Author: chogan@directresearch.com

Post #1702: There is no warranty on Prius Prime EV range. So treat your battery nicely.

 

In a  nutshell:  Toyota offers no warranty whatsoever on the EV range of a Prius Prime.  After doing a bit of calculation, I’ve come to the conclusion that’s probably because they couldn’t.  Odds are, for some of these Prius Primes, the EV range will be greatly reduced long before the car is ready for the scrap yard.

Now that I’ve reviewed the basics, I think you could plausibly see two- or three-fold difference in battery life, across users, depending on their habits and climate. 

I go over five key habits in the final section.

To summarize:

Want to kill your battery?  Routinely charge it to 100% and discharge it all the way down to 0%.  Leave it 100% charged for long periods of time, ideally, while letting the car roast in sun.  Accelerate with a wide-open throttle and stomp on the brakes to stop.  And do a lot of high-speed highway driving in EV mode.

Want your battery to live a long and fulfilling life?  Stop your charge well below 100%.  Only discharge the battery part-way before you recharge it.  Keep the car and battery cool. Drive gently, and use the gas engine when you’re on the highway.

In terms of the core question — how long should I expect my wife’s Prius Prime battery to last — I still don’t know.  If I do a crude extrapolation based on a Tesla battery (with same cell chemistry and manufacturer as the Prius Prime battery), I come up with a shockingly short lifespan.   Something like an expected 40% loss of range after 30,000 electrical miles.  And yet, my wife’s car seems to show no appreciable loss of range after about 8000 electrical miles.  So something about the crude comparison isn’t right.  I just have no idea what it is.

Edit 9/29/2024:  The salad days of 35-mile EV range (under the right conditions), in my wife’s 2021 Prius Prime, are now firmly in the rear-view-mirror.  Range took a nosedive last winter, and seems to have stayed down ever since.  The last time I drove that car, I estimated a full-to-empty-battery EV range between 20 and 25 miles.   (We got high-30s on average when new.  The EPA-rated range of the battery when new is 25 miles, but the EPA drive cycle is far more stringent than the around-the-‘burbs driving that accounts for the majority of this car’s use.)

As to why this happened, I have no good answer.  My fear is that this is just normal wear-and-tear.  Range dropped at one point, and now appears to be stable at, say, 2/3rds of what it was when new.  As the EV-usable portion of the battery is only about 60% of battery capacity (accounting for buffers for 100% charge, 0% charge, and hybrid use), a one-third decline in 60% of the battery capacity is algebraically equivalent to about a 20% decline in total battery capacity.  The car has 19K miles on it, I’d estimate 75% electrical miles (which is also what I get when I take total miles and net out an estimate of gas-powered miles on an average of three tanks of gas per year), which means that loss occurred in about 15,000 electrically-driven miles.

Which, unfortunately, puts it spot-on with my Tesla-based estimate from two years ago, just above.  (For details, see “The crude comparison falls flat on its face”, below.   Originally, I dismissed the estimate I got by extrapolating from known expected battery life for a Tesla as being implausibly short.  Now, I’m not so sure I was that far off.  So, FWIW, and crudely done, an estimated 20% loss total battery capacity, at around 15,000 miles is, in fact, halfway to the projected 40% loss at 30,000 electrical miles, which I arrived at by starting from the stated lifetime (2000 full charge cycles) for Tesla batteries, where those Tesla batteries appear to have the same battery chemistry and manufacturer as the Prius Prime battery. 

The good news is that the range dropped, all at once, but has stabilized since.  Maybe something catastrophic happened last winter, producing a one-time large decline in range, but no error codes or warning lights.  But my bet is that the car was simply programmed to show as little loss as possible early on, as a consumer-satisfaction measure.   Best guess, that sudden one-time drop in range doesn’t mean that range will sink like a stone from now on.  I’m betting that it just means that the software clicked past some threshold, and all the previously-hidden range decline is now visible to the driver.

