Author: chogan@directresearch.com

Post G22-027: Using 1/2″ dripline for low-pressure (water barrel) irrigation

 

It works.   It’s a little slow.  But it clearly works.  The flow rates above are per foot of 1/2″ dripline, hooked up to a water barrel.  This particular dripline was rated for 1 gallon/foot/hour @ 25 PSI.

Background.

In my just-prior gardening post (G22-026), I found out just how easy it is to set up drip irrigation.   In less than two hours, I set up drip irrigation for about 400 square feet of garden, divided into four beds.

As described in that post, I used 1/2″ drip line, connected to municipal (high-pressure) water. It was a snap to put together, and it works like a charm.

Blessed relief.  Instead of hauling buckets of water, I turn on the tap.

My only regret is that I couldn’t use that with my existing rain barrels.  The drip line is designed to deliver one gallon per foot per hour, at at pressure of 25 pounds per square inch (PSI).  A system engineered for that pressure surely wasn’t going to work with the 1 PSI water pressure generated by a water barrel.

Or so I thought.

Experimental data.  Accept no substitutes.

I’ve only been a serious gardener for three seasons now.  But one of the first lessons I learned is that a lot of what gets passed off as advice for the home gardener is simply untested and untrue folklore. 

In this blog, I’ve taken pains to test something before repeating it.  The idea being that amateur science beats no science at all.  Hence, I can tell you that (e.g.) poly sheeting is all-but-useless for frost protection, but mason jars provide excellent frost protection.   Not because I read that somewhere, but because I both tested it and can explain why it’s so (Posts G22-005 through G22-008).

Today I’m testing whether I can use 1/2″ dripline for low-pressure (water-barrel) irrigation.  To do that, I’m going to measure the output of that 1/2″ dripline when it’s hooked up to a water barrel. 

Here’s the setup.  That’s a water barrel on a cinder block, 50′ of 1/2″ dripline (rated for one gallon/foot/hour @ 25 PSI), and three Dixie cups.  Plus some bricks to hold it all in place.  Not shown is the kitchen measuring cup use to measure the output.

The experiment consisted of hooking the dripline up to the water barrel.  Letting it drip for 15 minutes.  Then measuring how much water was captured in Dixie cups placed at 1, 25, and 50 pipe-feet away from the water barrel.

The results are tabulated at the start of this posting.  For me, that’s a more-than-adequate and more-than-adequately-uniform water output.  Which means that all I need to do to convert my existing high-pressure irrigation system to low-pressure (water barrel) use is … hook it up to the water barrels and let it run all day.  It will be easy enough to tell how much water I’ve put on the garden just by measuring the drop in the water level in the barrels.

Sometimes a (moving) picture is worth 1000 words.  Click the link below to see a brief video clip showing how rapidly drops emerge from the dripline at 1 PSI.  As soon as I saw this stream of drops, I knew this adequate for use in irrigating the garden.

 

 

Post #1548, the electric charging sequel

There ought to be a law.

Source:  myparkingsign.com

Yesterday I ranted about the disorderly situation for public car-charging stations.

You’d think that you could drive up, swipe your credit card, plug your car in, and buy some fuel at a known price.  Just like at the gas pump.  I mean, how hard could that be?  And you’d think that drivers of non-electric vehicles wouldn’t park in the car charging spaces, either by law or out of a sense of live-and-let-live.

But based on my recent experience, nothing written above is true.  My first experience with a public car charger was a machine with no instructions and no posted prices.  It had balky hardware and/or software  that gave us multiple false starts before we actually got the charger to work. Kind of.

And there was a proudly gas-guzzling truck parked in one of the two available charging spots despite a nearly empty parking lot.

But, on the bright side, apparently I’m not the only person to have run across a non-electric car blocking an EV charging spot.  To the point where laws are being enacted to prohibit that.

My wife pointed out this recent change in Virginia law.  As of today (July 1, 2022), in Virginia, it’s illegal for a non-electric car to park in a marked EV charging space:

"Parking at Electric Vehicle Charging Stations 

Parking vehicles not capable of receiving an electric charge in a space clearly marked for charging electric vehicles is now prohibited, and subject to a civil penalty of nor more than $25. (HB 450)

Source:  Fairfax County Government website.

And, she further notes that as of October 1, 2022 Maryland will so something similar:

Electric Vehicle (EV) Parking Space Regulation

Beginning October 1, 2022, individuals may not stop, stand, or park a vehicle in a designated EV charging space unless it is an EV that is actively charging. Violators may be subject to a fine of $100.

