Studio711.com – Ben Martens

The Cost of Power

Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday!

In the last post in the series, I gave an update on our Model Y’s efficiency and our continued progress towards having this car be cheaper than the gas car we would have purchased instead. Today I’m here to report on a bit of a change to those calculations. Our electricity price has increased by ~20% this year and next year they’ll go up again (~5-10%).

PSE prices are increasing because of state regulations which are requiring them to get rid of coal and natural gas plants. Voters want more wind and solar but not nuclear. This is being demanded at such a rapid rate that PSE needs to raise costs to cover the change.

This slows things down a bit, but the bigger factor in determining how much money we are saving is still the cost of gas. The change in electricity cost means that our electricity cost per mile* goes up from $0.034 to $0.041/mile. Our gas cost would currently be $0.19/mile. A gallon of gas going down by about $0.20 would be a bigger hit to our savings per mile than this electricity cost increase.

This price increase also led me to do a better job with the previous price increase that had happened in January of 2023. My old calculations had ignored the lower prices for the first half a year that we had the car. After improving the electricity cost changes in the model, we’re at $10,628 in fuel savings after 57,600 miles.

So while the cost increase is annoying, it doesn’t dramatically change the math. It does increase my desire to have solar panels on the house though. The math on that just doesn’t work out super well in the Seattle area though. It would be a neat feeling to generate my own power to fuel our car!

*Yes, I’m also factoring in service costs, depreciation, insurance, registration, etc in the total cost per mile. This post only focuses on the fuel costs.

benmartens February 18, 2025 Electric Vehicles No Comments

Nightstand

Our bedroom furniture is a mishmash of stuff we had before we were married and while it still works fine, there’s not a lot of rhyme or reason to the setup. For example, somehow during those endless nights with Elijah as a baby, we ended up with a foldable TV tray table serving as Tyla’s nightstand. After ~11 years of this, I figured it was time to do something about it.

I landed on a set of plans from Wood Magazine since I find it significantly easier to work off existing plans than to build from scratch. I knew I wanted to build this out of walnut, but my first hurdle was the cost of the materials. The plans called for less than half a sheet of 3/4″ plywood and it needed to be good quality on both sides. A sheet of walnut plywood is not cheap and while I could theoretically buy half a sheet, the markup for having them only sell me a half almost makes it not worth it. I ended up buying a full sheet and made plans for what to do with the leftovers. (Stay tuned… hopefully that next project won’t take 11 years.)

The build itself was straightforward. The plans were ok but they’re very basic. There’s not much joinery. Everything is just a set of panels and pieces that get combined with biscuits. I was ok with the simpler build, but I wasn’t crazy about the biscuits. They’re great and I use them on various projects, but it felt like the glue up would be very complicated since the pieces could still slide laterally. I ended up doing everything with dowels instead and that worked out very well. I was able to dry assemble everything and then the glue-up was straightforward. But before the glue-up, I prefinished everything with General Finishes Arm-R-Seal Oil Based Topcoat in semi-gloss.

In keeping with the nature of the simple design, the drawer just sits in the opening, and it is a bit of a loose fit. It’s fine for a nightstand but that could be an area for improvement if you’re using the same plans.

I dream of replacing all the furniture in our house with stuff I’ve made, but at this rate I think I’d have to outlive Methusaleh.

benmartens February 13, 2025 Woodworking No Comments

Old Maps Online

I wasn’t expecting to be surprised by a website called Old Maps Online, but it has been fascinating to go back to again and again. There’s a slider at the bottom and you can scroll through time to see how various nations have changed their territories. I’m especially interested in Bible history and this has added a lot of information to my studies. Note that at the top of the page you can switch between having the map show regions, rulers, people, and key battles. You can also click on the map details to get related Wikipedia articles in a slide out panel.

benmartens February 6, 2025 Links No Comments

New Model Y

Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday!

Tesla usually just makes updates as they are available. They don’t wait for specific model years and the main things stay the same from year to year giving them good cost efficiency since most parts are compatible for many years in a row. However, they have been “refreshing” the cars in their lineup and the most recent one was the Model Y. This features larger changes with more incompatible parts between the two versions. Here are some exterior pictures of the new Model Y:

What do I think? I generally like it. I think the continuous front and rear headlights look nice. I think my biggest visual complaint is that the space below the rear taillight looks odd to me. I believe that the license plate mount is in the black part very low on the car. I have yet to spot one in person so we’ll see what real life looks like.

