Yesterday I posted about our experience getting through the big storm, but I didn’t say anything about what it was like to own an EV during that time. You know why? It was … completely uneventful. If I had it to do over again, I would have been smarter about charging the car before the outage, but we entered the outage with around 65% and still had over 50% when it was done. We didn’t change anything because we had an EV. If we need to charge it, there were still plenty of superchargers in the area that were open and functioning normally. I heard about some lines during peak times but I wouldn’t have had a problem going during a quiet time.
Could I have charged it from the generator? Theoretically… maybe. The generator puts out 3.5kW which is roughly how fast I normally charge the car, but as I mentioned in my post yesterday, our generator doesn’t have an inverter and I’m not sure I want to risk hooking the car up to it. It would also be hugely inefficient versus just driving to a supercharger
Having an EV in a situation like this will hopefully be a big benefit going forward. Some EVs support standards that let you hook them into your house panel giving you a day or two of power before you have to recharge. That sounds a lot better to me than running a generator. Unfortunately Tesla isn’t on board with that yet.
No, this isn’t the title to my end of year post. We had a big storm come through Seattle and I wanted to document our family’s experience going through it.
The storm was a rapidly developing cyclone called a “bomb” cyclone because the rapid intensification is called “bombogensis.” Thankfully the weather models did a stellar job of predicting it and we knew it was coming. I won’t fully recap the storm because UW weather prof Cliff Mass did a great job of that:
I believe it’s the third time I’ve been through a storm like this out here. The other two were in 2006 and 2012. In 2006 around 700,000 people lost power and in 2012 the number was around 475,000. I think they’re still counting people but this storm looks like it landed at around 600,000 people without power. (It’s also unclear if all these number are people or households.) Winds in our area were gusting 40-50mph and a few factors made it extra bad:
There was a very high pressure system east of the mountains so that created huge winds flowing from east to west. That’s backwards of the way we normally get wind so that will always cause more damage.
The trees haven’t lost all their leaves yet so that adds more drag. Plus we have a lot of evergreens that never lose their needles.
This was the first hard blow of the season so there was a lot of dead stuff waiting to fall.
We lost power at 7:30pm on Wednesday night after having it flicker for hours leading up to that. I immediately headed out and dug the generator out because there was a lull in the rain and I didn’t expect the power to come back any time soon. I was thankful to do it during my normal waking hours instead of wondering if I should get out of bed at 2am to set it up!
We thankfully installed a 240v plug on the outside of the house that feeds directly into our panel using an interlock kit so you can’t accidentally feed power back into the grid or get fed by both sources at the same time. I keep a sheet of OSB in the shed for giving the unit a little shelter from the rain and I just screw some L brackets on the top to hold it together.
Our generator isn’t anything fancy. We bought it back in 2015. In today’s money it looks like something similar is around $530. It does have electric start but otherwise, it’s very basic. This theoretically puts out a constant 3500 watts with bursts up to 4400. The challenge is that there’s no readout which tells me how close I am to that limit. So my default behavior is to flip off all the circuits and then carefully turn on the few that I need. Thankfully most lighting is LED now so we were able to use a lot of the house lights and that in itself has a big morale boost. Beyond that I would generally pick two 15-20amp circuits to enable. We have two fridges so those got the power most of the time, but at some points I would turn those off and run the furnace. We have gas so the electricity just needs to handle the brains and the blower. Being warm and having light was a huge luxury!
Some notes for next time this happens:
I was able to run the indoor fridge and the furnace at the same time.
I was able to run the tankless water heater and the bath fans together so we could shower.
I ran the generator for 27 hours during our 40-hour outage and used about 5 gallons of gas.
The challenge for me was that we use this very rarely and I haven’t built up a lot of comfort with it yet. Our bedroom is on the other end of the house and I can’t really hear the generator running because there are a lot of others running too. So if something went wrong, I don’t know how I’d notice. I also didn’t have a good feeling for how long it would run on a tank of gas. All this led me to sleep on the couch both nights that our power was out waking up periodically to walk out and check the generator, etc. It wasn’t very restful but I was still thankful to have it.