But arguing against that, nothing I could see about the state of battery charge, using a ScanGauge 3, suggested anything of the sort.  So this mythical “software threshold” may be a figment of my imagination as I try to explain away the sudden, seemingly one-point-in-time, steep range loss.

Bottom line is that we lost a chunk of range, all at once, and I have no good idea why that happened.

Edit 10/19/2023:  After more than two years now, my wife’s Prius Prime still shows no noticeable loss of EV capacity.  We consistently get 36 to 40 miles of EV range (AC/heat off).  (That’s much better than the EPA rating of 25 miles of EV range, but all of our EV driving is suburban-low-speed driving.) 

My point is, don’t take this post as a slam on Toyota.  Car companies typically offer no range warranty for their PHEVs (Volvo being the only clear exception I’ve come across so far.)  See Post #1707 for the long list of car companies that don’t offer a range warranty on their PHEVs.

The well-known reality of lithium-ion batteries is this: You can kill them if you abuse them.  And hey, guess what, that applies to all lithium-ion batteries, including the ones in your car.  Your car’s battery management system will do its best to stop you from killing your batteries.  But it can’t do everything. 

It’s up to the driver to avoid doing things that shorten battery life.  For real.  No kidding.  As-reflected in the (lack of) range warranty.  That’s the only point of this post. 

Why Toyota couldn’t provide a four-page leaflet on the care and feeding of your lithium-ion battery, I have no clue.  Because I knew none of this stuff, above, before this latest deep dive. In fact, many of the default settings on the car are not optimized for good battery life and can’t be changed.  Likely, the Toyota battery management system guards against the worst of your habits.  Still, if you want the battery to last as long as possible, you need to get into the habits that will do that.

Continue reading Post #1702: There is no warranty on Prius Prime EV range. So treat your battery nicely.

Post #1701: Prius Prime warranty documents. I laughed. I cried.

This post started off as a little analysis of electric vehicle battery life, but soon went off the rails.

As it stands, it’s probably useful only if you are considering buying a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV).  Particularly a Toyota plug-in vehicle.  If you are, it may be well worth reading.

To be clear, my wife’s 2021 Prius Prime is running fine.  No problems.  Then again, it’s less than two years old.

The upshot is that I have more-or-less no warranty on the PHEV battery in my Prius Prime.  Which is not at all how it looks, if you read the description of the warranty on Toyota’s website.  Nor how it looks, if you look at Federal legal warranty requirements on EV batteries.

Ultimately, this is a story about about a loophole in a well-intentioned Federal regulation.  And what you can learn when you bite the bullet and actually read your car’s owner’s manual.  Including the footnotes.

Critically, it means you shouldn’t drive one of these cars to use the least gasoline you can, right now.  No matter how enjoyable the resulting bragging rights might be.  You should drive them to preserve the life of the battery for as long as possible.  And those are two quite different driving strategies.

Background

The Federal government requires that all electric vehicles (EVs) sold in the U.S. include at least an 8-year, 100,000-mile warranty on the EV battery.  That’s a floor, not a limit.

California require 10 years/150,000 miles.

And, of course, some manufacturers may offer more than that.  Although most offer the US mandated 8/100,000, Toyota chose to offer the California-level warranty for all cars sold in the U.S.  So, my wife’s Prius Prime battery is covered by a 10-year, 150,000 mile warranty.

I just looked that up in the warranty documents that came with the owner’s manual.

I laughed.  Lucky me.  Go Toyota!  That battery must be bulletproof.  I’m gonna drive the heck out of it, to be sure I get my money’s worth.

But this is PHEV.  How can they do that?

Then I started thinking about that, and something didn’t quite add up.

The key thing you should realize is that using a battery for PHEV just beats the crap out of it, compared to using it in an electric vehicle.  Allow me to explain.

By and large, the main determinant of lithium ion battery pack life is the amount of electricity you run through it.  The industry standard is based on the number of full charge/discharge cycles the battery pack can take before it loses 20 percent of its capacity.  (If you only do a fraction of a full charge or discharge, you count that fraction toward the total).