EV charging spaces must have signage that indicates the charging space is only for EV charging, day or time restrictions, states maximum violation fine, and is consistent with design and placement specifications in the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices for Streets and Highways. EV charging spaces count toward the total minimum parking space requirements for zoning and parking laws.

Source:  U.S. Department of Energy

Thus, in Virginia and Maryland, it looks like EV charging spots have (or will soon have) the same sort of legal treatment as (e.g.) handicapped parking spots.  There’s a uniform state-wide requirement barring you from parking in those spots if you don’t qualify to use them.

But Delaware — where we tried to charge our car — appears to have no such laws on the books.   And, as far as I can tell, neither does the District of Columbia.

In those states, by contrast, any restriction on blocking the use of an EV charging station would be at the discretion of the owner of the property where that station is located.  In the same way that the owner of a parking lot can post “No parking, towing enforced” and tow away cars, presumably any rules against blocking access to EV charging spots would be privately enforced.

Shockingly expensive, to boot

The other big surprise to me was the cost of using these public charging stations.  Based on the few places in Ocean City MD where the hourly rates for charging were posted, our level-2 charging (240 volts) would have cost anywhere from $0.50 to maybe $1.25 per kilowatt-hour.  That compares to somewhere around $0.12 per KWH for residential energy use in Virginia (reference).

The lowest rate we observed — 50 cents per KWH — makes electricity as expensive a fuel as gasoline.  Based on the EPA ratings for the Prius Prime (for miles-per-gallon and miles-per-KWH), electricity at 50 cents per KWH costs as much per mile as gasoline at just over $5 per gallon.

(YMMV.  Literally.  Note that the standard of comparison above is the efficient Atkinson-engine Prius.  If, by contrast, you would otherwise be driving a standard (Otto-cycle) non-hybrid, your gasoline cost per mile would be higher.

Let me use the 2018 VW Golf as an example, because that came in an electric and standard gas model.  Fueleconomy.gov lists those as getting 28 KWH per 100 miles, or 3.6 gallons of gas per 100 miles.  Doing the math, $0.50 per KWH costs you the same as gasoline at $3.90 per gallon.  Or, if gas at $5 a gallon, you break even if you pay no more than $0.64 per KWH.)

But no matter how you slice it, the whole notion of big cost savings from electrical transport goes right out the door if you’re paying an appreciable fraction of a dollar per KWH.

So I’m left wondering whether the high prices observed in and around Ocean City, MD were merely a result of being in a resort town.  Or whether we were paying more because of the slow (level 2) rate-of-charge (which means we occupy the charging slot for a long time, to receive just a modest amount of electricity).  Or whether that’s the norm, suggesting that it really is that costly to deliver electricity to a car in that fashion?

It only took a bit of internet search to find that the 50-cents-per-KWH charge is not out of line with prices elsewhere.   And I’m starting to get some hints at some reasons this market is so screwy.

Electrify America runs a chain of charging stations, and they charge $0.43 per KWH for level-2 charging, per their website.

But that’s only in locations where they are allowed to charge per KWH.  Because, in some states, the only entity that can sell electricity is the public utility.  In those states, electric car chargers have to price by the minute, not by the KWH.  Electrify America charges $0.03 per minute for level 2 charging.  Because a Prius Prime charges at a rate of just about 3 KWH per hour (the actual rate varies over the course of the charge), with per-minute charging, that’s about $0.60 per KWH for a Prius Prime receiving a level-2 charge.

Blink charging quotes rates ranging from per $0.39 to $0.79 per KWH, per their website.  But, as with Electrify America, in states where they are not allowed to charge per KWH, they charge per minute, where the highest cited rate ($0.03 per half-minute) would cost about $1.20 per KWH for level-2 charging of a Prius Prime.

I think that’s enough to tell me that the pricing we observed in Ocean City is not out of line with prices elsewhere.  It’s also enough to tell me that more-or-less the entire fuel cost savings from electrical transport vanishes if your only charging option is a public charging station.  If your only access to charging is at five-to-ten-times the residential rate per KWH, chances are that your per-mile fuel cost for electrical transport exceeds that of the equivalent gas-powered transport.

 

 

Post #1458: Eco-bore

 

People Instagram a picture of what they had for lunch.  Or TikTok footage of themselves dancing solo.  Or unironically post a YouTube video on how to boil water.

Don’t even get me started on cat videos.

With that as context, I can post about the gas mileage in my wife’s Prius Prime.

Which was 67 MPG for the 145-mile trip back from Ocean City, MD this afternoon.  Not dogging it, either.  A chunk of that was flying down the Lexus lanes around DC, at 75 MPH and up.

