) either.
Thanks * Glad to see you posting again
BRCM;
Interesting to read about the Canadian additive thanks for the info!!
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I do remember the deuce 1/2 & 5 ton ARMY trucks only needing a 60sec pre-ignition before they would just go ,,, whether it was +90f or -15f in Germany. Remembering your posts from your former homestead, I wondered how well these would do.
Yeah, those would be old pre-combustion chamber engines with glow plugs to get 'em to light. Most everything in diesels in the last 50 years is direct injection and they start quicker and easier than gas engines.
Almost all ultra-low sulfur diesel fuels these days have about 5% biodiesel in it (usually soybean oil) to provide lubricity for injectors. Injection pumps are pretty much a thing of the past. Caterpillar, Cummins and Detroit have used common rail systems with unit injectors, both mechanical and electronic, for over 35 years.
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Biggest potential problem with bulk stored diesel in the Antarctic we had, was water in the fuel.
We used to pump fuel into a settling tank that was located inside the warm power house. It would sit there for a day or so while the diesels run off the second warm settling tank. When that became low, switch tanks, remembering first to drain off any water from the tank low point. It becomes a standard regular daily routine.
Where the water comes from I am not exactly sure. The outside air is constantly well below freezing, so humidity out there is effectively zero. Maybe it comes from the bulk fuel in the ship that delivers the stuff.
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It is a given that the water is delivered with the fuel on the boat. The fuel is loaded in a warm climate, sails to a cold climate, condensation adds water to it. The same problem exists with truck tankers and tank farms where fuel is stored, and the 20,000 gallon upright storage tank for our generators. We have Parker Racor 30 micron water separators on the fuel systems. I'm not sure settling tanks in the building would be insurable.
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I'm not sure settling tanks in the building would be insurable.
Oh we were Federal Government down there.
If something burns down, falls out of the sky, or sinks, we just reorder another one, courtesy of the tax payer.
Its rather the military, the military never insure anything.
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That's interesting. I didn't realize military forces had a presence in Antarctica for other than logistics support for the various scientific research stations there.
Back in the day the US Navy operated a nuclear power plant at McMurdo. But in the extreme cold it was problematic and eventually decommissioned. The 3516 Cat generators continue to power the place today.
http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2014/ph241/reid2/
Edit:
Believe it or not, the power at McMurdo Station, Antarctica is more reliable than the national grid system in the continental US. There has never been a power outage at McMurdo Station in the 66 years it has existed. In one of the most remote locations on earth.
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Australian Antarctic bases are 100% civilian, but the Antarctic Division is a Federal Government body like many of your American three letter agencies.
Its been almost fifty years since I was down there, but back then, I understood the US bases were run strictly by the US navy, with civilian scientists and some civilian specialists, but all the administration and base support staff had navy rank.
Our diesels were ancient 45kVA Ruston 4Y four cylinder 1,500 rpm dinosaurs. They were very old even back then. We laid down the foundations and slab for a new powerhouse which the next expedition were going to build. Not sure, but I think they were to be Caterpillar 150 Kva 3,000 rpm turbo diesels. Many of the old diesel hands shook their heads in wonder, saying those screaming high rpm Caterpillar diesels were a big step backwards, and would very quickly wear out, and never last like the old solid stuff.
They were proved quite wrong of course.
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Its been almost fifty years since I was down there, but back then, I understood the US bases were run strictly by the US navy, with civilian scientists and some civilian specialists, but all the administration and base support staff had navy rank.
The US bases there have always been operated by the National Science Foundation with logistics support provided in the early days by US Navy and USAF aircraft, in later years the NSF had their own LC130 aircraft. Due to the expense of transporting fuel and supplies to the remote bases by air the NSF started the overland traverse operation back in 2002.
The tractors eventually used for the traverse program are Caterpillar Challenger 65E's and MT865's, specially prepared by Peterson Cat in Oregon. The Australian government also uses these tractors.
https://www.antarctica.gov.au/news/2019/heavy-tractors-chosen-for-australias-antarctic-inland-ice-quest/
The US bases there have always used Caterpillar 3512 and 3516 generators, in the early days the A-series mechanical injection engines, in later years the B and C-series electronic injected engines. The older mechanical injection engines operate at injection pressure of 2,250psi and were about 38% thermally efficient. The electronic engines operate at 40,000 psi and achieve thermal efficiency in the mid 70's. These are 12 and 16 cylinder high-speed diesel engines operating at 1,800 rpm with 4 pole generator. Contrary to popular belief high-speed engines last longer than medium (900 rpm) and low speed (<450 rpm) engines. The high-speed G-drive engines are more fuel efficient, have a higher power to weight ratio, experience much lower loading on internal engine components and react much faster to sudden loading than medium or low speed engines. These engines experience virtually zero wear in operation. 99% of the wear occurs during cold start and warmup. So the more thermal cycles the engine experiences in its service life, the shorter the time to overhaul. They are designed to be able to replace or service individual power units (piston and liner) without major engine teardown.
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Hi
I did a four day course at Caterpillar here in the UK, those engines are on another level, they use the crank case oil pumped up to 5000 PSI to work the unit injectors and inject in two stages, small charge first when that is burning the main charge goes in. it seems they can run on anything that is a hydro carbon. We had two of them in some of the boats I worked on. The impressive bit is depending on the managment computer the same engine can produce from 450BHP to 2400BHP, the head bolts go right through the engine to the main bearing caps and are pulled down to 700 ftlbs, ceramic coated steel pistons. even the coolant is monitored electronically, you cant put water in or you get cavitation on the cylinder liners. Tappets aqdjusted with a dial guage not feeler guages. We had a laptop and instructed not to touch anything other than marine engines, the laptop number goes into the engine ECU and if it is found in a road vehicle we would lose the CAT agency.
Quite alien to someone who cut his teeth on gargener engines 1750 RPM govener apeed.
Brian.
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I did a four day course at Caterpillar here in the UK, those engines are on another level, they use the crank case oil pumped up to 5000 PSI to work the unit injectors and inject in two stages, small charge first when that is burning the main charge goes in
Those are the intermediate stage first-gen HEUI (Hydraulic Electronic Unit Injector) injection engines. Later ones use mechanically operated injectors (camshaft and rocker arm) with electronic metering on a common rail. They both develop injection pressures of 40,000 psi when the rocker arm pushes the injector plunger. The high injection pressures provide complete atomization of the fuel and the nozzle tips use very small laser-drilled holes where the fuel comes out. Running a high pressure unit injector on a test stand, the fuel spray is pretty much a fog and it is highly explosive.
The old low pressure injection systems used to spray streams out of the holes in the nozzle.
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Speaking of marine engines, this guy crawled into a Cat 3612 to do the inspections on the rod bearings, then got stuck in it. Took him a little bit to get crawled out there with another tech turning the engine over with the service gear.
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2p987v
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I am not really a diesel guy, and only really know what I can remember from long ago and that is not much. I was the radio tech, but we all learn a second skill, and I used to run the powerhouse whenever the diesel guy went on a field trip or was away from the base.
Its interesting that the water cooled engines directly provide all of the building heating through circulated hot water and fan coil heating units.
Strangely, high thermal engine efficiency might tend to work against that !
In summer when outside temperatures are higher, and its daylight 24 hrs, the electrical load can be quite low, and the engine water temperature would drop to the point that an electrically powered boiler had to be switched in. That both loaded up the diesel and provided more heat to the water circulation system. If hot water circulation between buildings ever stopped, the pipes would quickly freeze, and there would be no way to ever get the system working again.
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I don't know about the other stations there, they are all along the coastlines. Only the US has an inland station at the south pole and only about 45-50 people live there in the winter. In the summer about 150 people live there. But summer is kind of misnomer because the average temperature is well below zero. I just checked the weather at the south pole a bit ago and right now it is -68F with a wind chill index of -103F. They are in winter there right now in total darkness 24 hrs a day.
The original station built in 1956 only lasted 10 years before it became buried in drifted snow. The next station was a high-tech aluminum dome with prefab housing units inside it. That also became buried in drifted snow and it partially crushed it. There is little snowfall there, but significant drifting snow that buries things.
The present station is built on pedestals and has angled surfaces so the snow blows underneath it but doesn't build up. It is the most expensive off-grid housing on earth and it took 9 years to build it. The powerplant houses three Caterpillar 3512 generators, only one of which is required to power and heat the station. The output of one generator is 1.2MW. They also have a Cat 3406 peaking generator that produces 450KW. The station uses a combination of glycol and electric heating. Electric is more efficient than glycol because electric resistance heating is almost 100% power efficient. The glycol heating is used primarily to melt ice for water. There is no propane gas, no other fuel-oil burning heating at the south pole. The sole heat source is the running generator engine. The power plant and generator room is more than 100 feet below the ice.
The station itself is quite large. It is 80,000 sq ft on two floors. It is steel beam construction with 18" thick foam panels with glued plywood on both sides for walls, floor and roof. The fuel required to sustain the station is about 1,200 gallons of diesel fuel per day. That might sound like a lot, but it is the most fuel and energy efficient off-grid structure ever built by the human race considering its size. Far more efficient than the International Space Station, which requires millions of gallons of fuel to service it, and even to get a person back and forth to it. This is a somewhat of a picture tour of it
https://glacierexplorer.com/2013/01/amundsen-scott-south-pole-station-oasis-in-the-desert/
Other people have done video tours of South Pole Station that you can find on the internet. The people that live in the station in the winter are more remote and isolated than the astronauts on the International Space Station. In 1998 Dr Jerri Nielson, the station physician, diagnosed herself with cancer during the winter. No rescue for her was possible. She performed surgery on herself and was eventually rescued in the spring. The cancer went into remission, but recurred seven years later, eventually causing her death in 2009.
This is a pretty good video of the logistics of supporting living in Antarctica. Elon Musk does not need to go to Mars, he can set up his own base in Antarctica and see if he can get electric tractors to work, it's the same difference.
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I guess I found it interesting that they store 7 years worth of fuel and food in the tunnels under the ice at the south pole, and the temperature in those tunnels is about -50F.
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The Russians are the only other nation to set up an inland Antarctic Base, Vostok, but its been mostly abandoned.
Its located right in the middle of Australian Antarctic territory.
There have been the occasional visits to the abandoned Russian base there from time to time, and Vostok still holds the record for the lowest temperature ever recorded.
Interestingly, America never had any Antarctic explorers in the age of discovery, no American ever planted the US flag for God and Country and claimed any of it as US territory.
America planted a flag on the moon, but were about the very last to arrive in Antarctica.
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Heres one link
https://www.fieldlines.com/index.php/topic,149570.msg1058116.html#msg1058116
I couldn't find the most recent related post, the power went out and I keep a fully charged car battery (Interstate Brand) And have a 1100watt 12v inverter. Naturally I couldn't resist cranking up my stereo while no one had power. :)
When this happens at night I have this LED light and it lights the whole place up, which makes things easier.
