Author: chogan@directresearch.com

Post G22-030: Joining pieces of floating row cover the easy way.

 

If you have ever needed to join two sheets of floating row cover, or other spun-bonded or non-woven porous plastic cloth, this post outlines the easy, skill-free way to do that.

In a nutshell:  Use fusible interfacing.

If you know what fusible interfacing is, you probably don’t need to read the rest of this.  The only pro tip is to use a damp pressing cloth, to avoid melting the floating row cover. 

For the rest of you, fusible interfacing is hot-melt fabric glue that comes in thin sheets.  Cut it to size, slip it between pieces of fabric to be joined, press briefly with an iron, and presto, the fabric pieces are joined.

My only value added in this post is in pointing out that this does, in fact, work quite well with floating row cover.  The only other method I’ve seen mentioned is to sew it, which strikes me as both a lot of skilled work, and likely subject to early failure.

Let me put two caveats up front.

First, this seam is strong enough to use, but it’s not as strong as a sewn seam when used on this thin plastic material.  If you stress it enough, you can pull those two pieces of plastic spun-bonded fabric apart.  So far, for me, it is holding up well in my intended use, which is as a cover for a hoop house.  But in that use, it’s just draped over a frame, not stretched taught.  This probably would not work well in an application where the cloth is stretched taught and stressed across the seam.

Second, a hot iron will most definitely melt floating row cover.  (Ask me how I know).  So place a thin, damp cloth over the fabric/interfacing  sandwich before pressing it.

Details follow.  But you’ve already read everything you need to know.

Here’s the end result below, once with the seam sitting flat, once with the seam standing up.  I am sure the floating row cover will fail before the seam will.

FWIW, I moseyed through ironing two 30-foot pieces of row cover together in about ten minutes.  Start-to-finish, it took me far longer to write this up than it took to do it.

Walking that fine line

Sometimes there’s a fine line between thrifty and stupid.  This project may well cross that line. But the facts in my case are the following:

  1. I own a gigantic roll of 8′ wide floating row cover.
  2. I need some that’s at least 12′ wide.
  3. I own an entire bolt of fusible interfacing

Why I own an entire bolt of fusible interfacing, I do not know.  Must have had a reason for it, at some point.  But at this point, it’s been sitting with my sewing stuff so long it’s like an old friend.  I’ll probably be a little sad if I ever finally use it up.

It’s this sort of thing that caused my wife to revoke my Costco membership.

Source:  JoAnn Fabrics

In any case, fusible interfacing is cheap.  I cut mine into 5″ strips, but surely a strip a couple of inches wide would be adequate.  At full retail, above, that’s  $1.29 worth of fusible interfacing, to join two 10-yard pieces of floating row cover.

As long as this works, and doesn’t take a lot of time, I think that puts me on the thrift side of the line.

A few notes on the process.

Tools

As shown above, the only tools you need are

  • an ironing board
  • an iron
  • a pair of scissors
  • a thin, damp cotton cloth.  (A handkerchief or bandana would be ideal.)

The ironing board is optional but makes this a lot easier.  It holds stuff at the right height, it allows the material to glide over it, it’s padded just right for ironing.  In short, it’s the thing that was designed to make ironing easier.  If you lack an ironing board, a towel on a table can be used as the base for your ironing.

The iron should be set to steam, if you have that setting.  Otherwise, set it about halfway between its lowest and highest setting.  The interfacing itself just says “use a hot iron”, so the setting is not critical.  Anything that will melt the glue but not the fabric is OK.

A hot iron will melt floating row cover in no time flat.  That’s why you must use some sort of cover, and why I suggest using a thin damp cloth on top of the assembly to be ironed.  That both presses steam into the cloth, ensuring even heating, and limits the temperature to somewhere around 212F (100C).

Materials handling.

Here’s the trick:  Keep it neat.

It doesn’t matter whether you have additional layers of floating row cover in the stack of material to be ironed.  Just insert the fusible interfacing between the two pieces that you wish to glue together.  So if your row cover comes folded over — leave it that way, and handle it that way.

In my case, the 8′ floating row cover came folded over, on the 4′ long roll.  I left it that way.  I unrolled the length I needed (30′), put a weight on the fabric, unrolled another 30′ back in the direction I started from, and then cut that (total-of) 60′ piece off the roll.