Thus demonstrating that the 72 MPG on the way out to Ocean City (Post #1454) wasn’t the fluke I thought it was.

This, from a car that the EPA lists at 53 MPG on the highway.

On the one hand, MPG is not the smartest way to measure fuel consumption.  It exaggerates small differences.  In terms of gallons of fuel used, the difference between 53 (EPA), 67 (return trip), and 72 (outbound trip) MPG ain’t much.  Per 100 miles, it looks like this:

My incremental 27 tablespoons of savings (per 100 miles) on the outgoing trip pales compared to the eight trillion tablespoons of crude oil in the U.S. strategic petroleum reserve.

Yet it puts a smile on my face, no matter how much my savings is just so much pissing into the ocean.

Which, because I just came back from Ocean City, I will clearly state is simply a metaphor.

And yet …

And  yet, the on-the-road car recharge market is a total mess.

Hey, we were on vacation.   Our favorite destination store (Made By Hand, Bethany Beach Del) now had an electric car charger out front.  We were driving a car that could use a recharge.  I’d never used a commercial charging station before.  We had a lot of free time.

Seemed like a series of matches made in heaven.

What a mess.

The plug that goes into the car is standard.  So the engineers did their job.

Beyond that, I’d say that pretty much every other profession involved in this industry has screwed up to a greater or lesser degree.

Let me start with the asshole with the proudly gas-guzzling pickup who occupied one of the two EV charging slots.  In an almost-empty parking lot.  Clearly parked there on purpose.  Clearly parked there to deny use of the EV charger.

It was one of those Dodges (now, hahahaha, Fiats!) that advertises the displacement and configuration of the engine (7.3 hemi?).  I doubt that the average knuckle-dragger who drives one of those as his grocery-getter even knows what hemi is short for, or the long and proud history behind that engine configuration.

But I can assure you, as an early Prius adopter, there are a lot of insecure people out there who are threatened by changes in the car market.  Just as it was common to be harassed (e.g., tailgated) driving a hybrid in 2005, it now seems some people are threatened by electricity-driven transport.  (And yeah, it was true, there was a lot of anonymous hate directed at hybrid drivers back in the day.)

Suffice it to say that the aim of the Hemi is the opposite that of the Prius Atkinson engine.  Which is to say, the Hemi was developed to have a high power-to-weight ratio, at the expense of poor fuel economy.  Which makes the Hemi driver the natural enemy of the Prius driver. 

So that much, at least, made sense.  The asshole needlessly denying revenues to the private-sector concern offering charging services drove a pickup with (no doubt) great acceleration and power, but fer-shit gas mileage.   And perhaps was not all that happy with $5/gallon gasoline.

And so he squatted in that precious EV charging space.  Not for any benefit to himself.  There were plenty of space in the lot.  Just to own the libs, I guess?  But he didn’t have the guts to straddle the line and block both spaces.  So both a gas-guzzler and a coward.  Because he did only what he had a legal right to do.

And so, it appears that the purveyors of this charging station just assumed that good will would keep those slots open.  Not only is there no legally-enforceable restriction on parking there, there’s not even any signage suggesting that gas-only cars should park elsewhere.

These stupid lib-tards assumed that people would simply cooperate.  In America?  That because there’s no benefit for a gas-only car to park there, they assumed gas-only cars would leave those spots free for the electrically-powered cars that could use them.

Ha ha ha.  Hemi ha ha.  Idiots.  There’s a whole piece of the political spectrum that takes pleasure in owning the lib-tards.  And the lib-tards didn’t even consider putting up signage to discourage that.  Because they were stupid enough to assume good will on the part of the average American.

Let alone towing non-EVs out of those recharging spaces.  Which is, apparently, what it will take in that resort destination, to keep those charger spots free.

And  yet, the on-the-road car recharge market is a total mess.

OK, so ignoring the asshole in the black truck, blocking one EV charging space, we pulled into the space next to that.   And attempted to recharge the battery in my wife’s Prius Prime.

And we were faced with:

  • No indication of what recharging would cost.
  • Virtually zero instructions.
  • Malfunctioning credit-card reader.

But after numerous tries, it took my credit card, and let us do some level-2 charging (240 volts).

And yet, it still has not charged my credit card.  So … I guess that was free?

What?  When was the last time somebody required you to swipe a credit card, then didn’t charge you?  It’s hard even to characterize the degrees of incompetence involved in that.