So were talking bare bones here, a car battery and cheap inverter these sell at like 100bucks new
https://www.ebay.com/itm/175030090692?chn=ps&norover=1&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-117182-37290-0&mkcid=2&itemid=175030090692&targetid=1264870805984&device=c&mktype=&googleloc=9013362&poi=&campaignid=14859008593&mkgroupid=130497710760&rlsatarget=pla-1264870805984&abcId=9300678&merchantid=101684715&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIht3Vp_Gr9wIVia_ICh35tQvJEAQYBiABEgK-vfD_BwE
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Yeah, I'm not sure of the symbolism of the flag on the moon. Nor am I sure of the symbolism of Antarctic territories. I'm pretty sure the Russian station is still active, but like the Chinese one not in the winter time. As far as I know, the US maintains the only year 'round inland station at Amundsen-Scott. The budget of the National Science Foundation is not unlimited and I think the observatory there is the main attraction.
I have made contact with KC4AAA, the ham radio station at the south pole, once on 40 meters. Back in the late 60's and early 70's before there was satellite a local ham operator here ran the phone patch and radio teletype from South Pole Station to the US using four phased 20m 1/4 wave vertical antennas and a 1.5KW amplifier with an old Yaesu tube rig. Jerry ran the phone patch here in the US for better than 10 years for the National Science Foundation and in those days it was the only communications link to the south pole.
Now, they run the ham radio station down there just for fun, all the internet and communications are via satellite. They don't even have a current station operator down there this winter, KC4AAA is slient.
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That is pretty much why I never bother with Ham Radio these days.
Any child can instantly call his friend half way around the world on his mobile phone, its all just too easy.
I can remember when just booking ahead for an interstate telephone call through several manual telephone switchboards was a really big deal.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Alice_Communications_System
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Ok :)
Since were all off topic today which is ok.
The original topic was about a affordable temp power. This can be done cheaply with a crappy inverter and a good 12v car batt. And a good LED lamp.
KT Tunstall - Suddenly I See (Official Video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AEoUa0Hlso
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The original topic was about a affordable temp power. This can be done cheaply with a crappy inverter and a good 12v car batt. And a good LED lamp.
A battery and inverter is one of the poorest backup power systems that exists. In my opinion. On the surface it seems like a good idea. But reality is that batteries have to be maintained when not in use or they go dead. In use, the 12V car battery can't supply enough power to keep even 500 watts alive for more than a few minutes before the voltage sags and the inverter cuts out.
You can buy a cheap one of these and it will run at 50-70% load for days on end, power your freezer, fridge, lights, TV set, radios, what have you on very little gas. If you want a good one of these that's really quiet get a Honda and spend a little more money. I'm going with the concept that it's better to establish distributed power generation for communities to keep the power on and not have it go out in the first place. But this is the next best thing.
https://www.farmandfleet.com/products/1109557-champion-power-equipment-2000-watt-stackable-portable-inverter-generator.html
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Hi
What I find is all wrong is the adverts for Inverters. Run mains equipment in your boat, caravan or camper 12V 3000W 6000W peak....
They come with two lengths of 25MM2 cable with crockodile clips on the ends, and if you read the adverts the 6000W Peak is for milli seconds, doesn't say how many.
On the boats I used to refuse to go above 800 to 1000W on 12V and 1000 to 1500W on 24 with instructions to keep the engine running on a fast tick over. Also I only recomended pure sinewave especially if anything was an inductive load.
I use an inverter here on my solar set up but only if the input to the batteries exceeds the drain on them the batteries 24V 135Ah are only used to buffer the system for no more than an hour or so.
Brian
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What I find is all wrong is the adverts for Inverters. Run mains equipment in your boat, caravan or camper 12V 3000W 6000W peak....
Those inverters are useless. 3KW on a 12V system in a boat or camper? Assuming the battery can hold 12V, which it can't at full load, that's 285 amps at full load with the inverter at 88% efficiency. Who's got that kind of battery bank in their boat? That's what they make generators for. 6 lbs of gas in a gallon can contains one hell of a lot more energy than you can hope in your wildest dreams to store in a 250 lb battery, with the engine that it drives only operating at 20% thermal efficiency.
And that is the downfall of so-called "renewable" energy systems. Batteries. They are many times more environmentally toxic to manufacture, use, dispose of and recycle than 1,000 gallons of gas. And many times more expensive. Don't care what battery chemistry you use.
It's also why electric cars are a non-starter. California is gonna ban combustion engine cars by whatever date it is they plan on doing that. Good luck. Their power grid can't even power what they got now without rolling blackouts. So let's everybody get electric cars and blow every breaker in a 500 mile radius.
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A battery and inverter is one of the poorest backup power systems that exists. In my opinion. On the surface it seems like a good idea. But reality is that batteries have to be maintained when not in use or they go dead.
Thats is true but if you keep the batt charged its good for like 8 hours and be charged thru a vehicle.
Also you can run a DVD and and TV which helps pass the time. usually only 12 hours at the worse.
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Thats is true but if you keep the batt charged its good for like 8 hours and be charged thru a vehicle.
It's only good for 8 hours if you draw no more than 5 amps off it. The typical 85ah car battery is already down to 50% capacity at that point. Pull it any lower than that, it will wreck the battery or severely shorten its life.
Even electric scooters are pretty much a joke. They are fine for in town and short distances. But we had a couple of them and where we live it's 30 miles to the nearest town. They couldn't handle that. Last year we bought two brand new Honda PCX's. They get 110 mpg, go 80 mph, and will go 210 miles before they get low on gas. Takes 1.9 gallons to fill it back up again. Considering that an electric scooter or car has to get electricity from some combustion fuel source someplace - coal, natural gas or diesel, it gets transmitted over a grid system that has considerable resistive losses in lines and transformers, and the battery and charger itself is not very efficient - the gas 160cc bike that has real power and range is more environmentally friendly.
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A battery and inverter is one of the poorest backup power systems that exists. In my opinion. On the surface it seems like a good idea. But reality is that batteries have to be maintained when not in use or they go dead. In use, the 12V car battery can't supply enough power to keep even 500 watts alive for more than a few minutes before the voltage sags and the inverter cuts out.
You can buy a cheap one of these and it will run at 50-70% load for days on end, power your freezer, fridge, lights, TV set, radios, what have you on very little gas. If you want a good one of these that's really quiet get a Honda and spend a little more money. I'm going with the concept that it's better to establish distributed power generation for communities to keep the power on and not have it go out in the first place. But this is the next best thing.
https://www.farmandfleet.com/products/1109557-champion-power-equipment-2000-watt-stackable-portable-inverter-generator.html
I think you really need to have both.
Batteries are ideal for silent night time operation where loads are absolutely minimal, or for just covering a few hours while the power utility resets whatever had tripped. Gasoline generators are going to be much more practical for larger day time loads or extended running, and for recharging the battery of course. It also offers some redundancy if there turns out to be an unexpected problem with either the generator or the battery + inverter.
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HI
You're talking as someone who uderstands battery use. I had customers that wondered why the shiny new battery they paid so much for last year, after their boat had been out of the water for winter storage who didn't want to pay for shore power hook up wouldn't start their engines because the batteries hadn't been used. So they had to buy more shiny new batteries. Only one customer removed his batteries and used them on his companies vehicles over the winter.
Electric vehicles if you live in a tower block 15 floors 3 appartments per floor one car per household 30Kw charging point each that is 1.3Mw not counting the power the building needs and in the UK bottled or mains fed gas is not allowed in high rise dwellings. If every one has an electric car we will never need snow clearance the underground cables will warm the roads up. I aggree with Chris on this one. In the UK they are talking a lot about hydrogen until you find the energy density isn't any where near current fuels.
Makes a good topic for discussion though. especially with polititions who specify it and don't have to implement it.
Brian
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One thing about most inverters they will shutdown at 11 volts
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Batteries are ideal for silent night time operation where loads are absolutely minimal, or for just covering a few hours while the power utility resets whatever had tripped.
We got one of those little Honda EU2000's. It's an older one but for light loads it just idles running a few lights or the freezer. As load increases it speeds up. But running at about 500 watts load you can stand by it and talking in normal tones is louder than the generator. And it runs for 8 hours on a gallon of gas.
In the summer when we have the boat docked, I carry it down to the dock and plug the onboard charger that charges our 24V bank in the boat into the little generator. I leave it running all night to charge the batteries in the boat. Sitting on the deck on the house relaxing for the evening, with the generator running down on the dock, can't even hear it 120 feet away.
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In the UK they are talking a lot about hydrogen until you find the energy density isn't any where near current fuels.
Hydrogen isn't very practical either. Costs too much to make it.
Here in the US we use a lot of ethanol. It is about 10% of all the motor fuel gasoline used. The US produces more than we use - in 2021 US farmers exported 1.24 billion gallons of ethanol to 88 countries on six continents. The single largest importer of US ethanol is Germany.
Here in the midwest we can get E85, which varies in the blend by time of year. In winter it's usually 50% ethanol, 50% gasoline. In summer it's 85% ethanol, 15% gasoline. We burn it in our RAM 1500 pickups, they are Flex Fuel capable. We have 395hp Hemi's in our pickups, on regular E10 gas they get about 21 mpg. On E85 they get about 19 mpg. Pure ethanol has a pump octane of 108 so modern Flex Fuel engines can run significantly more timing advance on E85 than they can on E10. On E85 the horsepower is bumped up to 420hp too.
Emissions-wise, the only emissions from ethanol is CO, CO2 and water vapor. There is no HC or NOx emissions. Ethanol is hydrogen, carbon and oxygen molecules. At the ethanol plant, the last time I was there, I seen that they have big liquid CO2 tanks there. I asked one of the guys what those are for?
The ethanol plants are farmer-owned cooperatives. One of their farmer-owners, who is also an engineer and chemist came up with it. In the still they have heat and water vapor. The still is fired by natural gas. They put a CO2 scrubber in the exhaust on the still, capture the CO2, compress it and liquify it. In the presence of an electric field in the vapor, feed carbon into it and you get alcohol. All you need is a carbon source. That's what they use the CO2 for. They put a big electric grid in there to create the field, feed the CO2 in and get the alcohol. It improves the yield of the still by 80%. All the plants got it now. The farmer that invented it is a billionaire.
It is pretty cool technology - pull CO2 out of the air and make fuel with it.
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In my opinion, nuclear power is under-used. Previous Mars rovers were all solar powered. But the amount of power available is very low with solar and they have all gone weeks of inactivity waiting to get enough power to resume exploring the planet. The latest one that landed a year ago is nuclear powered. It has a RTG (Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator). 10.6 lbs of plutonium will power it for 14 years and it's a 2,200 lb vehicle with computers, cameras, radios, propulsion motors, and a built-in remote control science lab.
The technology exists to make nuclear powered cars. The US Navy has been powering ships and submarines with nuclear power since 1955. A modern aircraft carrier requires about the same power as a city of 800,000 people. The reactors aboard a Nimitz-class carrier produce 450MW of power, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year for 20 years before they need to be refueled. Once these ships are brought online and commissioned they are never shut down, even when docked for re-provisioning. The amount of power it takes to push an 1,100ft 102,000 ton ship at 35kts is astronomical and can only be achieved in any practical sense with nuclear power.
Nuclear IS the power source of the future. It's been powering this planet with the big fusion reactor in the sky for billions of years. It's just that humans haven't learned how to responsibility control it yet.
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That is pretty much why I never bother with Ham Radio these days.
Any child can instantly call his friend half way around the world on his mobile phone, its all just too easy.
I can remember when just booking ahead for an interstate telephone call through several manual telephone switchboards was a really big deal.
You need to look back into ham radio, with all the new digital modes including KB to KB chat modes(PSK31...) it is coming back.