We all took guesses about when the power would come back on and Elijah was only off by about 2 hours! I was just getting ready to drive to campus to do a little work and as I put the gas cans in the truck for a refill, the power came back on. It was perfect timing because our internet came back right away too and I was able to resume working from home. We felt very fortunate to get power back when hundreds of thousands were still waiting for it.
We’ve gotten great use out of this generator a half dozen times over the last 9 years which makes me feel like it’s ok to upgrade. The main features I want are some way to know how hard I’m pushing the generator and a good inverter that produces a clean power signal. (Read up on Total Harmonic Distortion in generators if you want to geek out.) But the quick summary is that our battery backups freak out if I try to charge them on the generator so I’m too nervous to hook up any sensitive electronics and I’m nervous that it’s going to fry one of our appliances. It’s hard to justify that much money when we already have something that works and we need it so rarely.
Even though we don’t need it very often, I was thankful for our twice yearly Survival Sunday routine. One of my tasks on that list is to change the generator oil when needed and fire it up to make sure it’s running smoothly. I had just done that in September so when I needed it during this storm, I turned the key and it fired right up.
I realize that we are privileged to have had such a relatively easy path through this storm and our prayers go out for those still waiting for power or dealing with much greater impacts from the storm.
Tyla and I have been getting increasingly more involved with Martin Luther College in New Ulm, MN. It’s Tyla’s alma mater and it is where ALL of our national church body‘s pastors and teachers are trained. (Pastor’s go on to Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary for an additional 4 years of post graduate study.) MLC is plays an incredibly important role of giving all of our teachers and preachers a solid foundation before they head out into their positions. There aren’t a lot of church bodies that put this much effort into their worker training programs!
Running any college would be difficult but running a small college that effectively caters to two majors and draws from a relatively small pool of people constantly presents new challenges. How much money do you invest in campus buildings or decreasing student debt or increasing the available classes or online training for post-college age students? The list goes on and on.
President Gurgel has started a new President’s Advisory Council and we were thrilled that he asked us to participate. We recently had our first meeting which was in-person and on campus. A huge thank you goes to Tyla’s sister, Megan, for taking vacation days to stay with Elijah at our house while we were traveling! In addition to a full day of meetings on Friday, we made the most of our time:
Full campus tour
Catching up with teachers we had in high school and college
Not bad for about 65 hours in New Ulm, eh? I had visited campus a couple times back in the early 2000s, but Tyla obviously had a lot more experience there and was a great tour guide. We were so happy to see the chapel (2010) and the fieldhouse (2022). Those are major additions that have a dramatic impact on the campus.
So what exactly does the President’s Advisory Council do? Honestly I think we as a group are still trying to figure it out how to be most effective, but at a minimum, President Gurgel is hoping that we can provide some new perspectives on situations that they are facing as well as being ambassadors for the school in our own communities. It looks like we’ll have more of these trips in the future, and I pray that we can add value to what the wonderful MLC leadership team is already doing.
If you enjoy maps at all, I warn you that learning about the content of this post may result in great loss of time for you.
Now that you’ve been warned, check out Historic Aerials. For any address, you can scroll back in time and see satellite images of what it looked like in previous years! You can even click the Compare button, choose a map on each side, and then adjust the transparency slider back and forth to really spot the differences.
When Elijah was younger, I heard about the Wingfeather Saga book series. It’s a fantasy book series for kids written by one of my favorite Christian musicians, Andrew Peterson. I read the first book and loved it, but it was too much drama for Elijah at the time, and it was so good that I didn’t want to turn him off by giving it to him too early.