(Separately, there’s “calendar aging” in addition to charge/discharge cycles, but that’s for another day.)

Because a PHEV battery is small, a given amount of driving will run you through a lot more charge/discharge cycles than you would in a full EV.  For example, a 30-mile daily work commute would put about five cycles per week on the Prius Prime battery, but only half a cycle per week on one of the upper-end 300+ range Teslas.

If you were to put batteries with the same chemistry and construction in a Prime and a Tesla, and drove those cars the same way (which would never actually happen, as any Tesla driver will attest), all other things equal, the battery in the Prime will fail way, way before the battery in the Tesla.

Let me put some real-world numbers on that.  At this point, Tesla’s battery chemistry may be a bit older than the current best.  But not by much.  Those Tesla battery packs are supposed to go 1500 full charge/discharge cycles before failure.

At 1500 full cycles, then:

  • A Tesla with a 300-mile range would travel (1500 x 300 = ) 450,000 miles to battery failure.  This is why you’ll hear Tesla owners say their batteries are good for half-a-million miles.
  • A Prime, with a 30-mile range, would travel (1500 x 30 = ) 45,000 miles to battery failure.  (Assuming all travel was done on electricity.)

Even assuming something more normal — that only half the Prime miles are traveled on the battery — the Prime, with a Tesla-like battery chemistry, would still be seeing frequent battery failures around 90,000 miles.

How can Toyota warrant those batteries for 150,000 miles?

Is the Toyota battery that much better than the Tesla battery?  (After all, it was developed a lot more recently, and batteries have been improving.)  But still, even as much as I am something of a Toyota fanboy, for the longevity of their vehicles on average, something about this didn’t quite add up.

Warranty?  Not really.

Now we get to the part where I cried, from reading the owner’s manual.

To get to the punchline, the joker in all of this — the Federal regulation, and the Toyota warranty — is what you mean by “battery failure”.  Sure, the Feds require that you warranty the battery against failure for 8 years or 100,000 miles.  But the manufacturer gets to define what “battery failure” means.

You can easily find examples on-line.  Tesla adopts a 70% threshold for battery failure.  If you lose more than 30% of your range, in your first eight years of ownership, they’ll replace the battery.  Nissan uses a 75% threshold for the Leaf, but seems to measure it in a somewhat non-standard way.  VW uses a 75% threshold.

Those are all EVs.  Where the only way to make the car go is electricity.

But the Prius Prime is a PHEV.  Electricity is not the only way to make the car run.  It can run as either an EV, or as a standard gas hybrid.

For the PHEV function of the Prius, Toyota effectively adopts a threshold of 0%, for battery failure.  As long as the battery is good enough to run the car in hybrid (gas) mode, then according to Toyota, it hasn’t failed.  Which means that if my PHEV range drops to zero, well, tough.  As long as it’ll still run as a standard Prius, the fact that it has no PHEV range does not qualify the battery as having failed.

Or, as Toyota puts it, loss of range over time is normal, and is not covered by the warranty.

The upshot is that I have literally no warranty on the PHEV function of the Prius Prime.  A fact that — trust me on this — you would never figure out by looking at Toyota’s website.  Or, near as I can tell, anywhere else.

Based on the literal Toyota warranty documents, mere loss of capacity is not failure.  Up to and including all PHEV capacity.  If my electric range dropped to zero tomorrow, but there was still enough battery left to run it as a gas hybrid,  I’d have to eat the cost of a fix, to restore PHEV capacity.

Moral of the story:  Read The Fine Manual (RTFM).

A change of decoration is in order

Now that I know the full scoop — that far from offering a 150,000 mile on the PHEV function of the battery, Toyota offers zero — I need to change a few things about the way I drive that car.