I bounce signals off the moon on 2 meters, and adding that capability on 70cm and 23cm this summer/fall... new WSJT modes are setting records for low power moonbounce comms, someone recently made a contact with 50 watts and a single yagi on 23cm! And they had a 50% signal strength loss because the other station was circular polarization. Other station was a 12' dish running 600 watts. Similar records are being set on other bands.
I run four 20' long 2 meter yagis on an H frame and 750 watts and recently worked an Australian station that was running a single yagi and 200 watts, his signal strength at my station was -28db! Yes way below the noise floor and way below what the human ear can decode. Digital mode was Q65 60A a fairly new mode in the last year or so. These modes use limited data transfer just to make the contact, they are not a rag chew mode!
23cm EME stations often chat on SSB! The bigger ones on 70cm do it too. My small 2.1 meter dish on 23cm will have ~ 28db gain! My 2m antennas only have 19db gain so the higher you go in frequency the greater the gain and the easier it is to make a voice contact BUT after 23cm generating transmit power gets very very expensive. Even on 23cm it is not cheap, my 550 watt amplifier was $3300!!!
I enjoy building stuff and EME is a builders hobby, not a lot of off the shelf parts for some bands.
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I agree with Mary. Lots of ham operators like ham radio just for the experimentation aspect. I too like the weak signal digital modes, although on HF, don't even own a VHF rig. Well, shouldn't say don't own one - I got one someplace but it got lost in a box during our move to the new house and wife hasn't found it yet even though that was two years ago. I have high suspicions that that box was one that my wife took to the Goodwill place :)
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Electric vehicles if you live in a tower block 15 floors 3 appartments per floor one car per household 30Kw charging point each that is 1.3Mw not counting the power the building needs
Yes indeed it is, and this is what I don't fully understand about the push for electric vehicles. For a Tesla car, for instance, if you plug into a 120V outlet it maxes the circuit out at 20 amps and only charges the battery in the car 1.5 miles of range per hour. That's 2.4 KWh consumed to go 1.5 miles. That is worse "mileage" than a comparable gas car that gets 25 mpg. At 33 KWh contained in a gallon of gas, the gas car only consumes 1.98 KWh to go 1.5 miles.
If you put in the "fast charger" it requires an 80 amp service @ 240V, or 19.2 KW to charge your electric Tesla. And this big charger will charge the battery adding 12 miles of range per hour of charging time. It is called the "Level 2" charger.
If you get the "Level 3" charger, this one is 480V three-phase @ 300 amps, or 144KW. It charges the battery adding 90 miles of range per hour of charging time.
The electric car is less energy efficient than gasoline, costs more operate, it is not "zero emissions" and how many of you have a 480V three-phase 300A service in your house to be able to charge the car up in three hours? Add to that in cold weather in the northern latitudes at 0F your lithium battery only has 70% of the capacity it has at 59F. Over half of that has to be used to heat the interior of the car and defrost windows unless you want to drive around in a snowmobile suit.
Not sure how they can bend the facts on electric vehicles and people believe it. Of course, they bend the facts on home wind turbines too, and people believe that. People are gullible. But electric vehicles are a non-starter from a practicality standpoint.
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Most specs i see are in the 5km per kwh range. I also see lots of people that can make good use of an electric car. Most of those people are suburban commuters with say a 20km commute one way. That's 8 kwh a day, which is easily charged at home.
Winter time would double that, but still be practical.
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ChrisO;
While pure EVs do currently have a much much slower re-fueling time.
Saying they are less efficient is not true, unless you have proof and wish to share your notes.
Gas/Diesel cars have a ton more parts that will need maintenance than any Electric I've seen (this includes the 3-wheelers and mini-units coming over in tankers from China that cost just as much to have them shipped to your doorstep as they do to buy.
This doesn't even count the fact that I can pull off the line faster than any of the new so-called muscle cars.
Need to drive over 300 miles a day, go with gas/diesel for now, unless you opt for the new Aptera that will get you over 1000mi (which means we could head to Myrtle Beach) on a single charge, but it'll also set you back ~50K.
There's tons of opinions about which way to go, there's good and bad in each one.
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Saying they are less efficient is not true, unless you have proof and wish to share your notes.
Gas/Diesel cars have a ton more parts that will need maintenance than any Electric I've seen
Bruce, only the electric motor is more efficient. The rest of the system, from where the power comes from, losses in lines and transformers, losses in the charger, losses in the inverter and battery - is less efficient than combustion engine by a pretty large margin.
As far as maintenance? They always advertise new stuff. Lithium batteries lose capacity not only with charge cycles, but also with age. One cell goes bad, you are out a battery. As they lose capacity they become increasingly inefficient to charge. And the batteries don't last near as long as a combustion engine in a car. Wait until you get the bill to replace the battery in your Tesla.
Edit:
The invoice is hard to read, I just scanned it. But yeah, $16,550 to replace the battery in a Tesla Model 3 because it had a cell fail just out of warranty and the charger refused to charge it anymore. The cell expanded and burst - lucky it didn't burn the garage down. The car was totally worthless with a bad battery in it - couldn't even give it away. Do you know how much gas I can buy for $16,500? Over 4,000 gallons, which would power a conventional car that gets 25 mpg over 100,000 miles. So now you're out not only the cost of the electricity to charge it, which is about the same price as gas, you're out a $16,500 battery in a 5 year old car with 47,000 miles on it. Don't ask me how I know, but after the paying the bill, I just do. It was our daughter's car, and she HAD to have a Tesla after she got out of college. At least until she came to mom and dad to pay to fix it. And that was just for one module. The car has four of 'em and now she's got problems with the other three modules that have aged and lost capacity and they're telling her she needs to put the other three in at a cost of $40,000.
It's no different than an off-grid battery bank in a string. One goes bad, you have to replace 'em all or they'll never balance.
If you want to believe the sales propaganda, go for it.
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Hi
A friend of mine enquired about a Renault EV and if you don't have (UK) 440V 3 phase you can't have any form of quick charging at home around 15Kw on a standard domestic 240V supply. Quick charging seems to be 30 to 50Kw, Mercedes are talking about 100Kw charging. That is industrial power levels. I don't see how charging at those levels the batteries aren't melting.
We so far only seem to have E10 at the pumps, and years ago I race tuned a 1 ltr enginge and ran it on Methanol yes 98 BHP at the crank at 6800RPM but only 8 MPG on the road and our gallons are 4.5 ltrs
Brian
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Ouch. I'm sticking with petrol.
Bran
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You need to look back into ham radio, with all the new digital modes including KB to KB chat modes(PSK31...) it is coming back.
I enjoy building stuff and EME is a builders hobby, not a lot of off the shelf parts for some bands.
Have to agree on the building part, that holds far more interest to me than just rag chewing on twenty metres on commercial equipment. Still have all my old Yeasu HF gear, and a 1.5Kw tube linear. No antennas here though, where I am now.
I was probably the first to have two way QSO from the Antarctic on six metres when the band opened up unexpectedly for a couple of hours. But apart from that I have too many other interests these days.
If a big EMP wipes out civilization, I might think about getting back on the air with a simple tube type CW rig. That should be quite possible.
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A friend of mine enquired about a Renault EV and if you don't have (UK) 440V 3 phase you can't have any form of quick charging at home around 15Kw on a standard domestic 240V supply. Quick charging seems to be 30 to 50Kw, Mercedes are talking about 100Kw charging. That is industrial power levels. I don't see how charging at those levels the batteries aren't melting.
Those quick-charging stations use the big Level 3 (for the Tesla) chargers. But there's a downside to using those too. They wreck cells charging at C/2 and cause you to have a $16,500 battery repair, and it's not covered under warranty. Don't ask me how I know.
The Tesla Level 2 charger for at home is a 19KW unit. But a 200A residential service will not handle 80 amps continuous on one circuit for more than a couple hours, and that charger is incredibly expensive to run once you get your electric bill, especially in California where our daughter lives. Don't ask me how about that either. That's just based on the $500 checks that my wife sends to our daughter when she calls up and says she don't have enough money to charge the car to get to work because her electric bill is $600. It's always, "can I borrow $500 this month from you and dad to pay my electric bill?" "Borrow" - yeah, right - more like a monthly contribution to Southern California Edison.
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Electric vehicles if you live in a tower block 15 floors 3 appartments per floor one car per household 30Kw charging point each that is 1.3Mw not counting the power the building needs
Yes indeed it is, and this is what I don't fully understand about the push for electric vehicles. For a Tesla car, for instance, if you plug into a 120V outlet it maxes the circuit out at 20 amps and only charges the battery in the car 1.5 miles of range per hour. That's 2.4 KWh consumed to go 1.5 miles. That is worse "mileage" than a comparable gas car that gets 25 mpg. At 33 KWh contained in a gallon of gas, the gas car only consumes 1.98 KWh to go 1.5 miles.
wrong: tesla model 3 long range AWD EPA figures are 251 Wh/mile - ie about 4 miles per kWh. Other ev's with smaller batteries and lower performance can do better
If you put in the "fast charger" it requires an 80 amp service @ 240V, or 19.2 KW to charge your electric Tesla. And this big charger will charge the battery adding 12 miles of range per hour of charging time. It is called the "Level 2" charger.
If you get the "Level 3" charger, this one is 480V three-phase @ 300 amps, or 144KW. It charges the battery adding 90 miles of range per hour of charging time.
The electric car is less energy efficient than gasoline, costs more operate, it is not "zero emissions" and how many of you have a 480V three-phase 300A service in your house to be able to charge the car up in three hours? Add to that in cold weather in the northern latitudes at 0F your lithium battery only has 70% of the capacity it has at 59F. Over half of that has to be used to heat the interior of the car and defrost windows unless you want to drive around in a snowmobile suit.
if the electric vehicle is so inefficent, how come it doesn't produce enough wast heat to heat the cab or defrost the windows? Ev's are better than 70% efficient; the best ICE cars are about 40% efficient ( but all that wasted energy does heat the cab nicely in the winter :P )
Not sure how they can bend the facts on electric vehicles and people believe it. Of course, they bend the facts on home wind turbines too, and people believe that. People are gullible. But electric vehicles are a non-starter from a practicality standpoint.
pot calling the kettle - you seem to have bent a lot of facts yourself.
As for practically: an ev isn't suitable for every circumstance; if you need a 'supercharger' at home then an ev probably isn't for you; but many folks are fine with a 'granny' charger working overnight even if they use most of their battery capacity every day, but many only use a fraction of their mileage range in daily use and for them an ev can be a very good option.
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Ouch. I'm sticking with petrol.
The thing that amazes me is that people here should be 100% familiar with the downfalls of off-grid power systems using batteries. They are what makes off-grid power so expensive compared to utility power.
And yet these same people will go for the EV sales propaganda hook line and sinker - for vehicles that use some of the most expensive consumer batteries known to man. Doesn't make sense.
wrong: tesla model 3 long range AWD EPA figures are 251 Wh/mile - ie about 4 miles per kWh. Other ev's with smaller batteries and lower performance can do better
Try to tell that to somebody that owns one and drives it on California freeways at 80 mph going to work every day. They don't get even CLOSE to the advertised energy economy (or range) in normal driving. Plus what they claim for vehicle electric efficiency vs efficiency at the charger on the wall and what you get out of it on the road is two different things.