The result was a single, neat, 4′ wide stack of four layers of floating row cover.  Two long folded-over pieces, on top of each other.  In cross-section, it’s like two “U”s on top of each other, with the open sides of both “U”s on the same side.

My goal is to glue together layers 2 and 3, along the open side of the U.  Just as they lie.

If you know anything at all about sewing, you are probably appalled at the thought of making a seam this way.   That is, just by gluing two flat pieces of cloth together as they lay on top of each other.

You’ve probably got an urge to do something that’s stronger, like trying to make a lapped or French seam.  Ignore that urge.  Floating row cover is a beast to handle in this circumstance.  Trying to align large pieces of it, to form any sort of fancy seam, is just asking for trouble.

Just keep it simple.

  1. Take your rolled-up pieces of row cover
  2. Unroll enough to cover the ironing board, with the edge to be glued facing you.
  3. Let the excess fall off the ironing board.
  4. Peel back the top layer(s) and place a strip of fusible interfacing between the layers you want to glue together.  I used strips about 5′ wide, but that’s clearly overkill.
  5. Straighten it up and iron it, with the thin damp cloth on top.  It only takes a second or two for any area, and you only need a light pressure.  If you are unsure of yourself, stop, let it cool for 15 seconds, and test the bond by pulling on it.
  6. Pull fresh material onto the ironing board and repeat.

Take care that the fusible interfacing is ENTIRELY COVERED by the two pieces of that you want glued together.  Whatever it touches, it will glue together.  You can be as sloppy as you want, as long as you don’t accidentally glue together anything other than the two pieces that you want to glue together.

At this point, I think I’ve driven it into the ground.  The only real point is to keep the floating row cover as neat and compact as possible.  Don’t unfold it, roll it up before you move it, and so on.  And mind that the fusible interfacing is not sticking out where you don’t want it.

Extras for experts.

I only used this to create one long seam, but the same technique would work to create a more complex shape.  Any sort of a cover that you could sew, you can create from floating row cover and fusible interfacing.  So, for example, I could fuse a couple of seams perpendicular to the long seam and make a tent-like shape.  And so on.

I am confident that this would work with any porous spun-bonded or non-woven fabric.  As I understand it, fusible interfacing works well because you get a physical bond, as you press the glue through the fibers of the fabric.  This is what allows you to join, with confidence, a low-surface-energy material (poly-whatever-plastic) that would be all-but-impossible to glue up if it were in the form of solid sheets.

That said, I have not literally tried this with Tyvek or similar non-woven fabric.  My guess is that as long as there is a fibrous (as opposed to slick) surface to the fabric, this would work.  But, duly noted, I have not actually done the experiment.  For sure, fusible interface works with just about any traditional (woven, sewable) fabric used in making clothing.

Addendum:  A rebar lesson learned

To use this floating row cover, I had to cut up one 10′ piece of rebar.  Turns out, unless you want to lay out some cash, that’s not quite as easy as most internet sources will suggest.  They’ll tell you all the ways you can (possibly) cut rebar.  Many of which are reasonably cost-effective if you’re going to cut up a ton of rebar.  They won’t really focus on what it’ll cost you if you don’t happen to own the right tool already, and you just want to cut up one piece.

For me, the cost-effective solution was a hacksaw with brand-new blades.  That’s blades, plural.

I should start with what I’m using this for.  This is for my attempt to grow  parthenocarpic cucumbers and summer squash under insect-proof netting (Post G22-013).  Which, in turn, is my way of dodging last year’s plague of cucumber beetles and squash vine borers.

Here’s one of the two hoop-house enclosures that I hope will keep out the squash vine borer and cucumber beetle.  Note the visible seam between the two pieces of floating row cover, created by the fusible-interfacing method outlined above.

The construction of this is standard.  For two hoops, pound four short pieces of rebar part-way into the ground.  Then bow two pieces of 10′ piece of 3/4″ PVC pipe and slip the ends over the protruding pieces of rebar.

I (of course) bought rebar in the cheapest form possible.  In my case, that was 10-foot-long pieces of #3 (3/8″) rebar.  I could have bought it pre-cut, but at a much higher price per foot.

I owned several tools that plausibly would cut 3/8″ rebar, so I figured, hey, I’ll just cut it when I get it home.

Well.