Or, putting it bluntly, I’ve been pretty stupid about how I drove the Prius Prime.  I’ve been using that battery like there’s no tomorrow.  Because, hey, with a 150,000 mile guarantee, I assumed there was no tomorrow.   I assumed Toyota built that well enough that I’d see no serious degradation of PHEV range for the first 150,000 miles or so.  And I now realize that was all just my misunderstanding of the fine print of the warranty.

I’ve been living in a fool’s paradise by trying to burn as little gasoline as possible.  Look at me, see how environmentally conscious I am.  All the while, fully understanding that EVs trade off battery wear and tear for gasoline consumption.  I just stupidly believed the 150,000 mile warranty assumed me that the tradeoff in the Prime was minimal.  When the reality is that if I drive all-battery now, chances are I’m going to end up driving all-gas later.

And that changes now.  From this day forward, I drive for minimal battery wear-and-tear.  Ultimately, the longer the battery lasts, the more gasoline I will save in the long run.

First, I’m going to stop doing highway driving in EV mode.  One of the nicest surprises of the Prius Prime is that the EV side of it was more than adequate to do highway driving.  So my habit was simply to run down the battery, no matter what the trip was.  And if that meant getting on the interstate in EV mode, no problem.  But I see in forums for other PHEVs that highway driving in EV mode is discouraged, owing to high battery drain.  So from now on, if we’re on the highway, we’ll be burning gasoline.

Second, I’m going to punch the EV Auto button every time I get in the car.  Arguably the least-well explained controls on the Prius Prime are the three buttons that determine mode-of-propulsion.  (This next bit will only make sense to Prime owners).

  • The one on the left is for pedal feel.  Ignore it for this post.
  • The one in the middle lets you choose to lock the car into EV mode, or into standard Prius Hybrid mode.  (Labeled as EV/HV mode.)
  • The one on the far right lets the car choose which mode is best.  (Confusingly labeled as EV Auto mode).

Again, I should have known better.  With all things Prius the right answer is always “let the car decide what to do”.  In “EV Auto” mode, the car will kick on the gas engine under higher loads, and so forth, as it sees fit.  Avoiding high loads on the battery should be good for longevity.

For whatever reason, Toyota makes EV Mode the unchangeable default at startup.  (Plausibly, because they knew their customers were a bunch of eco-nerds like me.)  So from now on, punching the EV Auto button after hitting start is going to be SOP.

Third, I’ve bought a countdown timer to prevent the battery from charging to 100%.  The owner’s manual offers some mostly-lame advice on extending battery life.  But one useful thing it suggests is to use the charge scheduling function so that the car is fully charged just before you use it.  The inference (actually a well-known phenomenon) is that leaving a lithium-ion battery in a high state-of-charge puts wear-and-tear on it.  We have no fixed schedule, so I’m going to do the next best thing.  Based on state-of-charge when we park the car, I’m going to dial in all but the last hour of required charging.  At that point, I’ll either typically use the car starting from 80% charged, or be smart enough to plug in an hour before I intend to use it.

Conclusion, and loophole, defined.

Anyway, it all boils down to a loophole.

If you buy a hybrid, with a battery warranty, you know what that means. It’s black-and-white.  It means the battery has to be in good enough shape to run that hybrid.  On a Prius, when the hybrid battery fails, the car is un-driveable.  Hence, a 100,000 mile warranty on the hybrid battery was easily understood.

If you buy an EV, with a battery warranty, you know that that means, even it it isn’t as crystal-clear as for a hybrid.  It means that the manufacturer will replace the battery if your loss-of-range exceeds a clearly stated amount.

But if you buy a combination EV-hybrid — a PHEV — your warranty gets lost in the cracks.  You buy it for the EV, but you only get a hybrid’s worth of warranty on the battery.  If the battery fails so badly that the car won’t run as a hybrid, they’ll replace it.  Otherwise, tough luck.

And not only did I not realize that, not only was that hugely unclear from Toyota’s promotional materials, but I’ve been driving the car as if that 150,000 mile warranty meant that Toyota expected that much usable PHEV life out of the car.  When, in fact, that’s just not true.