Edit:
Ever seen a Tesla Level 2 charger in person? If you're in a cold climate you can heat your garage with one, plus the heat output of the battery when it's charging. The charger cable has thermocouples on it that reduce the charger's power to prevent overheating the cables.
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Saying they are less efficient is not true, unless you have proof and wish to share your notes.
Gas/Diesel cars have a ton more parts that will need maintenance than any Electric I've seen
Bruce, only the electric motor is more efficient. The rest of the system, from where the power comes from, losses in lines and transformers, losses in the charger, losses in the inverter and battery - is less efficient than combustion engine by a pretty large margin.
wrong again (refer to figures in prevoius post) : also you counting transmission losses for ev's whilst assuming that gasoline appears in you car without 'transmission losses'; how much energy is spent on getting the oil out of the ground ( or seabed)? Then shipping / pumping to the refinery, the energy (and environmental) cost for producing gasoline, then transportation to the gas station where you fill up.
As far as maintenance? They always advertise new stuff. Lithium batteries lose capacity not only with charge cycles, but also with age. One cell goes bad, you are out a battery. As they lose capacity they become increasingly inefficient to charge. And the batteries don't last near as long as a combustion engine in a car. Wait until you get the bill to replace the battery in your Tesla.
Edit:
The invoice is hard to read, I just scanned it. But yeah, $16,550 to replace the battery in a Tesla Model 3 because it had a cell fail just out of warranty and the charger refused to charge it anymore. The cell expanded and burst - lucky it didn't burn the garage down. The car was totally worthless with a bad battery in it - couldn't even give it away. Do you know how much gas I can buy for $16,500? Over 4,000 gallons, which would power a conventional car that gets 25 mpg over 100,000 miles. So now you're out not only the cost of the electricity to charge it, which is about the same price as gas, you're out a $16,500 battery in a 5 year old car with 47,000 miles on it. Don't ask me how I know, but after the paying the bill, I just do. It was our daughter's car, and she HAD to have a Tesla after she got out of college. At least until she came to mom and dad to pay to fix it. And that was just for one module. The car has four of 'em and now she's got problems with the other three modules that have aged and lost capacity and they're telling her she needs to put the other three in at a cost of $40,000.
well that is unfortunate, but then again, i know someone whose BMW just ground out its big end bearings at just 100,000 miles with a full BMW service history - he learned that there are quite a few that have suffered a similar failure. Battery cars are still a new and developing technology so one would expect some premature failures - I'm not sure what BMWs excuse is.
With some evs it is practical to swap out a failed cell - although there are still relatively few vehicle technicians who are up to the task
It's no different than an off-grid battery bank in a string. One goes bad, you have to replace 'em all or they'll never balance.
Actually that's not strickly true for lithium with a BMS - it's more down to how difficult the manufacturer has made it to dismantle and reassemble the battery
If you want to believe the sales propaganda, go for it.
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Ouch. I'm sticking with petrol.
The thing that amazes me is that people here should be 100% familiar with the downfalls of off-grid power systems using batteries. They are what makes off-grid power so expensive compared to utility power.
And yet these same people will go for the EV sales propaganda hook line and sinker - for vehicles that use some of the most expensive consumer batteries known to man. Doesn't make sense.
wrong: tesla model 3 long range AWD EPA figures are 251 Wh/mile - ie about 4 miles per kWh. Other ev's with smaller batteries and lower performance can do better
Try to tell that to somebody that owns one and drives it on California freeways at 80 mph going to work every day. They don't get even CLOSE to the advertised energy economy (or range) in normal driving. Plus what they claim for vehicle electric efficiency vs efficiency at the charger on the wall and what you get out of it on the road is two different things.
like i said: evs won't suit every circumstance: if you live somewhere where it gets very hot or very cold you may well run into lithium battery issues - they don't like <0 celcius or >40 celcius.
Edit:
Ever seen a Tesla Level 2 charger in person? If you're in a cold climate you can heat your garage with one, plus the heat output of the battery when it's charging. The charger cable has thermocouples on it that reduce the charger's power to prevent overheating the cables.
again, i refer to my previous comments about appropriate use of evs: if you need to use a rapid charger daily then an ev might not be your best choice, especially if you live somewhere hot. By definition, rapid charging is less efficient and does the battery no favours. You don't take a knife to a gunfight, but that doesn't mean that knives are no use for anything - I've never had much success making a salad with a shotgun.
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I used to eat breakfast at a Burger King with a German man who owned a Tesla as a second car. If he speed charged it he could watch the battery life decay. And he couldn't even go from Fort Lauderdale to Daytona Beach on one charge. If there is a hurricane the Tesla would have to be abandoned in favor of an ICE car to even escape Florida. My 1995 Toyota Corolla gets 35mpg on the highway. With the 12 gallon tank, that's enough to get me to Valdosta or Savannah on one tank.
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Not only that,
But your Toyota will accelerate just as fast on the very last quarter gallon, as on a completely full tank.
A battery car potentially gets slower and slower and slower.
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again, i refer to my previous comments about appropriate use of evs: if you need to use a rapid charger daily then an ev might not be your best choice, especially if you live somewhere hot. By definition, rapid charging is less efficient and does the battery no favours
Like I said, if you believe in EV's, then go buy one. You're the one that has to pay for it. I'm just telling you about our daughter's experience, with real world figures, owning a 2017 Tesla Model 3. She drives 90 miles a day to work and back. And this is pretty typical for somebody that lives in the suburbs and works the high-tech job in the big city. She uses just about a full "tank" of electricity every day, 5 days a week, to get to work and back. She has to charge it up every single day or she can't make it on the second day. They advertise like 220 miles on a charge? Not even CLOSE in what is her normal everyday commute. It costs her $300/month in electricity to get back and forth to work.
Previous, she had a Chevy Equinox that got 29 mpg. She used to fill it up once a week at a cost of about $90. Everything is expensive in California, including gas. She believed all the sales propaganda and she HAD to have that Tesla because it was going to save her big money on gas getting to work. It's all the rage with the yuppies in California. Now she can't get rid of it because she's got payments on it and it was one of the most expensive huge mistakes she's ever made.
So like I said - go for it. Doesn't hurt to learn that real world is a completely different thing from advertising.
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Ha ha! Fair enough; i have to concede that i can't afford to ;D their prices are too high, and i need a vehicle that can occasionally tow a trailer - AFAIK the Tesla model 3 is the only ev that's rated to tow a trailer in the UK, and i definitely can't afford one of them.
I probably will get one - if the price is right. I did offer £1000 for one that had an electrical fault, but the owner hasn't taken me up on the offer - yet.
All I'm saying is don't exaggerate the shortcomings of evs; yes they have shortcomings and limitations, but they are more energy efficient, and cleaner- as long as the grid they charge from has a good portion of clean energy.
I'm sorry to hear of your daughters experience - but there are a lot of people who are very happy with their ev's, and they are still selling like hot cakes, new and used - that's why I can't afford one.
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These current EVs operate will operate with like 600v from the traction system. I was a member of SAE and was able to see there patent.
Believe or not I have patent for low voltage traction engines. We will use carbon auto batteries not lead acid. There just to heavy.
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I'm sorry to hear of your daughters experience - but there are a lot of people who are very happy with their ev's, and they are still selling like hot cakes, new and used - that's why I can't afford one.
They're popular with the jetset, luxury yacht and yuppie crowd as the "in" status symbol toy. I believe we told our daughter she couldn't afford one but she had to have it anyway. I guess that's how 30 year old "kids" learn that advertising is a legalized form of deception, including the EV companies that get government subsidies to sell their product, and the politicians that create those subsidies owning stock in the companies that produce the product.
You can believe in the claimed efficiency and "zero emissions" claims - that's how they sell it. That's marketing. In engineering in producing and consuming energy there is no free lunch.
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https://patents.google.com/patent/US8261575B1/en?oq=US+8261575+
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now that Elon owns Twitter more information will come out about Tesla automobile
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To the OP of this thread. Thanks for not asking the rest of us to get back on track ::).
Tesla, yea,,, not my thing, way to much cost for my pocket book,,, and they detract from other EVs & hybrids, heck even GM & China have one that's kicked all but Tesla out of the top selling in China (Tesla is seen as a status symbol there)
A fellow IT'r owns not just 1 but a total of 3 Tesla vehicles; all three models I think, and all charged from his powerwall bank that gets it's charge from his banks of solar panels. He has yet to have any issues and I'm always asking.
I own a hybrid and don't think I'll go back to a pure ICE not when I constantly get better than 45mpg with the A/C or toaster on.
I am awaiting my turn (delivery) for a pure EV, yes the Aptera which I can get for around 30G_USD and will get me to and from work without ever plugging it in way past the day I decide to retire. I even like it's ability to become a camper for a "slight" additional charge.
As a note: I've already helped rebuild a battery bank for several EVs that popped a bad cell wasn't that hard, took longer to get the buggers out than to replace the cell, test, balance check and reinstall ( the first one being an older Camry that is still running).
Let us not forget, while Li-based units are getting most of the attention these days NiMH are still doing just fine and still holds the market share in Hybrids and lesser known mini-EVs.
I also still do and teach how to process nasty-a$$ed grease into burnable bio-fuel. I also know I can easily buy a V10 Chrysler rust-bucket for less than 2G_USD that would get a whopping 10m/gal, which would end up costing me a bit of time and lye to fuel it.
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Electric vehicles if you live in a tower block 15 floors 3 appartments per floor one car per household 30Kw charging point each that is 1.3Mw not counting the power the building needs
Yes indeed it is, and this is what I don't fully understand about the push for electric vehicles. For a Tesla car, for instance, if you plug into a 120V outlet it maxes the circuit out at 20 amps and only charges the battery in the car 1.5 miles of range per hour. That's 2.4 KWh consumed to go 1.5 miles. That is worse "mileage" than a comparable gas car that gets 25 mpg. At 33 KWh contained in a gallon of gas, the gas car only consumes 1.98 KWh to go 1.5 miles.
wrong: tesla model 3 long range AWD EPA figures are 251 Wh/mile - ie about 4 miles per kWh. Other ev's with smaller batteries and lower performance can do better
If you put in the "fast charger" it requires an 80 amp service @ 240V, or 19.2 KW to charge your electric Tesla. And this big charger will charge the battery adding 12 miles of range per hour of charging time. It is called the "Level 2" charger.
If you get the "Level 3" charger, this one is 480V three-phase @ 300 amps, or 144KW. It charges the battery adding 90 miles of range per hour of charging time.
The electric car is less energy efficient than gasoline, costs more operate, it is not "zero emissions" and how many of you have a 480V three-phase 300A service in your house to be able to charge the car up in three hours? Add to that in cold weather in the northern latitudes at 0F your lithium battery only has 70% of the capacity it has at 59F. Over half of that has to be used to heat the interior of the car and defrost windows unless you want to drive around in a snowmobile suit.
if the electric vehicle is so inefficent, how come it doesn't produce enough wast heat to heat the cab or defrost the windows? Ev's are better than 70% efficient; the best ICE cars are about 40% efficient ( but all that wasted energy does heat the cab nicely in the winter :P )
Not sure how they can bend the facts on electric vehicles and people believe it. Of course, they bend the facts on home wind turbines too, and people believe that. People are gullible. But electric vehicles are a non-starter from a practicality standpoint.
pot calling the kettle - you seem to have bent a lot of facts yourself.