Fast forward to last year when we were driving down to Oregon for vacation, and we gobbled up the first audio book. Elijah loved it! There are four books in the series and we both read them whole series. I don’t know if I would have given it a chance if I didn’t have a kid, but it’s a solid story even for adults. There’s plenty of humor and a really good story. We talked about it so much that Tyla ended up reading the books too, and now we’re watching the TV show as a family.
As if one of my favorite musicians authoring a great book series in one of my favorite genres wasn’t enough, there were more great connections:
The music for the TV show is done by The Arcadian Wild which Spotify will agree is one of my most-played artists.
There’s a character in the books named Armulyn the Bard. There’s a piece of trivia that connects him to another one of my favorite artists, Rich Mullins.
The character Armulyn is author Andrew Peterson’s tribute to singer-songwriter Rich Mullins with Armulyn’s name being a play on words: when pronounced correctly, it sounds like R. Mullin. Armulyn is even described and illustrated as looking like Rich.
And trivia within trivia… the Armulyn character in the TV show is voiced by the late Rich Mullins’s brother, Dave Mullins.
I keep mentioning Christian artists, but this book isn’t religious. It’s not an allegory or anything like that, but there’s also no garbage that you wouldn’t want your kids reading. There is a deity in the book but it’s not a main point and they just refer to him as “the Maker”.
Unless you really hate the entire fantasy genre for some reason, I obviously recommend checking out the books. I’m usually one for books over audio books, but I liked doing the first one as an audiobook because we got to hear the hidden jokes with the way things are pronounced and get more of a feel for Peterson’s intention behind the characters (because he narrates the book himself.)
Earlier this year, we replaced our OEM tires with Hankook iON evo SUV tires. Efficiency and longevity were two big analysis points in my research. I can’t speak to longevity yet (though I’m tracking tread depth with every tire rotation), but I can give an update on efficiency.
First of all, I’ll say that it’s quite difficult to get objective research about efficiency. So many of the random posts online do a very poor job of analyzing the data. For example, they’ll make a post of their efficiency after 100 miles or they’ll show a month of snowy winter driving compared to the previous 2 years of all-season driving. To avoid some of these issues, I’ve waited until we had 10,000 miles on the new tires before making this post.
Over 40,000 miles with the original tires (Continental ProContact RX), we averaged 262 Wh/mi.
Over 10,000 with the new tires, we’ve averaged 259 Wh/mi!
The tires area already performing slightly better than the OEM tires and that’s even when they’re relatively new. Over time, traction decreases but efficiency increases due to less rolling resistance.
A lot of the recommended tires for this car are high performance which makes sense because the cars can be driven hard. However, we are more interested in overall efficiency and those high performance tires can easily use 10% more energy. This makes a big difference over time, or even on specific trips where you’re pushing the limits of your range.
Last week I wrote about our trip to central WA. Part of the fun of those trips for me is the logistics of doing it with an electric vehicle. This one was a particular challenge because there are no superchargers up around the Grand Coulee Dam and it was going to be a long loop. If we left with 90% charge my estimate was that we’d get back with 15%. That’s ok, but it’s about the minimum that I ever shoot for.
While the Tesla itself will do everything it can to avoid you running out of power (as long you tell it where you’re going), my favorite pre-planning tool is A Better Route Planner. I’ve got the knobs tuned really well for our car and I can often predict it as good or better than the car itself at the start of a long drive.
To buy us a little extra cushion, I planned for us to eat a picnic lunch at the Gehrke Windmill Garden which Plug Share said had a handful of free NEMA 14-50 plugs which are good for about 10% battery charge per hour. I haven’t yet made any plans that require one of those random free spots to be functional, but I was happy to try it out and it did indeed work well. We added 6% to our battery while we ate and in the end, we made it back to the supercharger in Moses Lake with 20% so without the 6% charge we would have only been 1% off my pre-trip estimate.
When we do a trip like this, I always travel with our mobile connector and all my various adapters. If we got into a big bind, I would pull into an RV park and ask if I could pay $20 to take a couple dollars of electricity from them. We’ve never needed it, but it’s nice to have that as an option if we ever really got into a bind.