Feature improvements include a rear 8-inch touchscreen, better acoustic glass treatment, ventilated seats, an updated sound system, and new suspension. None of those are game changers but I’d be happy to have all of them.

I’m curious to see what this does for resale prices on the older models like ours in a couple years. I wonder how much of a difference there will be between the two models.

We aren’t itching to trade ours in for a new model though. The logic behind this purchase was largely about price efficiency so trading in the car now wouldn’t make sense. For those following along at home, we’re at 56,600 miles with $9089 in estimated fuel savings to date. Factoring in registration fees, service costs, estimated resale, etc, this puts us within a few pennies per mile as our old Beetle and still on track to beat our old Escape even ignoring inflation.

benmartens February 4, 2025 Electric Vehicles

Stall Catchers

Alzheimer’s is a terrible disease. It is the 7th leading cause of death in the United States and it can have an outsized impact because of its sometimes long, slow progress. But what can you do to help fight against it? Enter Stall Catchers!

Every year at work we have some events that encourage more people to volunteer and this was one of the activities. It’s super easy and you can do it from your couch. The basic concept is that you look at a picture and determine if blood is flowing through vessels or getting stalled. Record your findings and move to the next one. There’s a point system and some leaderboards to encourage more participation, but that’s all there is to it. It’s simple to do in your spare time and it can dramatically speed up Alzheimer’s research.

You can read more about the science behind it or get started now at https://stallcatchers.com/. It took me a little while to get the hang of it but after a few minutes it was easy and I was chugging along making actual contributions to Alzheimer’s research!

benmartens January 30, 2025 Links

DIY Wireless Pool Thermometer

When we visited my parents last summer, they were talking about the idea of having a pool thermometer that they could read from inside. There are various options on the market already but none of them met their criteria. I went home thinking this could be an interesting project and Christmas gift.

While I’ve done electronics projects before, I feel like very much of a newbie and there was a ton of learning involved in the project. My first challenge was learning how to read temperatures with a sensor that would be submerged all the time. Some research led me to the DS18B20 waterproof temperature sensor and I found a nice tutorial about using it with Arduino. I bought a couple official ones from Adafruit even though there are cheaper versions on Amazon. I only needed one for the project but I figured there was a good potential for me to screw one up. I had some ESP8266 boards left over from the LED panel project and that seemed like a good fit for this project. The boards are only a couple bucks and they have WiFi built in. With a little breadboard action, I was able to see the temperatures from the debugging output of the board.

The next step was to somehow publish that data. There are endless options, but to keep things simple, I started with Adafruit IO. It’s free for the small amount of data that I’d be sending and there were good tutorials about using it with the ESP8266 boards. That was quite simple to set up and before I knew it, I had a temperature sensor that sent data to a website!

I was going to explore ordering a custom breadboard and I did start down that path but I got a bit overwhelmed trying to find all my specific parts in the tool. My circuit wasn’t very complicated, so I ended up just using some perf board and manually soldering the components in place.

I wanted to make it easy to replace all the individual components so I ended up using connectors in quite a few places. I put a headphone jack on the end of the temperature probe and it plugs into a jack in the box. Then the box jack has another wire that plugs into the board.

Before I could figure out the box situation, I needed to figure out how to get power to it and that ended up taking me a lot of time. I landed on a power socket that’s meant for RVs connected to a buck converter to bring the 120v down to 5v. It was bulky but I made it easier by removing the long cable and plug on the power socket.

That just left the box and for that I opened up Fusion 360 to make a custom box that I would 3D print. It had all the holes in just the right places, the lid fits snugly, and all the screws are countersunk. The only problem was that the standoffs I built in for the ESP8266 were too tall/thin and they broke but ultimately it’s not a big deal.

I was nervous about whether the WiFi signal would reach from their pool, but thankfully they don’t have any competing WiFi traffic in the area and it worked fine! I got Dad set up with the development environment so he could make changes to the code, and he had an idea to make the probe wire much longer and keep the box in the pool house. There are endless possibilities since I’ve basically handed him a prototype and walked away, but hopefully it will work at least for a little while! I’m expecting it to take a couple more iterations to work through bugs and maybe we’ll build nicer software for it, but at this point, I’m kind of amazed that it actually worked.

benmartens January 16, 2025 Gadgets

Monarch Money – 1 Year Review

It’s been over a year since I moved away from the dying Mint.com to Monarch Money to keep track of our finances. As with any tool like this, it takes a while to get everything hooked up and configured nicely, but now that it’s there, I really like it. My favorite part so far is the automated rules that do a great job of figuring out how I like to categorize our expenses. Now my periodic trips into the tool are more about reviewing the line items instead of manually categorizing them all. All that categorization is especially nice at the end of the year to look back and see where our money has been going and decide if that seems reasonable or not.