As for practically: an ev isn't suitable for every circumstance; if you need a 'supercharger' at home then an ev probably isn't for you; but many folks are fine with a 'granny' charger working overnight even if they use most of their battery capacity every day, but many only use a fraction of their mileage range in daily use and for them an ev can be a very good option.
Huge problem is battery cost to replace when it dies at 40k-50k miles... that battery costs MORE than my SUV cost me when I bought it used, 3 years old, 15,500 miles on it.
My average trip is 60 miles, that is a trip to the doc, get groceries etc. A Tesla in MN winter couldn't handle it when temps are -20f... 50+% of battery life is lost due to cold, another 50% is lost to the cabin heater. So that 250 mile range is now 62.5 miles and borderline for my use in winter. No chargers available in the towns I go to.
Electric grid here in town is already over loaded and fails when someone farts... add 100 electric cars and it melts down and dies.
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Hi
I'm a boring old fart who when I watch TV I tend to watch documentories. The first electric vehicles were produced in 1908 and aimed at women because they couldn't use a cranking handle. They did up to 100 miles at 12 MPH. Then the starter motor was invented and good old Henry started producing Fords with electric start which killed the electric vehicle sales. The Fords were faster, more comfortable and had a greater range.. Sounds familiar.
Brian.
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Getting back to when the power goes out.....
In the summer I live on a street with only about 15 houses, five of them have propane backup generators which seems like a lot for a fairly urban location. I am always amazed on how little energy I live on. It is camp living although I don't feel I am sacrificing much. Everything is PV except the stove. I have hot water, refrigeration, dishwasher with heated dry, large LG clothes washer and that washer has its own hot water tank and all cycles use hot water. I do this with just a car battery from a vehicle I don't bring with me. The basics even work with a couple days of rain. And my battery has to be full in the evening to run some stuff to keep me alive. The system didn't cost me much more than my wife's wine bill for a couple of summers. The wine club keeps reminding me of how much has spent over the years.
I compare that to home where my utility bill tells me I am using more power than my typical neighbor. I like that close connection to power when I generate it. Having to schedule use isn't that bad and it is nice to know that I can survive If I have to. Not to bring up Tesla, but I am thinking of buying an EV just so I can run air conditioning in the summer. My home and garage can not be spotted from google earth and some of my panels are not even on my property. Fortunately, EC charging stations are about on every corner. I can charge up for the night when grocery shopping. Cost really isn't an issue. It really pissed ne off when Will Prouse said on a video he had had four Tesla and I hadn't had any!
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Hybrids IMHO are over-priced but much more practical.
I think too many cars are over-engineered, too. My wife wanted a Tahoe but settled on an Arcadia. The annual miles are > 20k. She gets about 25 mpg how she drives. I take the same trip and get 35 mpg in her vehicle. The engine encourages her plumbum footwork, whereas I purposely drive for efficiency. Until they train people how to be efficient its all lip service.
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Hybrids IMHO are over-priced but much more practical.
I think too many cars are over-engineered, too. My wife wanted a Tahoe but settled on an Arcadia. The annual miles are > 20k. She gets about 25 mpg how she drives. I take the same trip and get 35 mpg in her vehicle. The engine encourages her plumbum footwork, whereas I purposely drive for efficiency. Until they train people how to be efficient its all lip service.
Horsepower is there to be used LOL
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A Tesla in MN winter couldn't handle it when temps are -20f... 50+% of battery life is lost due to cold, another 50% is lost to the cabin heater. So that 250 mile range is now 62.5 miles and borderline for my use in winter.
Actually, that's pretty optimistic. At 20 below the heat pump in the car can't produce enough cabin heat to even make the car drivable. You don't have to worry about range at -20F because you'll freeze to death in the car before you get there. They only got a 2,400 watt heater which is barely enough to keep windows defrosted at 20 below. You're supposed to use your electric seats to warm up your backside. But it's no fun driving a Tesla at 20 below with a hot a$$, cold nose and the vapor from your breath fogging up the windows.
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Electric cars should include a dual fuel gas/oil burner to warm the batteries and cabin.
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Yeah, well, they don't. They got a 2,400 watt electric resistance heater and grid heaters in the windows for defrost. In a conventional car the defroster has 15,000 BTU of heating power, almost double what their 2,400 watt resistance heater has, and it circulates air in the car and makes it comfortable while keeping the windows clear. In the EV design the energy used to defrost windows is wasted for cabin heating. In the conventional car it serves dual purpose.
In the newer ones they put a heat pump in 'em now, but primarily for A/C. Cabin heating is still an afterthought because it takes too much energy from the battery. So they deliberately skimp on it because they know the car is not practical in cold weather anyway due to the limitations of the battery and the reduced range, and the amount of power the battery heater takes to keep the battery warm enough to put out enough power to get it to go at highway speed. When you first get in the car the braking regen doesn't even work when the battery has just been pre-heated with the electric battery heater. Lithium cells get hot during discharge, once the battery gets warmed up from being used in cold weather, then the braking regen works.
A Tesla is the Rich Boy's Toy, who doesn't really care if it's practical or not. As long as it'll lay rubber for a city block, win at the Stoplight Drags and attract the hottest girls to their yacht parties that's all they care about.
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The recent storm in South Dakota, Minnesota and northern Wisconsin took out our interstate power here for the last 10 days. Our Caterpillar generators have been running ever since at the power plant, averaging very close to 3.2MW of power output continuous. Supposedly the crews will have the lines repaired sometime early this week.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/hurricane-force-winds-dust-storm-blast-south-dakota-minnesota/ar-AAXd6vb
The reliability of the national electrical grid system with HV transmission wires strung all over tarnation on poles, not so much. The reliability of our diesel generators, 100% - currently providing power for 1,337 residences and businesses on the local 7.2KV lines. The power was only out here for 38 seconds while the generators started, sync their sine waves with each other and came online. In the data on the power command center, the initial surge after a 38 second outage was 6.72MW, or an average of about 5,000 watts per service, to get inductive loads turning again. The frequency momentarily dropped to 59.2Hz during the startup surge, engine power output shows the engines reached a mechanical output of 10,008 hp for 11 seconds to bring the power back on.
The two generators have burned 39,920 gallons of fuel in the last 10 days, or 2.98 gallons per service, per day. You can't buy a home backup generator that will supply whole-house 200A service power on that amount of fuel.
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I waz talking to one of my neighbors about this last night. I have a very efficient living arrangement and 2 lifts in the shop downstairs. I was like ya I have 6KW APU that runs on diesel, your right petrol is a waste.
I can't run the whole building with that but can use the lifts and get the shop air compressor to pump up.
The kicker here is how do you tap into the Panel.
The most important thing that has to be used, is a "MAIN Service Disconnect BREAKER" The last thing you want to do is energize a dead grid.
I can also run welders and a 12-20 engine lathe
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The most important thing that has to be used, is a "MAIN Service Disconnect BREAKER" The last thing you want to do is energize a dead grid.
The only thing that's legal, unless it's a certified grid support generating plant, is a break-before-make transfer switch. 7200v transfer switches have capacitors the size of 30 gallon drums because the arc will jump a 6" air gap between the contacts.
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As a Process Engineer we annexed this data processing facility it had the raised floor that had like 975 phone connections. It was a credit card processor. (all) I worked with the guy that was telling me this, I said this is great. Im like we could run a isp with this existing terminal, he remarked to me as these lines have inactivity they just die off.
So one day I had the suction cup and started pulling panels there was this heavy 3 lead cable 460 ir whatever I touched that $#|+ and it arced. I was like f uck.... They were running 415HZ
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The recent storm in South Dakota, Minnesota and northern Wisconsin took out our interstate power here for the last 10 days. Our Caterpillar generators have been running ever since at the power plant, averaging very close to 3.2MW of power output continuous. Supposedly the crews will have the lines repaired sometime early this week.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/hurricane-force-winds-dust-storm-blast-south-dakota-minnesota/ar-AAXd6vb
The reliability of the national electrical grid system with HV transmission wires strung all over tarnation on poles, not so much. The reliability of our diesel generators, 100% - currently providing power for 1,337 residences and businesses on the local 7.2KV lines. The power was only out here for 38 seconds while the generators started, sync their sine waves with each other and came online. In the data on the power command center, the initial surge after a 38 second outage was 6.72MW, or an average of about 5,000 watts per service, to get inductive loads turning again. The frequency momentarily dropped to 59.2Hz during the startup surge, engine power output shows the engines reached a mechanical output of 10,008 hp for 11 seconds to bring the power back on.
The two generators have burned 39,920 gallons of fuel in the last 10 days, or 2.98 gallons per service, per day. You can't buy a home backup generator that will supply whole-house 200A service power on that amount of fuel.
I was down 24 hours, west end of my county had 95mph winds. Xcel dropped service into those areas to get what was still standing back online. Since then power has had a LOT of bumps and drop outs as they replace poles and bring sections online. And some overnight planned outages to do stuff that requires dropping all power to here. West side of my town took a pretty good hit too. I was lucky and protected from it by the bulk of the town. I saw a 70mph wind gust(had to go back thru the weather station data) that tossed my garbage can with 50 pounds of used cat litter in the bottom across the street...
Haboob(dust storm) hit out ahead of it... unreal system... not quite as bad as the July 1st, 2011 derecho that killed power for 5 days just as I had 100 guests descend on my house for my annual 4th of July BBQ
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Glad to hear you're still standing there, Mary. We're on the end of Xcel's interstate lines here so they haven't gotten to our area yet. They're concentrating on the more populated areas first. I don't know where the problem is on the line from Minnesota to here, but I suspect it's over by the Mississippi River someplace. Our substation transformers and everything survived, it's just the lines are dead that feed 'em. They claimed they had (unverified) tornados in Coon Rapids someplace, so that's likely where the problem is. They still don't have all the junk layin in the roads cleaned up over there, much less put power wires back up.
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And back from another Xcel outage, 22 hours this time... I had plenty of battery to keep fridge and freezers cold, run the computer and 1 monitor(I shut 2 down to save power) ad run the ham radio. Kept me entertained.
Neighbor across the street knocked on the front door, "Hey can I borrow your generator for 2 ours to cool the fridge and freezer down?"
I said "What generator?" I am running off solar and battery!
I let him dig my little Northstar 2800 watt generator out, he had to clean the carb but it gave him power.
That was a wild ride storm wise, 3:30AM line of storms hits and power goes down, town 17 miles west has major damage and that took out the substation that feeds this way. They had 90mph winds, i saw 50mph. Then 2 hours after power comes back up another line of storms hit, I had a peak straight line wind of 70mph, west of me again gt nailed with tornadoes and 90mph straight line winds. I have a 65 gallon garbage can and same size recycling can. Garbage can was half full and winds tossed it 150 feet, the recycling can was basically empty(and is empty now!) and I found it 500 feet away where it smashed in the overhead door at the school bus barn. I was watching crap fly by and hitting my bay window in the kitchen(I was standing in the doorway to the pantry, strongest room in the house) 15 feet back in case the glass gave way. Rain was forced in around the window seals, in around the front door seals and it is TIGHT! Hard to open tight! Winds may have been higher and my weather station didn't capture it, sometimes it misses the peak gust.