Not that I think Toyota would have made an inferior product.  But when Toyota said that they expect the battery to last the life of the car, I mistakenly thought that meant the PHEV functionality would last the life of the car.  Which I now seriously doubt.

So I’ve gone from a false sense of certainty, as to how this car will perform in the future, to a high degree of uncertainty about it.  Doesn’t mean its going to run like a three-legged dog at 100K miles.  But it might.  Which would be very un-Toyota-like, in my experience.

I should have known better.  It was the worst sort of magical thinking.

I was living in an eco-Fool’s paradise.  And that changes today.

Post #1700: COVID, fading in most parts of the country

 

In a little over a week, reported daily new cases in the U.S. fell from 15/100k/day to 12/100k/day.

That said, CDC still reports about 550 COVID-19 deaths per day, and over 4000 COVID-19 hospitalizations per day.

Which is a bit odd, if you think about it.

But if you stare at the CDC website long enough, it sure looks like COVID-19 is increasingly becoming a disease of the oldest old, or, at least, a reportable disease of the oldest old.  Which would nicely reconcile the bits of data above.

Details follow.

Continue reading Post #1700: COVID, fading in most parts of the country

Post #1698: Razor-blade longevity test, the redo

 

This post replaces all my prior posts on extending the life of a razor blade.  Because, I think I goofed.

Based on my most recent analysis:

Whatever it is that dulls a razor blade, short of abuse that puts big nicks in the blade, you can’t see it under a low-magnification microscope.  Blades that appear perfectly sharp, and (by measurement) retain their full width, can, nevertheless, be too dull to remove your beard.  I have no idea why.

The ONLY test for whether a razor blade remains sharp and usable is to shave with it.  Neither examining it with a low-power (USB) microscope, nor testing it with a home-made sharpness tester, provided useful information on how well a blade would shave.

Of the three things commonly cited on the internet, for extending the life of a razor blade, I now believe that:

  1. Softening your beard prior to shaving is critical for razor blade life.
  2. Drying off your razor blade — even a stainless steel blade — is necessary to keep it from dulling prematurely.
  3. Once it goes dull, there’s nothing you can do.  Stropping a dull stainless steel blade does not return it to a usable state.

Number 2 is a change from my prior posts, and that’s really the key point of this post.

Edit:  And I now know why:  Water spots.  A calcium carbonate deposit (a.k.a., water spot) is much thicker than the edge of a razor.  Tested and confirmed by comparing distilled water to tap water, Post #1699.

The upshot is, if you use shaving cream or (arguably) a high-end shaving soap, and dry your blade after each use, you’ve done your due diligence to get the most out of your razor blade or disposable shaver.  Whether more extreme measures add to that — keeping the blade stored in oil, freezing it, or whatnot — would require more analysis.

A recap and a bit of detail follows.

Recap

I’m trying to determine whether any of the suggestions for extending blade life, commonly found on the internet, actually work.

I boiled this down to:

  • Dry your blade
  • Strop your blade
  • Soften your beard.

I wanted to be as objective as possible, so I tried to avoid rating blades based on how the shave felt, figuring, there’s a lot of subjective leeway in that.  Instead, I was going to rely on how the looked, and how sharp they appeared to be, based on a home-made sharpness tester.

In hindsight, that was a mistake.  Appearance was an adequate way to judge blades if they were thoroughly abused.  But for blades that have not been abused — without visible nicks or erosion in the edge — it turns out that a sharp, usable blade looks just like a dull, unusable one.

Results.

Soften your beard/lubricate your face:  CONFIRMED

If nothing else, this razor blade test has broken me of a life-long bad shaving habit.  I shave(d) with soap.  Most recently I’ve been using Dove, because that’s supposed to have more emollients in it and be generally nicer to your skin.

And, not unrelated, I’d typically get three shaves out of a blade before I got the urge to replace it.  Maybe five, at the outside.  But by the time I got through that fifth shave, it required multiple passes of the blade and, basically, it hurt.