That was when I identified all the tools I owned that either wouldn’t cut #3 rebar or cut it so slowly it would take all day.  These included:

  • Bolt cutters, 24″ — too small to cut the rebar.
  • Jigsaw:  too slow (probably the metal-cutting blade was already dull).
  • Dremel tool with metal cutoff wheel — too slow..

Circular saw? I didn’t want to invest in a $25 metal-cutting blade, to cut up one $6 piece of rebar.

Angle grinder?  I don’t own an angle grinder.  And, as it turns out, looks like all the cheap ones specifically say NOT to use a flat metal cutoff disk.  So I really didn’t feel like investing $100+ in a new, higher end (and dangerous) tool, just to cut up one $6 piece of rebar.

Hacksaw with a dull blade?  No go.

Hacksaw with a brand new carbon-steel blade?  Bingo.  Cut halfway through the bar, then bend it to snap it.  First cut was easy, second was OK, third was work.  Then toss the blade and put in a new one.  I could feel and hear the blade going dull over the course of three cuts.

The upshot is that a hacksaw will work fine, as long as you have a sharp blade.  It’s not even hard work.  But if you use cheap carbon-steel blades, expect to get maybe three cuts per blade.  And if your blade is dull, this basically won’t work at all.

Bottom line:  You can easily cut rebar with a hacksaw and a new, sharp blade.  But the cost of the hacksaw blades used may well offset the savings from buying a single long piece of rebar and cutting it at home.  I’ve since bought a pack of better bi-metallic blades, but I have no idea (yet) of how many cuts you get with a higher-quality blade.

Post #1550: A recent Washington Post article on research about food.

There was an article in the Washington Post yesterday, Diet soda is fine, and 3 other food truths it’s time you believed, by Tamar Haspel.

I believe it’s the first and only time I’ve seen the phrase “observational study” in a popular press article.  I was so impressed I wrote a lengthy comment.

Which, because I have nothing better to blog about today, I’m reproducing below.  Obviously, you should at least skim the article if you want to make sense of the comment.

…

On your first point, this is also the reason poor people eat a poor diet. Try planning a month’s worth of meals at the current SNAP limit of $194 a month. You — like poor people everywhere — will find yourself loading up on starch, sugar, and fat, and skipping the fruits and vegetables. Rice at $0.60/lb provides about twenty times as many calories per dollar as apples at $2/lb.

(Highest calories/dollar among grocery-store items? Vegetable oil. Fried food, anybody?)

Second, bless you for using the phrase “observational study” in a news article. I was a health economist by trade, and if there were one little bit of understanding that I wish I could spread, it’s that not all “science” is created equal. Randomized controlled trials sit at the top of the heap, in terms of their strength of inference. Observational studies sit at the bottom. (“Natural experiments” of various sorts sit in-between).

Whenever you see the results of a study, the first thing to ask is whether or not it was a randomized trial. Hint: Almost no studies of diet are randomized trials. And if not, then is there a plausible alternative explanation of the facts, e.g., fat people drink diet soda, instead of diet soda makes you fat?

Finally, I note the absolutely toxic interaction between the frequently false and counterintuitive “findings” of observational studies, and the modern media’s thirst for click-bait. This virtually guarantees that every oddball and counterintuitive (and wrong) conclusion by every half-baked academic researcher will be hyped. And that any actual science — which by-and-large tends to show boring things, e.g., weight loss is all about restricting calorie intake — gets buried under an avalanche of pseudoscientific nonsense.

Post G22-029: Ground cherries.

 

My advice on growing ground cherries?  Don’t bother.

X-ray specs and sea monkeys.

This year I’m trying a few new plants in the garden.  For whatever reason, ground cherries caught my eye.  They seemed easy to grow, and the idea of growing something sweet in the garden was appealing.

If you look at the seed catalogues, you’ll see piles of beautiful ripe fruit.  You’ll see the fruit described as “about the size of a cherry tomato”.   You’ll hear the flavor likened to, e.g., pineapple.

And X-ray specs let you see the bones in your hands.  And sea monkeys provide endless amusement.

I bought some some seeds for Cossack Pineapple ground cherries, sprouted them, and transplanted the seedlings to the garden without incident.  They grew just fine, and appear to be thriving in the garden with no help from me.  So ease-of-cultivation is as-advertised.

Here’s the garden plot, below, with a bunch of healthy ground cherry plants.  I have maybe half-a-dozen plants, in about 16 square feet of garden space.