Grain elevator 20 miles NW of me
(https://chorus.stimg.co/23597676/284954039_7590794804324945_5112131938948960934_n.jpg)
Grain elevator in the town 17 miles west is also damaged badly, roofs off all over town, trees down everywhere. Trees down here in town to, sound of chainsaws woke me up! Neighbors grove across he street took a beating(and may have blocked some of the wind from hitting me!). He borrowed my electric chainsaw for his wife to use, said he had a new chain to fit it. I am using my battery powered chainsaw to do cleanup in my neighbors yard.
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Mary, indeed that storm caused a lot of damage to several farms, grain bins and sheds in that area. Up here, about 40-50 miles SW of us there was an outfit that had a grid tie wind turbine. I don't remember what brand it was - it was about 90 ft rotor on it. Anyway, it exploded in the storm, one blade went thru the factory roof, another one cut the tower down and collapsed it, the third blade flew about 1/4 mile and hit a house and demolished it. There was no other damage in town other than from that wind turbine. People didn't like the thing near the town at the factory anyway, when it was put in. And now it's smashed, there's gonna be huge lawsuits over it and the owners of the factory won't be putting another one up. When they put it in there was all this hoopla about how "green energy" from the wind turbine was gonna save the factory thousands in electricity bills. It never did. It was there for about 12 years and what it produced in electricity never paid for even 1/3 the cost of the wind turbine.
Up north here we had a nice quiet, peaceful Memorial Day weekend. Little bit of rain on a couple nights, we didn't get even 1/2 the amount of out-of-staters from the Twin Cities area come here this year. The last two years have been nuts with what we call out-of-state "corona boaters". People were out of work, they bought a used boat with their government corona checks, and showed up at our lake in hoards because they had nothing else to do. This year, most of them had to go back to work, gas is high priced, they found out that cheap $5,000 used boat they bought costs $10,000 to make it go for one year. So now they got no money left and and they couldn't afford to come to our lake and raise havoc anymore, and they all got their "corona boats" for sale on craigslist.
We hope it stays that way.
What did show up here mostly left yesterday afternoon. So last night we let our boat down off the lift, Kristin loaded it up with supplies and we went to one of our favorite fishing spots about 17 miles up the lake from our dock. We fished walleyes until about 2:00AM, caught about a dozen but kept two nice 19-20" dinner fish, spent the night on the lake on the boat. We woke up this morning at sunup and the wind was picking up with 2-3 ft rollers on the lake with whitecaps. So we hauled anchor and headed back home. The wind is nuts here again today, gusting to 35 mph, would be a rough ride to go anywhere in the boat today. So we're waiting until it quiets down a bit, then going out again tonight.
Otherwise our Caterpillar generators are silent, power is on and coming in just fine from Xcel ever since they got the lines fixed.
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Mary B
Wow! it's been 2012 since I'd seen a Grain Silo with the top blown off! A EF2 blew threw BFE MO that took out the tops of trees for something 2 miles and left my sister's house without nary a touch.
Would've been "interesting" to see antenna masts in those kind of winds.
Kinda make me wonder hos ChrisO is doing too.
Glad is see all is okay
Bruce S
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Bruce, those straight-line winds out on the prairie are notorious. Here where we live it takes a tornado to cause that kind of damage. We got millions and millions of acres of trees, hills and so on, and the wind tends to get tumbled and doesn't develop those notorious straight-line winds they get on the prairie in western and west-central Minnesota.
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Mary B
Wow! it's been 2012 since I'd seen a Grain Silo with the top blown off! A EF2 blew threw BFE MO that took out the tops of trees for something 2 miles and left my sister's house without nary a touch.
Would've been "interesting" to see antenna masts in those kind of winds.
Kinda make me wonder hos ChrisO is doing too.
Glad is see all is okay
Bruce S
Top of my tower in 70mph winds will be flexing 2-3 inches to the side! Scary to see but they are designed for that.
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More bad damage reports came in yesterday. Trees on houses, power lines down, barns and bins on farms flattened... can draw a line from Sioux Falls to Alexandria, MN and 30 miles to either side had severe damage. Still have chain saws going here today at the neighbors across the street, and he is fixing his barn that wracked in the wind. They chained a tractor to the upwind end yesterday and tugged it back vertical. Where the pole barn posts moved ground sideways they now had a hole they are filling with concrete. It was 8" off plumb down the west wall and south wall! Today he is rigging x brace cables just under the rafters from corner to corner to help pull it back square. Cables will stay in place permanently to make sure the next wind doesn't finish it off.
During my inspection yesterday I noticed branches on the 240volt lines that run across my backyard then up to my house. I borrowed a friends pole trimmer and got them cut away to take the weight off the lines.
And I found my lawn chair I thought was a goner! It was wedged in the trees/bushes at the back of my property, about 20' in the air! A rotating wall cloud went overhead(I was spotting on 2 meters to the National Weather Service) and I wonder if a small tornado wasn't trying to form... something cause a lot of lift in the winds that went over my house. To toss a 65 gallon commercial grade garbage can 500 feet takes some power.
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Wow! Thanks for sharing the pictures. Crazy power, huh.
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Update on our daughter's Tesla Model 3. They decided they can't afford to live in California anymore - too expensive. So they moved back to Wisconsin. What to do with the Tesla? She tried to sell it, but she owes more on it on the loan than the car is worth. There's no way it could be driven to Wisconsin. It would take forever, and that's assuming a person can find places in the western mountain states and midwest to charge it up when the battery goes dead.
So in the end I had to drive all the way to San Bernardino with my diesel one-ton dually and a flatbed 5th wheel trailer, load up the worthless Tesla and haul it to Wisconsin. It took 284 gallons of diesel fuel and 4 days round trip to get an electric car from California to Wisconsin. A car that depreciated to less than 50% of it's purchase price in four years, cost $16,000 (which I had to pay because daughter couldn't afford it) to fix a failed battery, and now the car is in Wisconsin where we have winter at -30F.
Welcome to the reality of the New Green Deal.
Even Tesla knows they're a joke. They are a scam to get government subsidies. When Tesla was cleaning out their car lots and moving to online sales only, guess what they used to keep cars charged up on the lots. Because unlike a diesel or gas car that doesn't burn any fuel when it's not running, EV's run themselves dead unless they're kept on the charger. Twin 300kVA diesel generators to keep their Tesla inventory charged up.
https://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2019/03/tesla-factory-store-uses-diesel-generators-to-recharge-slow-moving-model-3-inventory/
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now the car is in Wisconsin where we have winter at -30F.
Great, now you have a nice Tesla battery to keep your house warm when the Caterpillar generators fail. :D
Ed
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Hi Chris,
Thought you might like these pics.
About 6 weeks ago the ground started to rumble, and looking down our small normal road, very rural Normandy France, these machines appeared and laying 3off 3 1/2-inch ridged polypropylene continues tubes.
Tubes to about 30 to 36 inch depth and the small trench with the tubes in was then followed by cement mixer after cement mixer. A few days and they were gone from our village.
It seems the Regional Department had been allocated a budget from central government to put all overground cables underground, including mixing new fibre optic cables and 3 phase cables. Telecoms in one tube the others have electric at 20,000ac and 440vac.
For 22 years we here have had our own supply as the local supply was always being lost due to poles over or trees pulling lines down. 6 years ago we got fibre Optic to the end of the road box 200 yards away, after many years struggling with satellite speeds.
So in our back of the woods rural valley, we are now getting everything.
HMM! must get all my building applications in quick as i suspect with all the utilities poles gone the regional council will have us made a National Park.
Last photo shows our new cast iron manhole for our connections. Our sheep dog ready for work.
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It makes a lot more sense than stringing wires on poles. The only reason that was done was because it was quick and cheap with no regard for what it costs to maintain it long-term.
Our daughter and son-in-law are now in the same situation with poor planning and design. They have a Tesla car here where the nearest EV charging station is almost 100 miles away and it takes an hour to charge it to 75%. Takes a lot longer to charge it from 75 to 100% because the last 25% is the least efficient stage of charging. They have a rented house where they cannot install the Level 3 charger because the house doesn't have a big enough electrical service to handle it, and it takes literally days to charge it with a wall outlet so it can be driven 80 miles.
She's got a new job here teaching school in the fall, and she has to drive 60 miles a day to get to work and back. The 120V charger can't put enough daily power in the battery for her to make it to work and back in the winter time - and the daily electrical consumption of that car is more than our entire house takes per day. They neglect to tell you that in cold weather the charger will refuse to charge the battery unless it's at least 40 deg F. When it's -20F outside it takes 20-25 kWh for the battery heater to warm the battery to 40F so it will charge, which takes about 3 hours just to warm the battery. If you get in the car and just drive it, the battery and cabin heaters take 70% of the total energy that be stored in the battery so it will operate, and the range on a full charge is barely 80 miles - the energy equivalent of 8.9 miles/gallon with a gas car.
So if she goes to work at -20F with a full charge, only 30 miles, leaves the car sitting outside with the battery heater going, when she goes home after work there won't be enough left in the battery to make it home. The battery heater is 6KW, and it will draw the battery completely dead sitting outside at work for 8 hours without being plugged in, which works out to an energy equivalent of less than 1 mpg with a gas car.
She's gonna try to trade it off on a gas car in the Twin Cities area, see if she can find a dealer who will take it on trade and just absorb the loss on it trading into a used gas car.
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Friend in ND had a similar situation. Kid bought a Tesla when he was in college down in AZ. He came back to ND to work and the Tesla was useless and since dad paid for it dad took the battery pack out to run his house during power outages and scrapped the rest and told the kid he was an adult now, go get credit and buy a GAS car. There was literally nowhere to charge the Tesla fast within 200 miles! At least the kid managed to drive it home by carrying a generator in the trunk and camping along the way. Took him 10 days to drive from Phoenix to middle of nowhere ND. AT first he wanted dad to pay for hotels along the way... dad set him $1k to buy a generator and a tent and sleeping bag instead. LOL generator gets used around the farm so it was a useful purchase...
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I think there's dealers in the Twin Cities area that will take it on trade without scrapping it out. The battery in the Model 3 is 360V so it's not really practical to run inverters with it, and it's not safe to even have it sitting around. It's fire and electrical shock hazard. And when the battery goes bad, then what do you do with it? It's not recyclable and you're sitting on a pile of toxic waste.
These EV's are anything but "green" and they use a lot of false advertising and cherry-picked "specs" to sell them, just like they do with wind turbines that never produce even close to their nameplate power unless there's a storm going, and then they feather the blades and they don't produce anything during the storm anyway. And then the blades, which are composites made from petroleum, end up in a big toxic stockpile in Colorado.
It's called the New Green Deal.
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Friend in ND had a similar situation. Kid bought a Tesla when he was in college down in AZ. He came back to ND to work and the Tesla was useless
What makes it even worse, is that it says in the Model 3 owner's manual, "do not expose the Model 3 to temperatures less than -22F (-30C) for more than 24 hours. Permanent damage will result that is not covered under the limited warranty"
It doesn't get above that temperature for days at a time in the dead of winter here. And then suddenly we'll get a warm snap where it gets up to 0F and everybody goes snowmobiling, hunting and ice-fishing to enjoy the warm weather.
I think it was MagnetJuice that said we have a nice Tesla battery to keep the house warm? That's almost laughable. The only way it's gonna keep the house warm is to poke a steel rod into it with a wood stick to short it out and set it on fire.
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The EV industry also uses the same type of misinformation campaigns that governments use to get people to believe something. Tell 'em lies enough times, it must be true. Right?