For this final test, I decided to shave half my face using Dove soap, and half with Barbasol.  The main active ingredient in Barbasol is stearic acid.  That’s the same as the main fat in coconut oil, and it is frequently recommended as a beard softening agent.

From the first shave, it was absolutely clear that shaving with Barbasol was a lot better than shaving with soap.  In the end, I got ten decent shaves with Barbasol, versus a typical 3 to 5 shaves with soap. 

That one is case closed, as far as I’m concerned.  I’d conservatively say that using Barbasol easily doubles blade life, relative to shaving with Dove soap.

If you want a more in-depth dive into the ingredients of shaving cream and shaving soap, see Post #1668.

Strop your stainless steel blade:  Busted

Stropping means running the blade “backward” — opposite the direction of cutting — over some suitable material.  The idea is to polish and hone the very final edge of the razor’s edge.

The practice of stropping razor blades to re-sharpen them disappeared just about the same time that stainless steel blades (above) took over the market.  I strongly suspect that this was cause-and-effect.  Stainless razor blades are just too hard (or wear resistant, take your pick) for stropping to have much effect.  I went through this in the historical perspective on stropping, Post #1689.

I have now tried all of the following, and none of it resulted in restoring a dull blade to usable status.  I.e., from the standpoint of shaving, none of this sharpened a stainless steel blade:

  • Stropping on a leather strop, blade held in razor.
  • Stropping by rubbing on the inside of a plain water glass.
  • Stropping by rubbing on the inside of a curved borosilicate glass.
    • Low curvature (measuring cup)
    • Higher curvature (oil lamp chimney base)
    • High curvature (oil lamp chimney top)
  • Stropping on borosilicate glass, with abrasive metal cleaner
  • Stropping using a standard carbon-steel knife steel.
  • Stropping using a commercial leather strop plus green “compound”.

None of that seemed to make the least bit of difference in how well the blade shaved.  In particular, using an actual commercial leather strop and compound, 30 strops, did nothing to restore a blade to usability.

Finally, literally sharpening a blade — removing significant amounts of material from the blade edge — destroys its usability.  It makes it too narrow for the safety razor, and it then leaves stubble instead of cutting cleanly.

Stropping, steeling, sharpening, and so on.  Total bust.

Dry your razor after use.  I’ll be damned.

 

For this one, I cooked up a fairly elaborate experiment to show that nothing happened to stainless steel blades if you leave them wet.  I took six blades (three new, three used), kept one edge wet for a week (either continuously, or dunked in water once a day), and kept the other edge dry.

And, by eye, there was absolutely no difference, under a low-powered microscope, between the wet and dry edges.  There was no difference in sharpness, based on my crude sharpness tester.  So I originally concluded that drying a stainless blade after every use is unnecessary.

Then the stropping experiment finally ended, I put a different razor blade in my razor.  This was one of my test blades above, and I expected it to shave like a new blade.

Well, I was half right.  One side shave just like a new blade.  The other side was so dull as to be unusable.

When I pulled it out of the razor, the unusable side was the one that had been dipped in water a few times a day, for a week, and left to dry at room temperature.

So, I’ll be damned.  I can think of no other explanation for this, other than, failing to dry off that blade, for what amounts to a couple of week’s worth of dunking, left it dull.

I may look a little more carefully at this.  I want to repeat that.  And some people say that extreme measures can preserve blade life even further.  Others claim that the dulling is due to build-up of minerals on the blade, from hard water.  So I may want to look at all of that.

But as of right now, for reasons that I absolutely cannot fathom, it appears that you do, in fact, need to dry off a stainless blade to keep a sharp edge on it.  Or, at least, failing to do that will dull the edge.

I have no clue why that is.  I’m only attesting that, based on a sample of one blind shave with one carefully-treated blade, that appears to be true.

Anyway, dry off your stainless steel blade.  Apparently confirmed.

Edit: See next post for the explanation.  It has nothing to do with rust or oxidation of a stainless-steel blade.   Post #1699.

