In December, EV and hybrid vehicle sales hit another record (this happens regularly because the numbers keep growing.) 8.9% of all vehicles sold in the use were battery electric and 10.6% were hybrids. EV skeptics sometimes will brush aside those numbers saying that people are dumb once but won’t be fooled twice. But check out this study of over 23,000 EV owners which states that 92% of battery electric vehicle (BEV) owners would buy another one and 4% would switch to a plug-in hybrid. Now, I take that with a grain of salt given that this group specifically exists to promote EV ownership, but we can at least take away that maybe there are a lot of people who really do love their EV and would not want to go back to a gas engine.
I often think about this for our situation. We’ve already put 55,000 miles on our Model Y in just 2.5 years of ownership and it is a perfect fit for our situation. In these posts, I repeatedly refer to making the switch because it was going to save us money over a Ford Escape. I do not mean to imply that it would automatically save everyone money over a Ford Escape, but in OUR situation, it’s a great fit. I would definitely replace it with another EV and it would probably be another Model Y. The price has come down since we bought it so the math is even easier. The only difference is that if we replace it after our son moves out then I might consider downsizing to a Model 3 instead of the Model Y, but we’ll probably want to replace it before then anyway given the 20,000+ miles/year that we’re putting on it.
But we also own an F150. Would I replace that with an EV if it died? Probably not. It is still nice to keep one foot in the gas world. We drive it very infrequently and only use it when the other person is already using the car or when we need the utility of the truck. But it’s still nice to know that we could use it if the EV wouldn’t quite work yet. For example, we’re planning a trip to Yellowstone, and it has been nearly impossible to find a convenient AirBNB with a good charging setup. I’d have to rely on the supercharger right outside the park. With the amount of driving we’ll be doing in that giant park, that might still be a place where we prefer to have the truck with us.
I suppose the skeptics would disagree, but I believe that the EV scenario is only going to get smoother and simpler from here on out. We intend to keep that truck for a very long time so maybe in 10 years the pro/con list will look a little different, but as of right now, we’re already in the “yes, we’d replace our BEV with another BEV” camp.
I don’t remember how long ago it was, but many years back I built a custom silverware organizer to fit inside of our drawer. I did it in solid walnut and box-jointed the edges. It has worked well and it makes me happy every time I grab a utensil.
Fast forward to more recent times and we bought new silverware. We went through a lot of options before finally landing on this set and everything was great about it except that the knives were just a tad bit too long for the organizer.
After just ignoring it for too long, I finally took action. The organizer originally had dadoes to hold all the slots in place but thankfully I hadn’t glued those in place. I took out the dividers, sort of filled in some of the dadoes as best I could, made new dividers that were the right size, and then glued and nailed them into place. It was a bit tricky to align everything without the dadoes and there were some mistakes that make me question how long this will stay together, but so far so good! I just repeated the original finish of rattle can lacquer.
As you know if you’ve read these posts before, I have a lot of data and math about the efficiency of our car. Our purchased was because I believed we could tie or beat the price of the internal combustion car we would have purchased instead (a Ford Escape.)
I’ve had to update my calculations a bit. Since mid September (right at the point when our main warranty expired), the car stopped going into sleep mode. That means we lose a couple percentage points on the battery charge overnight. It’s not a huge deal and I imagine that many people don’t have their cars configured correctly to go into sleep mode anyway so I’m not expecting any major impact. If it was still under warranty, I think I’d press them for a fix, but I’ve had a couple (free) chats with their service team and they agree that it’s not worth looking into.
After the big storm, the cell connection from our car didn’t work for a week. It had been long enough that I thought all the area towers were back up and it still wasn’t working, so I scheduled an appointment. I decided I’d have them diagnose the sleeping issue too. But the next day, our cell connection was working again so I canceled the appointment.
Our car has actually gone to sleep a couple times in the last few weeks so who knows, maybe it will come back again, but for now, that efficiency gain I had been getting from our new tires is now roughly being offset by this lack of the low power sleep mode overnight.
We’re still on track to break even around the 100k mark but this is the point where one big repair bill could set us back. For now, at 54,000 miles, that service total is happily sitting at $0, we’ve already spent $8600 less on electricity than we would have on gas, and our total cost per mile for the Tesla is less than for our F150.
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.