But looking on the website for the parent company, the charging cost should have been more expensive than gasoline.  On a cost-per-mile basis. If they’d been competent enough actually to charge me what their website said was the rate for charging at one of their stations.  But instead, they let me charge, and then didn’t charge my credit card.

And that was true for most or possibly all the public charging stations in Ocean City, MD and environs.   Sure, you can recharge at a public station.  And per-mile, the resulting KWHs cost more than gasoline.   At least for my wife’s PHEV Prius Prime.

Anyway, I think I learned a lesson.  For now, at least.  I wanted a recharge so we could do our gadding-about-Ocean-City travel with a relatively low carbon footprint.

I now realize that the public-recharge market is such that this goal is not easily obtainable.  There’s just a whole lot of learning-curve, jerk-avoidance, cost-incurring turf that you have to negotiate.  All for the privilege of saving a few tablespoons of gasoline, in our otherwise efficient Prius.

On net, I’ll save the recharging for home, and run this as a straight-up gas vehicle when we’re on the road.

At some point, I suppose that whole public-charging market will straighten itself out.  But right now, it’s just not ready for Prime time.

 

 

Post #1455: COVID-19 trend to 6/27: Don’t panic … yet. Wait one more day.

 

There’s a big uptick in reported cases today, but it’s (pick one:  somewhat, mostly, kinda-sorta) due to the echoes of the Juneteenth holiday.  So, while it looks like we’re embarking on yet another wave of COVID cases, that’s not a certainty.  Yet.  This will be clearer tomorrow.

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 6/26/2022, 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

FWIW, I’m in Ocean City MD this week.  Near as I can tell, nobody under the age of 60 is wearing a mask in the grocery stores.  I assume that’s becoming the norm in most places now.

I can’t quite get my mind around the fact that we really should no longer expect any end to this.  Not with the high degree of “immune escape” of the most recent variants.

I just need to focus on the logic.  There’s a lot of COVID-19 in circulation, neither vaccine nor prior infection provides significant protection against a new COVID infection, and virtually nobody is taking precautions.  Once you absorb that, it doesn’t seem all that crazy that lots of infections but few hospitalizations and deaths is the new normal.

Post #1454: 72 MPG, why I truly don’t give a 💩 about high gasoline prices in the U.S.

The context

Source:  Calculated from Federal Reserve of St. Louis (FRED) data, series GASREGW (week, regular gasoline) and CPIAUCSL (CPI), accessed 6/26/2022.  This is the average U.S. price for a gallon of regular, in constant May 2022 dollars.

The price of gas appears to be peaking, at least for the short term.  Per the AAA, the price has fallen in the past week, in tandem with a drop in the price of oil.  Looks like the peak this time likely will be just under $5.02 per gallon of regular, as measured by the AAA on 6/14/2022. Continue reading Post #1454: 72 MPG, why I truly don’t give a 💩 about high gasoline prices in the U.S.

Post #1453: COVID-19, finishing the data week with an uptick in cases

 

The U.S. now stands at 32 new COVID-19 cases per 100K per day, up from 30 yesterday.  And 29 the day before that.  Maybe that’s a blip, but it’s a fairly widespread blip.  It might or might not be some unanticipated artifact of the recent Juneteenth holiday.

That said, it’s just another indication that this current Omicron wave doesn’t appear to be ending any time soon.  If that thought is insufficiently depressing, re-read the last portion of yesterday’s post.

Continue reading Post #1453: COVID-19, finishing the data week with an uptick in cases

Post #1542: COVID-19 to 6/23/2022, no peak in sight. Re-infection and a return-to-normalcy Catch 22.

 

I keep waiting for an end to this U.S. wave of COVID.  I keep being disappointed.  And now, I keep trying to get used to that.

The US is back to 30 new COVID-19 cases per 100K per day, more-or-less unchanged over the past seven days.  Unchanged for more than a month, when you get right down to it.

Continue reading Post #1542: COVID-19 to 6/23/2022, no peak in sight. Re-infection and a return-to-normalcy Catch 22.

Post #1541: COVID-19 trend to 5/22/2022, still 29/100K/day.

 

I expected the second U.S. Omicron wave to start trending downward today.  As you can see, that didn’t happen.   New cases per 100K per day is steady at 29, down 7% in the past seven days.

But, while this wave seems to be lingering beyond all reason, that doesn’t appear to be due to any change in the ability of COVID-19 to re-infect individuals.  At least, not since the original Omicron wave at the end of last year.  That’s my (possibly surprising) conclusion from looking at New York State data on COVID-19 reinfections as a percent of total infections.

Continue reading Post #1541: COVID-19 trend to 5/22/2022, still 29/100K/day.