Post #1697: Can this marriage be saved?

 

Marriage.  Crap.  Pile o’ shit.  Ex-furniture.  Late mid-century-modern TV chair.

This thing, or, more properly, these things:

This is what’s left of two American-made, walnut, totally “moderne” TV chairs, likely dating to around 1970.  There are famous and expensive examples of this type of furniture.  But I suspect this was “Sears Better” from the period.

The back story is that I moved into a little 1950s house in Vienna VA in 1993.  The sole criterion was that I could walk to the Metro, as my job was in downtown DC.

Across the street was a nice couple, him retired military, her his wife.  Colonel Pike was a force to be reckoned with.  After a snowstorm, I’ve never seen a sidewalk shoveled with such precision.  I can still recall what must have been this 80-year-old guy, walking around on the roof of his house, fixing this and that.  Adjusting the weather vane in the shape of a golfer.

As a guy, I occasionally did roof maintenance myself.  But, at that age, tromping around on his roof?  Simultaneously macho, admirable, and batshit crazy.  It gave me the willies watching him.  I don’t doubt that at 80 he was more than my roof-top equal at the time.  Yet I cannot even guess how his wife felt about this.

As time wore on, I got in the habit of shoveling our neighbor’s sidewalk as I shoveled my own.   Including Colonel Pike’s.  No doubt, not to his standards, but you do what you can.

Eventually, cancer got him.  I believe it was leukemia.  I clearly recall him saying that.  So no doubt he faced up to it.

My wife caught up with Mrs. Pike, at some point, just kind of sobbing while standing on the sidewalk. My wife did what she could.  I cannot imagine the depth of that love.  Lost without her life-long partner.

But let’s put that aside, guy-style.

The point here is the mounds of possessions that got taken to the street, as Mrs. Pike planned to move to Texas, to live near her daughter.

That was Döstädning.  Swedish death cleaning.  Though I did not know the term at the time.

My son, with an eye for treasure, picked these two chairs off the pile.  We used them for years, but 40-year-old fabric and foam just didn’t stand up to a bunch of kids crawling all over them.  In the end, the foam broke down, the fabric ripped, my son made one valiant attempt to de-construct what was left.

And what you see above is the result.

Now I’m retired, with way too much time on my hands.  I’m going to try to put these back together.   Not exactly as they were before.  But in the same spirit, as “TV loungers”, or whatever.

We’ll see how it goes.

They say that retirees need hobbies to keep them busy.  As a former small-business owner, all I can say is, screw that.  I’m just not motivated to turn my time and treasure into low-valued objects.

But reconstructing an interesting artifact from the past?   Yeah, I guess I can get on board with that.  So here goes.  Furniture Restoration 101.

Post #1696: An historical note on the current Xbox kerfuffle

 

A well-known energy hog of long standing

When the recent manufactured controversy over the Microsoft Xbox hit the papers, it resonated with me.

Probably 15 years ago, we bought a gaming console for our kids.  (For the kids, of course, because we adults would never consider wasting time playing video games.)

We bought a Nintendo Wii.  Not due to the quality of the gaming, but because the Wii console used about one-fifth the energy of the Xbox and similar alternatives.  (Ask me what screen I finally got to on Wii Tanks.)  The Wii had a lot of other interesting features — not the least of which was the Mii parade above.  But the main reason I picked it was that it had a vastly lower carbon footprint than the alternatives at the time.

At the time, the characterization of Xbox energy use was that leaving an Xbox running was like leaving your fridge door wide open.  It literally used as much power as the typical American fridge.

That does not appear to have changed in the past couple of decades.  Exactly how much energy a gaming console uses depends on what you’re doing. But it’s clear that running a graphics-intensive game, on an Xbox, and using some modest-sized display, could easily consume 300 watts.  

Here’s a site with a nice table showing typical ranges of energy consumption for home gaming consoles.  In particular, they have a nice table for the PS4, showing that the difference between letting the machine run, unused, and putting it on standby, is about 85 watts.  That matches my recollection for the Xbox.