Tesla's are notorious for catching on fire. Despite Tesla's claim that they're "safer than a gas car". I told our daughter this is the best possible thing that could happen to her Model 3, then collect the insurance on it to pay off the loan
https://youtu.be/sAQlLu5ttOk
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Friend in ND had a similar situation. Kid bought a Tesla when he was in college down in AZ. He came back to ND to work and the Tesla was useless
What makes it even worse, is that it says in the Model 3 owner's manual, "do not expose the Model 3 to temperatures less than -22F (-30C) for more than 24 hours. Permanent damage will result that is not covered under the limited warranty"
It doesn't get above that temperature for days at a time in the dead of winter here. And then suddenly we'll get a warm snap where it gets up to 0F and everybody goes snowmobiling, hunting and ice-fishing to enjoy the warm weather.
I think it was MagnetJuice that said we have a nice Tesla battery to keep the house warm? That's almost laughable. The only way it's gonna keep the house warm is to poke a steel rod into it with a wood stick to short it out and set it on fire.
Friend took it apart and turned it into a 48 volt pack. Batteries have their own insulated steel building 20' from the house in case of a pack fire. Since it is a standby system and he isn't charging it with RE heating that little building is easy and cheap enough. Not having to start a generator at -40 is a huge plus! He flips the transfer switch and turns on the inverter to power the furnace and critical loads. He gets a lot of 4-8 hour power outages... similar to what I get. Xcels crappy substation tripped off again last night when a tiny pop up thunderstorm 1 miles away hit the high voltage feeder. Takes 6 hours to get someone out to reset the breakers... if they reset and aren't so over heated they have to be replaced with more junk. That substation is to small and way over loaded now.
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Yeah, the Tesla battery is made of little AA-size battery cells. Our daughter's Model 3 has 2,976 double A flashlight batteries in it. Each plate module is 25.2V fully charged and 22.2V at nominal. So nominal voltage is actually 44.4 instead of 48 with two in series - they don't make that good of inverter batteries because they're near the low voltage cutoff for most 48V inverters, making the inverter way less efficient (drawing more amps for the same watts) than it is with lead-acid batteries @ 48V nominal.
So a 1500AH lithium pack drawn down to 20% SOC won't run the inverter near as long as a 1,500AH lead-acid forklift battery will drawn down to the same 20% SOC because the inverter pulls more amps and runs hotter on the lithium batteries.
With a typical light duty "renewable energy" lead-acid that can only be drawn down to 50% SOC without damaging it, then the lithium holds an advantage in weight per useable amp-hour. But they still don't beat lead-acid forklift traction batteries for efficiency and cost/kWh. So in the end, using a Tesla battery to power an inverter for a house don't make much sense. Might look good on paper, but the real world is different than paper theories.
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He tore the packs down to bare batteries and started over. He does a lot of battery pack refurbing for hand tools(it is his sideline business) and had the spot welder and heat shrink sleeves. He went to a better BMS over what Tesla uses. Told him if he runs across a Tesla pack cheap he can build one for me to use!
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He tore the packs down to bare batteries and started over. He does a lot of battery pack refurbing for hand tools(it is his sideline business) and had the spot welder and heat shrink sleeves. He went to a better BMS over what Tesla uses. Told him if he runs across a Tesla pack cheap he can build one for me to use!
Holy toledo, he must be desperate to go to that much work. All the cells are are in that green casting stuff that the coolant tubes go thru and they literally have to be destroyed to get them out. The individual modules aren't considered to be serviceable. The modules are easily removed from the big tray and there's people that pry and bust the circuit board off them so they can be used in other vehicles. But I've never actually heard of anybody grinding one of them modules apart because the cells are cast in groups of 13, then bonded into that green stuff that sets up about like cement. Each module has its own BMS on it. You can buy 'em on eBay for around $4,500 for a 220AH battery
https://www.ebay.com/itm/284777671993
That's why I said this battery technology, while necessary for your expensive electric toy car, is not really practical for anything else because you can buy a 220AH FLA battery for $150 bucks.
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You can buy 'em on eBay for around $4,500 for a 220AH battery
That price is for 4 modules (880 AH)
you can buy a 220AH FLA battery for $150 bucks.
The cheapest 12v 220AH that I found goes for $500
Can you give me a link that is not from China? I can use 4 of those.
Ed
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The cheapest 12v 220AH that I found goes for $500
Can you give me a link that is not from China? I can use 4 of those.
Who uses 12V? Either 2V or 6V for off-grid power. The local Farm and Fleet has GC2's for $150. They are made by Deka in the USA.
https://www.farmandfleet.com/products/g--2705-blains-farm-and-fleet-golf-cart-battery.html
If you want to step up the GC8 then they're $185.
So price out a 20kWh battery bank with FLA vs Li-ion. And keep in mind that despite all the hype the cycle life of Li-ion chemistry is 800 cycles. A much cheaper lead-acid forklift traction battery will run 3,000 cycles @ 80% DoD and last 20 years in an off-grid application. Sure, the 48V 600AH forklift battery weighs almost 2 tons and that's why they don't use them in electric cars. But who cares how much it weighs when it's sitting stationary in an off-grid utility room? It's cost/kWh that matters.
And then on top of that, see if you can get your insurance company to insure the place with a lithium chemistry battery on-site. Neither the insurance company, nor the fire dept, will touch it with a 10 ft pole.
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I went to AGM, my back and watering/testing batteries monthly got to the point they didn't agree. Stooping is bad for me.. so I need a battery chemistry that I can ignore...
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He tore the packs down to bare batteries and started over. He does a lot of battery pack refurbing for hand tools(it is his sideline business) and had the spot welder and heat shrink sleeves. He went to a better BMS over what Tesla uses. Told him if he runs across a Tesla pack cheap he can build one for me to use!
Holy toledo, he must be desperate to go to that much work. All the cells are are in that green casting stuff that the coolant tubes go thru and they literally have to be destroyed to get them out. The individual modules aren't considered to be serviceable. The modules are easily removed from the big tray and there's people that pry and bust the circuit board off them so they can be used in other vehicles. But I've never actually heard of anybody grinding one of them modules apart because the cells are cast in groups of 13, then bonded into that green stuff that sets up about like cement. Each module has its own BMS on it. You can buy 'em on eBay for around $4,500 for a 220AH battery
https://www.ebay.com/itm/284777671993
That's why I said this battery technology, while necessary for your expensive electric toy car, is not really practical for anything else because you can buy a 220AH FLA battery for $150 bucks.
That is why I told him he can build one for me LOL I am not taking one apart that far!
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Chris, that link that you posted is for a 6 volts golf-cart battery of 215 AH, not 220 AH.
Using those, I'll have to spend over $1300 (shipping not included) for a 48v bank.
I think I'll wait for a cheap electric car battery. There are people that have the know-how to dissect those batteries and get any voltage that they want.
You never answered about the link to ebay. That was 4 modules for that price, not 1 module.
But you don't have to answer, just continue bashing the Teslas. The more you do it, the cheaper I can get the battery. :D
Ed
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I went to AGM, my back and watering/testing batteries monthly got to the point they didn't agree. Stooping is bad for me.. so I need a battery chemistry that I can ignore...
When we moved here we didn't have utility power yet. The place came with dual Outback Radian inverters and a GB Industrial 24-cell 48V forklift battery. The battery is a 24-85-27 according to the tag on the tray. It is 1700AH and weighs 4,300 lbs. The battery has the BWT self-watering system on it that is sold by GB Industrial.
https://youtu.be/fXkysYnoCnM
The previous owners (a doctor that built the house as a vacation home) charged the battery with an old Winco generator with a John Deere diesel on it. We replaced that with a 45 kVA Caterpillar when we first moved here in the fall of 2019. The house is 3,600 sq ft, split level, and we typically use 20-25 kWh per day. The first winter we lived here we ran the generator all night every three days to charge the battery at 200 amps. The watering system has a little pump on it and all you have to do it make sure there's water in the tank for it.
We don't have solar panels because the house is all shaded by trees, and in the winter everything is buried under 6ft of snow and the sun don't shine anyway for 6 weeks at a time. Plus solar panels would ruin the battery anyway - you're not supposed to charge a traction battery until it's fully discharged down to 20% SOC. GB Industrial calls it "opportunity charging" and all it does is shorten the battery's life
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Chris, that link that you posted is for a 6 volts golf-cart battery of 215 AH, not 220 AH.
Using those, I'll have to spend over $1300 (shipping not included) for a 48v bank.
You never answered about the link to ebay. That was 4 modules for that price, not 1 module.
5AH on a 48V string is, what? 200 watt-hours after it goes thru an inverter? It's like big whoop - close enough.
Now you're starting to get the idea - price out NEW Li-ion cells with equivalent storage. $1,300 is cheap compared to what you're gonna spend on lithium batteries.
Ok, so four USED modules out of a salvaged battery. For $4,500 bucks. You wanna know what those cost new? I got a $16,000 bill around here someplace that I had to pay to replace the battery in my daughter's Tesla. It got worse and worse, would only charge to 50-60% and say "charge completed". Then it gradually got down to 15% is all it would take. They refused to warranty it, claiming the battery was damaged by supercharging it too many times, but they got a new design battery that will fix this - it only costs $16,000 installed. One of those "modules" in it had overheated and burst and all the coolant leaked out of it. The factory authorized service center tells her, "oh - you're lucky it didn't catch on fire."
That was real good to know.
The car couldn't make it around the block anymore and what's she to do? She had to get to work. Her car is at the shop with the battery out of it, the battery is no good, she has a loan on the car and owes $20,000 on it yet, and now faced with a $16,000 repair bill and it does not say a damn thing in the warranty anywhere about how many times you can supercharge it at one of those supercharging stations.
She learned her lesson because we told her not to buy that damn car in the first place. But she'll only be gullible once because she won't buy another one.
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I weigh in on this current thread.
I will keep using my NiCd and NiMh batteries.
I can easily get used Toyota modules and even fully tested and balanced packs for less than a G note.
I've worked with these before, have even done several module swap in Camry's that are still on the road.
Their while just like any battery, the charges can degrade when -20c outside they will still run my stuff.
My little banks of NiCds ( little meaning 14.4Vdc @20Ah) from my previous employer are still going right along.
I also have a few packs self built that I use for my when-the-power goes out lighting, but so far that's about it.
I have access to enough that I could build a small "Power Wall" , but life has a way of getting in the way to do so.
Cheers
Bruce S
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We don't use our inverters and battery anymore on a regular basis since we got the utility power here. But I do shut the power off and run the house on the battery for a few days about once a month, just to keep the battery healthy. If the power does go off, which actually hasn't happened since we got the generators for the township, the inverters will automatically take over the loads.
That stuff is hard to sell used. The battery is 5 years old and even a big skid steer loader can't move it. The inverters are the same age and with the Mate, DC bus box and AC bus box they are about $12,000 for the pair, including all the equipment. Nobody has the money to buy something like that, so we may as well hang onto it because we're not going to give it away.
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Hi
The tesla has lots of 18650 batteries, 18mm dia and 65mm long most rated around 2 aH some do 2.4 some do considerably less. so banks of them in series parallel can supply a decent load.... Until, each little battery has a device under the positive terminal, the CID current interrupt device. It is a one trip bimetal breaker. ie overload it and warm it up, it switches the battery off before it becomes incandescent. (in theory) if you overload a pack and one of these things trips it removes the battery from service, if it is series parallele it increases the load on the remaining cells so they can start popping one after the other as the temperature of the cells increases.