My only complaint is that it does not hook up to our Thrivent.com accounts, but I believe that’s a problem on Thrivent’s end. They were flaky with their connection to Mint as well.

If you don’t have a good way to keep track of where your money is going, I think you could do a lot worse than using Monarch Money. This isn’t a paid advertisement or anything, but I do have a referral code you can use that gets you a free month and then I get a month for free as well.

benmartens January 13, 2025 Links

Christmas in Indiana

Living thousands of miles from where I grew up, it’s amazing to me how often we’re able to get back there. My parents were gracious enough to host the whole gang for Christmas yet again. There was a tiny bit of snow when we arrived and then it warmed up making travel simple. We made good use of the clear roads by heading down to see my 94-year-old Grandpa. Other than that, we had a couple church services, board games, good food, a chocolate factory with bison and dinosaurs, and a pile o’ presents. And oh yeah, Luke brought a giant 1.3 gallon beer to go with Dad’s craft beer sampler pack mountain.

I’ve gotten in the habit of putting together a quick video recap of the trip. It’s probably not super interesting to anyone else, but we enjoy looking back at them.

And here are a few pictures from the trip as well:

benmartens January 9, 2025 Family, Travel

2024 Year In Review

As I sit here staring at this blinking cursor trying to remember what happened in 2024, I’m thankful that I keep this website going. I don’t post every day like I used to, but it is nice to have a record of our trips, my projects, and other family events (with some nonsense posts in the mix of course too.) So let’s flip back through the posts and see what happened this year:

We usually try for one big (I guess that’s a relative term that varies by family) vacation per year, but this year had two because Tyla got to go on her AGE-REDATCED’th birthday adventure to Leaping Lamb Farm. We had been there in 2022 for the first time and Tyla immediately wanted to schedule a return visit so we booked spring break week this year. We had to wait a year and a half for the trip but it was worth it. There were baby lambs and baby goats hopping and falling all over the place.

I took a solo trip in May to the 2024 PacNW Men’s Retreat and promptly returned home with food poisoning. Not only was that a horrible experience but I was really bummed to miss Pastor Dave Scharf’s talks. Little did I know I’d run into him later in the year… (Also, I’m happy to say that the restaurant that got me sick is now permanently closed. There appeared to be some serious health code violations, and I should have just walked away.)

We took a quick day trip down to Portland to see a professional disc golf tournament. It was such a fun day for all of us that we already have a tournament on our calendar for 2025. It’s a small sport but big enough that the pros are mind-bogglingly good. It was amazing to see in person what they’re capable of instead of just watching it on TV. Elijah also got to watch his disc golf teacher play and then got to take a picture with her on the first tee!

Pretty much every summer we try to make it back to my parents’ house in Indiana for some pool fun. They surprised us this year by installing a diving board and it got a lot of use! Given how far away we live, I’m thankful that Elijah gets to spend so much time there and get a little taste of what it was like where I grew up.

Our “official” big vacation was a cruise to Alaska. This was the third cruise for Tyla and me, and we knew Elijah was excited to see Alaska, but when we told him it was a cruise, it was a hard sell. He really didn’t want to go. Ask him what he thinks about cruises now! I’m thankful he kept an open mind, and he has now done a complete 180. It wasn’t nearly as relaxing as our previous cruises, but it was fun to experience it through his eyes.

We squeezed in one more quick family trip to Moses Lake in central Washington so we could drive up to the Grand Coulee Dam. We wanted to show it to Elijah and we were also able to snag a couple more counties as we try to color in the entire map of Washington counties. I think we’d all agree that the highlight of that trip was our ride on the tiny Keller Ferry. Our cars have been on a lot of boats, but never one that small!

As you may have noticed, pretty much all our trips involve all three of us, but in October, Tyla and I took our own trip out to New Ulm, MN for a weekend at Martin Luther College. We’re getting more involved with supporting the school and were involved in some meetings. A huge thank you goes to Megan for staying at the house and watching Elijah!

Then finally, this year we spent Christmas in Indiana. Two trips to Indiana in one year! I know it’s a lot of work for my parents to host us all, but we really appreciate being able to spend Christmas with everyone.