This probably sounds crazy to non-EV people and it would have made me way more nervous before we got into the EV world, but now I just view it as expanding my comfort level. When we first got the car I got nervous when we dropped below 50% charge. Now I’m much happier to play games to optimize our supercharging (15-50% is MUCH faster than 50-85% for example) and I’ll try to arrive at home with 10% or lower so that I can “fill up” with much cheaper electricity at home. Part of the fun of all this for me is knowing that in 10-20 years, this will all sound silly because there will be so many chargers everywhere. Our family goal is to hit every county in Washington. Privately I’m keeping track of which counties we hit in the Tesla versus our gas truck because I think it would be fun to say we hit them all in an EV. Some of the northeast and southeast counties will be quite a challenge!
Bonus fact: The Model Y was already the world’s best-selling vehicle in 2023 and now it is very close to being the best-selling vehicle in the US, already having knocked off the F150 and hot on the heels of the Rav4.
While we did just get back from a great trip, we decided to squeeze one more in before the weather gets rainy. I don’t remember how it started but we have a random family goal of visiting all the counties in Washington together. With that in mind, we headed east. For those of you not familiar with our state, you may picture Washington state as wet and cloudy. That’s true on the west side of the state between October and May but the east side of the estate is a desert. There are literally tumbleweeds blowing around. It’s a dramatic change with just an hour drive east over the mountains.
Our base of operations was Moses Lake, but the drive out there was slower than expected because the I-90 bridge over the Columbia River is being worked on for the next couple months. We sat through a 5-mile, 75 minute backup squeezing down to one lane. Oops.
Saturday morning we headed north for Grand Coulee Dam. Tyla and I have been there before but Elijah had never seen it. Grand Coulee Dam is mind-boggling big. It was originally created to supply a huge part of central Washington with irrigation but now it also supplies power for about 2 million homes per year. There are lots of stats, but suffice it to say the ~1 mile long dam is one of the biggest concrete structures in the world and the 10th most powerful hydroelectric dam (3.2 times more powerful than the famous Hoover Dam.) We got there for the first tour at 10am, but unfortunately the tour has really been neutered even after the initial changes after 9/11. You no longer get to visit the generator area. The tour briefly takes you down to the pumping facility which is interesting but too short. The rest of the tour is a drive across the top of the dam with a stop walk around at the top. I guess it’s still worth doing if you’re there, but don’t make that the key point of your day. Luckily for us, it was just one piece of the puzzle!
After the tour we had lunch at the apparently brand new Billups Sub Co. It was delicious but way more expensive than I was expecting. We got our food to go and ate it at a nearby park that had free EV charging (more on that in a later post.)
After lunch we headed northeast to Koontzville and then east to Highway 21. I don’t think we saw any other cars on that part of the drive and a forest fire had ravaged the area only a couple months before. It was quite a sight. Once on Hwy 21, we headed south to the Keller Ferry. This ferry is tiny compared to the ones we’re used to in the Puget Sound. It only holds 20 cars! The north dock is movable and gets moved upriver to a different spot when the river is too low. There’s no schedule and no fee for the 10 minute crossing. This sounds like a simple part of the trip, but we all said it was our favorite!
From the south ferry dock, we headed straight back to our hotel in Moses Lake for some swimming, food, and rest. Our drive back home went smoothly and we got through the construction in Vantage, WA before it had backed up at all. After getting through that, we did stop at the Thorp Fruit & Antique Mall. It was fun to go inside afer driving by so many times. We came back with a box of apples, but if you’re looking for really good deals, I think you should look elsewhere. It wasn’t bad but it felt like a mildly good sale at the grocery store, not the kind of deal you get buying straight out of a field.
So none of those activities were monumental but it added up to a nice weekend and some more family memories to add to the pile.