Overload lead acid enough it hisses and smells, if the case swells up and the plates buckle it dies. it doesnt catch fire.
Look on YouTube the is a guy in Australia posted videos of battery packs with a FLIR camera and the temperature some of the batteries in the middle of the pack are too hot to touch. there are videos of packs that have been left to their own devices with a big chared mass in the middle.
I am expanding my small 270aH pack with more lead acid. Lithium is very good however if you have a bad back because they are not as heavy as lead acid.
Brian
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If it was a pick'em up truck you could put some forklift batteries in the bed and disguise them as toolboxes. Would give you weight over them back wheels, too.
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I have LiPo batteries for my RC aircraft. They are good for that application because 10AH, 14.8V is only 854 grams (1.88 lbs).
The one on the toolbox has 57 cycles on it and it has a bad cell. I have a special charger to charge them, it checks the IR of all the cells thru the balance plug before charging and gives a readout of the battery's health and remaining capacity. The charger refuses to charge the one with a bad cell - it's a fire hazard.
The battery that's in the aircraft has 212 cycles on it and it's still good, but down to 87% of the capacity it had when new.
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The lithium batteries are also no different from deep cycle FLA as far as usable stored power. And they are not as good as deep cycle FLA for voltage retention under load. Those little 10AH batteries, typical with Lithium, are expensive. They cost $150 apiece. They are 10,000 mAh, but you can only use 8,000 mAh (80% DoD) or it will ruin the battery and it will be no good in 50 cycles, just like the one on the toolbox.
Fully charged they are 4.2vpc, or 16.8V. Fully discharged they are 3.2vpc, 12.8V. A drop of 4 volts from fully charged to fully discharged.
A 12V deep cycle FLA fully charged is 12.75V. Fully discharged is 10.8V - a drop of only 2.25 volts.
Any time you power anything electric, especially motors, to get rated power output in watts, as the voltage drops the amps goes up and so does I^2R losses in the motor winding. An inverter is no different. So your motor or inverter is more efficient on FLA as the voltage drops under load than it is with Lithium Polymer because you're dealing with much more voltage drop on lithium than you are on FLA.
You go to 12 cell 24V FLA, fully charged is 25.5V, fully discharged is 21.6V, a drop of 3.9V.
The equivalent lithium is a 6-cell, fully charged is 25.2V, fully discharged is 19.2V, a drop of 6V.
Most 24V inverters, you get down to 22V and you are at the inverter's low voltage cutoff - go any further than that and the inverter becomes so inefficient it creates more heat than it does power output.
So I don't get the love affair with lithium batteries. They are not efficient for charging - they get extremely hot. They are not efficient for discharging - they create so much heat during discharge that the little 10AH batteries shown in my photo are uncomfortably hot to the touch when the aircraft lands. Heat is wasted power, and that's why Tesla batteries have a glycol cooling system in them - they get freaking hot and they are a fire hazard when they get hot.
What I think it boils down to is that people buy into a lot of hype and marketing propaganda because they don't have the technical knowledge to know better.
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I have LiPo batteries for my RC aircraft.
Has anyone realized that these "3 phase electric" hobby motors". I use a speed blower control for my application, I saw these and was like "WOW"
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I am running on a FLA on [12batt] off the speed control current load. These things suck alot of power, for me the performance is key...
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Dam-it
I lost my last post I pointed out there these hobby motors there is no ---
Check your motor it will have 3 wires.
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Dam-it
I lost my last post I pointed out there these hobby motors there is no ---
Check your motor it will have 3 wires.
Not sure what you're trying to say, but I'm very familiar with these motors. I built that aircraft from scratch. The wing motors are T-motor Navigator-series MN3510 630KV motors. They are three-phase neo magnet motors with a central stator and external rotor. They produce .66 shaft horsepower @ 4,400 rpm (each). They are basically the same concept as the axial wind turbine generators that everybody builds here, except way more efficient and powerful for their size since the the windings are wound on a steel core. The axial flux wind turbine generators don't make very good use of the magnetic material.
The speed controllers are Turnigy FET-switching three-phase inverters. The speed controllers vary the AC frequency, they measure the motor's rpm with phase feedback from the inactive phase and adjust the phase timing (phase lead) to control the torque output of the motor. The speed controllers have the two DC wires in, the three phases out to the motor, and two wires for PWM signal for throttle. The PWM signal varies from 1000 (idle) to 2000 (full throttle).
They are VERY powerful for their size, used in everything from fixed-wing aircraft to helicopters. A stacked stator 14 pole version turning at 16,000 rpm, as used in a RC helicopter, produces 5-6 horsepower for a short period of time and the speed controller/inverter puts out 160 amps of three-phase AC current for a few minutes.
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The lithium battery used in that helicopter is a 45C discharge battery pack. It is 5.5AH, but the battery can put out almost 250 amps of DC current to the inverter for one minute. That is one advantage that lithium has over FLA.
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Don't want to step on anyone's toes :)
https://hobbyking.com/en_us/yep-80a-2-6s-sbec-brushless-speed-controller.html
I run this off a 12v car battery.
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Don't want to step on anyone's toes :)
https://hobbyking.com/en_us/yep-80a-2-6s-sbec-brushless-speed-controller.html
I run this off a 12v car battery.
Yes, and it will work fine on a 12V FLA. It's a simple FET-switched three-phase inverter. But it needs a PWM signal for the throttle or it won't function.
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I used to race 12th scale, "on carpet" we nervier had it that good, efficiently pm dv compete. a magnet motor can not compete accept. The -p
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We had a Tesla that caught on fire here on County V over the weekend. It reportedly quit going down the road. The two people in it got out and noticed smoke coming out of it. They got away from it before it exploded. It caught on fire just after lunch last Saturday. The fire dept worked on putting it out, but it was still burning on Sunday morning. It got so hot it melted the road and set that on fire, set the ditch on fire, thankfully it was by a swamp so they kept the fire from spreading. But they used 13,000 gallons of water just to keep it cool enough so the asphalt in the road wouldn't keep burning.
It is now like a superfund cleanup site. The amount of water required to control it resulted in groundwater contamination right by a swamp. A few thousand yards of dirt, and a section of the road have to be dug out and hauled to a toxic landfill someplace, and then replaced and the site restored. They've been testing the material removed and it was more extensive than originally thought. There's toxic materials still coming out of the site and they've hauled 30-some dump truck loads out so far. Out here in the country they didn't have the convenience of a storm drain system like they have in cities that could capture the toxic runoff.
Plus not sure who's going to pay for it. Lithium batteries are hazardous materials and are subject to DOT's Hazardous Materials Regulations (HMR; 49 CFR Parts 171–180). It's illegal to even ship one under 49 CFR section 173.185 without all the proper hazmat insurance and paperwork. And then they put them in electric cars? They're going to have to include an environmental hazardous materials surcharge on EV insurance because when one catches on fire they are an environmental disaster, and they are extremely dangerous. This is well known, but little is done about it because they are the latest political posturing statement that politicians can use to claim they're gonna "save the planet".
Daughter has had zero luck getting rid of her Tesla. We bought her a nice Jeep Compass and she's stopped making the payments on the Tesla. She's gonna let the bank take it. Not really all that great for her credit rating, but at this point she has no choice. Elon Musk is a fraud anyway that has sucked millions of people into his scams that he funds with taxpayer dollars thru government subsidies, including Tesla. If you're interested, there's a pretty good series that presents the facts.
https://youtu.be/c-FGwDDc-s8
https://youtu.be/DopFo1rjAr4
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We had a Tesla that caught on fire here on County V over the weekend. It reportedly quit going down the road. The two people in it got out and noticed smoke coming out of it. They got away from it before it exploded. It caught on fire just after lunch last Saturday. The fire dept worked on putting it out, but it was still burning on Sunday morning. It got so hot it melted the road and set that on fire, set the ditch on fire, thankfully it was by a swamp so they kept the fire from spreading. But they used 13,000 gallons of water just to keep it cool enough so the asphalt in the road wouldn't keep burning.
It is now like a superfund cleanup site. The amount of water required to control it resulted in groundwater contamination right by a swamp. A few thousand yards of dirt, and a section of the road have to be dug out and hauled to a toxic landfill someplace, and then replaced and the site restored. They've been testing the material removed and it was more extensive than originally thought. There's toxic materials still coming out of the site and they've hauled 30-some dump truck loads out so far. Out here in the country they didn't have the convenience of a storm drain system like they have in cities that could capture the toxic runoff.
Plus not sure who's going to pay for it. Lithium batteries are hazardous materials and are subject to DOT's Hazardous Materials Regulations (HMR; 49 CFR Parts 171–180). It's illegal to even ship one under 49 CFR section 173.185 without all the proper hazmat insurance and paperwork. And then they put them in electric cars? They're going to have to include an environmental hazardous materials surcharge on EV insurance because when one catches on fire they are an environmental disaster, and they are extremely dangerous. This is well known, but little is done about it because they are the latest political posturing statement that politicians can use to claim they're gonna "save the planet".
Daughter has had zero luck getting rid of her Tesla. We bought her a nice Jeep Compass and she's stopped making the payments on the Tesla. She's gonna let the bank take it. Not really all that great for her credit rating, but at this point she has no choice. Elon Musk is a fraud anyway that has sucked millions of people into his scams that he funds with taxpayer dollars thru government subsidies, including Tesla. If you're interested, there's a pretty good series that presents the facts.
https://youtu.be/c-FGwDDc-s8
https://youtu.be/DopFo1rjAr4
Tesla used the worst possible battery chem to claim the range, Compare to the Nissan leaf has never had a battery fire, but they can't boast the range, just bullet proof reliability, sadly most them are copying Teslas sh*t battery system, so we'll be seeing more fires.
the more energy dense the battery is the more fragile it is to keep it from spontaneous release of said energy.
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Tesla used the worst possible battery chem to claim the range, Compare to the Nissan leaf has never had a battery fire, but they can't boast the range, just bullet proof reliability, sadly most them are copying Teslas sh*t battery system, so we'll be seeing more fires.
the more energy dense the battery is the more fragile it is to keep it from spontaneous release of said energy.
For our daughter it was a rather expensive lesson. These things are piling up on car lots and they can't sell them. I think I read where one of the major car rental outfits is dumping their EV fleet and going back to gas engines because the EV's are too expensive to operate and maintain. Which is going to further depress the used market for them. Like all fads, they hit their peak and then reality sets in.
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I feel the same about these battery bank systems. These battery systems are just too new. Also I don't like the 600v to 800v running volt systems. there's been concerns from first responders with auto accidents. I've seen fire trucks hose down the batt banks and after 10 hours they still cant put them out.
I preferer a low voltage systems(100v max DC) myself. We all know there is a need for better battery systems. During with my work with my invention of a "4 cycle steam engine" I also patented (for education) a variable lift direct injection valve. In order to make it lift it needed water cool the electromagnetic coil conductor. We can do better with high amp low volt systems.
I actually patented the thing https://patents.google.com/patent/US8261575B1/en
It uses centrifugal force at running speeds to self pump the coolant thru the armature coil wires.
its a low voltage traction motor design for an EV. Why cant we have EV that will burnout and smoke the tires like a hotrod.
There should different types of EV's