At home, I felt like I had a lot less free time to do projects. I’m not sure if that’s because I was a lot busier with my volunteer work at church or because I was lazier in the evenings. It’s probably a combination of both. My woodworking Instagram account does remind me that there were quite a few projects even though none of them were huge. I made a walnut trash can with some interesting angles, a keepsake box made with wood from an old cross with Elijah’s school logo on the lid, a walnut tissue box holder, a coat rack, a kids bakery sign, a cat bed, and an updated silverware tray. There are some big projects underway now but those will probably land in 2025. And while it’s not woodworking, I replaced the rotten wood backsplash in our kitchen with tile. It was my first time doing tile and it makes me smile every time I do the dishes because I’m not staring at something I need to fix.

I think the biggest change for me personally this year was mostly dropping off of social media. I still post my finished woodworking projects to Instagram and I post for our church Facebook and Instagram accounts, but I have broken the habit of doomscrolling and it feels amazing! I removed the Instagram icon from my phone’s home screen and left that spot blank. It was shocking and scary how many times I would pull out my phone and click that spot. That just reinforced my desire to stop. I set a rule for myself that I would only go through what the people I follow had posted once per week on Friday nights, but now I find myself going multiple weeks before I remember to check in. This feels much healthier and certainly removed a lot of pointless screen time from my day.

To combat the relentless acceleration of the calendar and ever-dwindling free time, I’m trying to be even more intentional with my time. Making task lists for each day, removing wastes like social media, and trying to schedule family activities on a regular basis are all helping. There’s also the problem of having too much stuff to cram into a week, but I haven’t figured that one out yet. There’s always next year!

Previous Year In Review Posts: 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023

benmartens December 31, 2024 Commentary

Wrapped

Lots of websites are doing these “Wrapped” style emails where they show statistics about your usage of their service. Here’s a sampling of mine:

Spotify

I listen to a lot of Spotify while I’m working and I found myself listening to a playlist of Christian radio songs that I listened to in the ~90’s. You can listen to it here (no subscription needed if you’re ok with ads.) That combined with our reading of the Wingfeather Saga got me into listening to a lot of Andrew Peterson music.

  • Listened for 51,049 minutes
  • Play 4,898 songs
  • Listened to 1,249 artists
  • Top songs (mostly because these are two of my favorite albums)
    • FFH – One of These Days
    • FFH – Big Fish
    • Caedmon’s Call – Thankful
    • FFH – Power In His blood
    • Caedmon’s Call – Table for Two
  • Top artists
    • Andrew Peterson
    • Third Day
    • George Strait
    • The Arcadian Wild
    • Josh Turner

Pocket Casts

This one was less interesting to me because I already know which podcasts I listen to regularly, but here it is anyway:

  • 23 different shows and 403 total episodes
  • 12 days, 17 hours, 5 minutes of listening
  • Top podcasts
    • Stuff You Should Know
    • Making It
    • Cordkills
    • No Dumb Questions
    • Wood Talk

Duolingo

I started doing Duolingo in 2020 as a way to make good use of the time I previously spent commuting and I’m still doing it every day.

  • Completed 2217 lessons earning 96,226 XP over 3201 minutes
  • Current streak is at 1529 days

Goodreads

There are so many books that I’d like to read that I really enjoy using Goodreads to keep track of them all. My Kindle syncs with my Goodreads account but given how old my Kindle is, it crashes every couple weeks and prematurely marks books as completed so I don’t put much confidence in the things like the number of days that it takes me to read a book.

  • 31 books read, 9827 pages read
  • Most common book read: Percy Jackson and the Olympians
  • Least common book read: Taboo (Read this!)
  • Highest rated book read: The Wingfeather Saga: The Warden and the Wolf King

UDisc

I played less disc golf than last year, but here are my stats.

  • Steps: 42,300
  • Holes played: 141
  • Total throws: 465
  • Distance thrown: 7 miles
  • Courses played: 6

Trakt

I use Trakt to keep track of all the movies and TV shows that I watch. It’s great for hopping around between shows and remembering our show progress as we add and remove various streaming services.

  • Elijah and I watched 121 episodes of Mythbusters
  • The show Tyla and I watched the most episodes of was The Chosen.
  • The show we all watched the most episodes of together was The Wingfeather Saga.

Untappd

I track all my beers and have fun seeing how many different ones I can experience.

  • I tried 112 new beers from 64 breweries covering 31 different styles.
benmartens December 26, 2024 Commentary