We’ve done three cruises now so clearly we are experts and you should get your info from this post instead of the endless barrage of other internet content on this topic. Kidding of course, but here are three things that I think are helpful when planning a cruise, especially your first cruise:
Understand the differences between the cruise lines. There is a cruise line for everyone, but not every cruise line is for you. If, for example, you pick the cruise with the lowest price that you can find, you might leave wondering why people like cruises. There are a variety of pages to help you decipher the pack, but here’s one example. We’ve done two cruises with Royal Caribbean and one with Celebrity. The Royal Caribbean ships had a lot more activities and were more focused on families with kids while Celebrity was a little fancier and had an older clientele.
Get a balcony. There are generally four categories of rooms: interior, exterior view, balcony, and suite. We have always sprung for the balcony rooms and honestly, I think I’d probably rather skip a cruise than not have a balcony. I suppose there are exceptions to that, but I spend a lot of time reading and napping on the balcony. There are a lot of people on a cruise ship and this is a fairly private place where I can be outside, have a great view, and enjoy myself. For this reason, we also generally get a room as high up on the ship as we can since it usually equates to a better view, especially in ports.
Skip the packages. The base fare for a cruise is a pretty good deal. You get the room and access to a bunch of free food 24 hours a day. It’s impossible to beat it if you’re staying in hotels and eating at restaurants. That being said, you can easily spend way more than the base fare. For example:
Each ship has restaurants that cost extra money. Are they good? I’m sure! But will you be disappointed if you only eat in the main dining room, the buffet, and the other free snack food places around he ship? No way! The food is one of our favorite parts of a cruise and we’ve only ever eaten the included food options.
While the idea of unlimited alcohol seems enticing, it’s shocking to see how many people opt for the drink package. On our latest cruise it was $95/day! Individual beers were around $8 and mixed drinks were about $15. Are you really going to drink 6 mixed drinks a day or a dozen beers just to break even? And are you going to do that for each of the seven days of your cruise? We have never gotten that package and just say that we’ll buy them individually, but we never end up getting anything at all because we’re so full from the amazing food.
There’s free WiFi on board that lets you use their app to see activities, reserve things like laser tag, see the food menus, etc, but if you want to access the internet, get ready to pay a bunch of money. On our cruise it was $26/day for a single device and that’s only if you pay for the entire cruise (so that’s $182 for a 7 day cruise to access the internet from one device.) You can also buy a 24 hour pass but you’ll pay in the mid-30’s for that. I love unplugging on a cruise, but on this latest cruise, I didn’t do a good job of that. Since we were going to be in Alaska and Canada, I knew we could use our cell phones in the ports and had planned to connect with people to share info about when we’d be getting back, etc. Seeing the flood of email and texts ended up being a shot of unwelcome stress during the trip and I wish I had just left my phone off the whole time.
There is a cruise to fit just about everyone and you can customize each cruise in a lot of ways, but those choices can have a big impact on your experience and your bank account!
It’s time for another “Best of YouTube” post. We subscribe to the ad-free YouTube because it’s the streaming service we watch the most. Yes, there are lots of garbage videos there, but if you want to learn something, there is an endless flood of educational content too.
First up we have a video from Donut. Honestly, this might be one of the last videos I watch from that channel because my favorite hosts left to do their own thing at the new Big Time, channel, but this is still a great video. In 15 minutes (and what appears to be a single take), they explain every part of an engine:
If you have even a passing interest in engineering, check out Stuff Made Here. Every video is a home run, and his most recent video is no exception. He set out to make the world’s smallest bicycle. It’s incredible how much energy he puts into these ideas!
And finally, here’s a shoutout for the Practical Engineering channel. There are so many interesting videos with solid explanations of things that you might take for granted. He recently had a good one that goes into detail about how French drains work which is worth watching even if you already think you know, but for this post, I want to highlight “Why Railroads Don’t Need Expansion Joints.” Think about it… you have a thousand miles of a solid metal bar baking in the sun. That must expand and contract a lot! How do they deal with it?