The fruit are unusual.  They have a papery husk like a tomatillo.  So it’s moderately interesting plant, though nothing showy.  It doesn’t really stand out in the garden.

Here’s the first problem:  The fruit is about the size of a pea.  Not a pea pod.  A pea.  OK, maybe a fairly large pea.  But definitely in that ballpark.  Vastly smaller than, say, a typical cherry tomato.  Imagine having to pick your peas by picking one pea at a time.

Oh, did I mention the ground part?  The fruit ripens over an extended period of time, visible as the papery husks change from pale green to pale tan.  You will see it said that the best way to tell if the fruit is ripe is to let it fall to the ground.   My take on it is the only reliable way to get ripe ground cherries is to pick them up off the ground.  As a result, in practice, you harvest these by getting down on hands and knees and rooting around in the mulch, underneath your plants, to find these pea-sized fruits in their cute little papery husks.

Here’s the second problem:  The total yield of fruit is tiny.  Maybe this will get better as the season progresses.  But right now — from a half-dozen of these, covering may 16 square feet — I might be able to pick enough of fruit to match the volume of one (1, a) salad tomato.  And, because I’m impatient, I pick not only what’s on the ground, but I pick some that appear ripe, but are still on the bush.

Here’s what today’s harvest looks like, in the husk, and then peeled:

Note the color variation for both the husks and the fruit.  That’s because I picked a handful up off the ground — those are the ripe yellow ones above — then snagged a few more that were still hanging, but appeared ripe.

Here’s the third problem:  They aren’t sweet.  At least, these aren’t.  Not even the fully-ripe ones.  They do have an unusual taste.  It’s described as being like pineapple, but in fact its only distantly related to that.  Slightly tangy, slightly fruity. It’s definitely pleasant.  Even the green ones have a nice tartness to them.  But it’s not some great delicacy.  It’s nowhere close to being as nice as, say, fresh blackberries.

It’s possible the yield will pick up some, as the season progresses.  It’s possible that other varieties are tastier.  But as of today, my view is that these are an interesting novelty, and nothing more than that.  If you’re willing to get down on hands-and-knees, you can harvest a scant palmful of ripe fruit per day, out of roughly 16 square feet of garden space.  And enjoy an interesting — but not sweet — fruit-like flavor from them.

In the grand scheme of what I could be growing in that space, and using my gardening time for, these are a waste of time and space.  Interesting.  Better than nothing.  But I won’t be growing them again.

 

 

Post #1549: COVID-19 trend to 7/1/2022, sitting here in Limbo.

 

If I were a stock market analyst, I could look at today’s chart, make up a name (the reverse clamshell formation), declare that it clearly meant that stock prices were going up (or down, doesn’t matter), and make a ton of money as a financial pundit.

But the fact of the matter is that we’re just kind of stuck in COVID-19 limbo.  The U.S. daily new case rate has been at or about the current level since late May.  Going up?  Going down?  Going nowhere?  Beats me. Continue reading Post #1549: COVID-19 trend to 7/1/2022, sitting here in Limbo.

Post G22-028: Low-pressure hose timer autopsy.

 

Edit 7/29/2022:  When all was said and done, I bought another copy of the one that just broke.  I then modified it by drilling two small weep holes, like so:

I then mounted this horizontally (with the dial facing the sky).  In theory, when this leaks — and it will — the weep holes will allow the water to drain without drowning the motor.  Which — see below — is what killed the first one.

Edit 7/11/2024:  That same cheap-o hose timer above is still working.  Granted, it’s only been two years, so I can’t exactly claim victory.  But it’s worth nothing that this one — mounted to drain through the weep holes I drilled — at least didn’t crap out after a year, the way so many of its ancestors did.  I take it in during the winter,  I give it new batteries annually.  It has to open and close twice a day during the summer.  I don’t think it’s too much to ask that $30 should buy me more than just one or two years of service.

The original post follows.

A hose timer is a gizmo for turning water on and off on some pre-set schedule.  You (typically) stick a couple of batteries in it, program it, place it between faucet and garden hose, and turn the faucet on.  It will then operate a little valve to turn that water on and off according to your chosen schedule.

Until it breaks. Which it will.  Which you probably won’t notice until your plants start withering.  Unless you’re away on vacation, that is.  In which case you’ll return to dead plants. Continue reading Post G22-028: Low-pressure hose timer autopsy.

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.