And, doing just the tiniest bit of math, if you let that game console run at idle all the time (i.e., showing the menu), that will cost you about 750 KWH per year, compared to powering it down to standby mode.  That 750 KWH is, in fact, more than the average U.S. fridge, per year.

The upshot is that, as I recalled, if you don’t enforce turning your Xbox off, but instead just leave it idling, the additional electricity cost is more than the cost of running a refrigerator.

What did Microsoft actually just do?  Sleep versus Shutdown, or about 130 KWH per year in energy savings.

As is typical with modern news-righteousness, everybody seems to start yelling before you can get a clear picture of what just happened.

If you want a clear explanation, start here.

At issue is the difference between Sleep mode (with instant-on), and Shutdown mode (where it takes about 15 seconds for the Xbox to reboot).  Just as with your laptop, one of those keeps everything in memory, keeps memory warm, and uses more power.   The other one writes things off to storage, then more-or-less turns the machine off.

Sleep consumes perhaps 15 watts, while shutdown mode consumes just 0.5 watts. Which doesn’t sound like much, but for an Xbox continuously plugged in, the 15 watt Sleep mode consumes about 130 KWH per year more than the 0.5 watt Shutdown mode.

Just FYI, that’s enough electricity to power my wife’s Prius Prime for about 750 city miles of driving.  At the prices I pay in Virginia, that’s about $15 worth of electricity per year.

In the past, Sleep was the default mode.  But starting in March 2022, Microsoft change the default to Shutdown, rather than Sleep, for newly-manufactured units.  So, to be clear, this new default has been in place for almost a year, on newly-purchased units.

The current controversy arose because Microsoft is updating the software on older Xbox units to make them match the standard that has been in place for about a year, for new units.  That is, they are going to make Shutdown the default.

Users can override that if they wish.

In my experience, you don’t scrape the bottom of the barrel until the barrel is empty.

I don’t know how the party of Teddy Roosevelt ended up being the pro-energy-consumption party.  But that seems to characterize the Republican party today.  Coal is good.  Renewables are bad.  Energy use is good.  Energy conservation is bad.

At root, this is a controversy about a manufacturer choosing to make the software on older gaming consoles match the software that it has put on consoles manufactured for the past year.  Mainly, this changed the default “off” setting from Sleep to Shutdown, which I calculate should save about 130 KWH per year per unit.

Near as I can tell, Microsoft updates the software on my computer any damn time it pleases.  And I actually depend on the computer to get along in the real world.  How on earth this update to gaming-console software became such a cause célèbre among the Right, I cannot even begin to fathom.

But, ultimately, I think it’s a good sign.  If that’s the biggest thing they have to complain about, then things must be going pretty well.

Post #1694: COVID cases stable, but vary widely across areas.

 

I’m going to continue to check in on the rate of newly diagnosed COVID-19 cases, from time to time.  It’s unchanged from a couple of weeks ago, at 15 new cases per 100K population per day.

Per the CDC, we’re seeing about 550 COVID-19 deaths per day, and about 4500 COVID-19 hospitalizations per day.  The deaths number is up quite a bit from a few months ago, but winter is hard on the frail elderly.  My take on it is that COVID now sits alongside various forms of pneumonia as a common terminal illness for the oldest old.

The only other thing of note is that there’s a lot of variation across the states. A lot of the Rocky Mountain states are in the neighborhood of 5 /100K / day, a lot of the East Coast is still around 20 / 100K / day.  No idea if that’s real or just variation in propensity to test.

I have rebased my graphs to being with 1/1/2023.

 

Data source for this and other graphs of new case counts:  Calculated from The New York Times. (2021). Coronavirus (Covid-19) Data in the United States. Retrieved 1/24/2023, from https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data.”  The NY Times U.S. tracking page may be found at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html

The U.S. flu season continues to fade.  The CDC flu map is now mostly green.

Source:  CDC fluview