Jim’s Blog

The Dallas, TX area now has over 100 L-2 (240v) public Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment (EVSE) many of which are free to charge. Blink Network has the most with 91. Coulomb ChargePoint has around 10. And eVgo has a 480v Fast-Charge station – for the Nissan Leafs that have a fast port installed. The eVgo station is located at Walgreens at the corner of Monfort and Belt Line in Addison.

Today (31 Jan 12) Toyota updated the MPG figures for the Plug-In Prius. The 87 MPGe was increased to 95, and the hybrid driving mode (once the battery pack energy is depleted and the car resumes operation as a conventional Prius) was increase from 49 to 50 MPG.
MPGe = Miles Per Gallon Equivalent

I have been researching electric cars. One of the problems with electric vehicles (EV) is range anxiety – worrying about running out of battery juice before getting to a charging station. This is being eliminated by charging stations popping up all over. A few months ago, I test drove a Nissan Leaf. I liked the experience, but the Leaf is a little small and I was still thinking about range anxiety. Then I found out about the Toyota Prius Plug-in.

The Prius Plug-In is coming out in the Feb-Mar 2012 time frame. I went to the plug-in website and put myself on the list to be one of the first to buy one. Toyota refers to their Plug-In as a “PHV” – that’s plug-in hybrid vehicle. The Prius Plug-in will only go 13-14 miles on the electric-only batteries, and then becomes a regular Prius hybrid. That’s not all bad, considering most of our driving is around town to the grocery stores and to the post office and bank. Under that scenario, we would be driving in pure electric mode and not burning any gas. This will really drive up our miles-per-gallon (MPG) number. The standard Prius gets 51/48 MPG, so the Plug-In could get way over 100 MPG, depending on how many electric miles are driven. I am still considering the Prius, but I just found the Ford Focus Electric.

The Ford Focus Electric is larger than the Leaf, goes 100 mi on a charge (about the same as the Leaf), but charges in half the time as the Leaf. Ford hasn’t announce the price yet, but the Focus EV could be less than the Leaf, especially considering that Nissan just raised the price of the Leaf. Ford says the Focus EV will be out “the end of 2011″. I’m not sure when that is, but will probably be before the Christmas holiday. So there are still no details on the Focus EV for color, options available, and price.

Over the next 2 years there are a lot of electric vehicles and plug-in vehicles coming out. If you buy one, how do you find out where the charging stations are? The website I like the best is CarStations.com. This site has chargers for all different charging networks. Another website that is more complex to navigate was put up the US Dept of Energy.

My research is documented in these links.

We are seeing more and more birds at our feeder. This is a definite sign that spring is almost here.

Janis came home from our local Super Target the other day with a small bag of potatoes. Among the potatoes, were a few purple ones. I just had one for lunch. I was amazed that it was purple throughout. I thought it just had purple skin. It tastes just like any other potato. A little research turned up the fact that the puple potatoes are rich in antioxidants. Looking a little further, I found that the Purple Viking potato has purple skin but is white inside. And the Purple Majesty potato is purple throughout. So, this potato on the plate must be a Purple Majesty.

My daughter, Lauren decided she wants to raise bees. She was inspired by the top bar hive that she saw on Phil Chandler’s site BioBees.com.

Wanting a woodworking project to do, I volunteered to build it for her. So, I downloaded the free TBH plans and went to work. It took just a few hours to build – spread out over a couple of weeks and turned out quite well. Lauren decided instead of buying bees to put in the hive, perhaps a swarm of bees will find the hive in her yard and take up residence. We’ll see what happens in that regard. The photo album for the hive has a home on Lauren’s new website – TinyChickenRanch.com that Lauren just started to work on. I wanted the hive to have the look of natural wood, so I used Phil Chandler’s suggestion and treated the outside of the hive with a 20:1 mixture of linseed oil and organic beeswax. Because the sun is really hot here in Texas, I painted the hive roof white to reflect the sun’s heat. But, hopefully the hive will reside in a shady part of the yard.

Last year I raised 15 baby chicks from 1 day to about 10 weeks old when we transferred them to my daughter Lauren’s chicken coop. Last year we ordered 2 Ameraucana chicks and only got 1. The Ameraucana’s lay a pale-green to pale-blue colored egg and are often referred to as Easter Eggers. I just placed my order with McMurray hatchery in Iowa. McMurray requires that you order a minimum of 25 birds. So, I ordered 12 Ameraucana and 13 Cuckoo Marans. The Cuckoo Maran chickens lay the darkest brown colored eggs and are know as Chocolate Eggers. The earliest the Cuckoo Marans were available to order this past week was May 9th. So our chicks will be shipped on May 9th and should arrive here on May 12th. In the meantime I need to get a brooder set up in the garage. The chicks have got to have a heat lamp so they can be kept near 95 degrees F the first week and 5 degrees lower each succeeding week. Lauren will introduce 4 of the new chicks to her flock. The rest I will sell on the Dallas Farm & Garden Craigslist.

This image is from backyardchickens.com The pale-blue eggs are Ameraucana; the dark brown eggs are Cuckoo Maran eggs

I just ran across a review of various low self-discharge rechargeable batteries. Based on Stefan’s review, I have changed my ideal battery for my use from the Sanyo Eneloop to the Tenergy Low Self-Discharge (LSD) Rechargeables. The Sanyo’s are good, but the Tenergy batteries are 2/3 the cost of the Sanyo batteries.

I have tried to use rechargeable NiMh batteries for the past few year with disappointment after disappointment. My charged batteries just go dead after a short time making these batteries not very useful in flashlights and sundry electronic gadgets and remotes. Then yesterday, while reading some product user comments on Amazon, I ran across a reference to Sanyo Eneloop rechargeable batteries. Further research indicates that the Eneloop batteries do not have the bad properties of normal NiMh batteries – namely, they don’t go dead sitting on the shelf. Finally, I’ve found a battery that I can recharge and use over and have it last for a while when charged.

I’ve been looking at netbooks for a while now. I was getting tired of lugging my 17″ HP laptop around back and forth to school. So I bit the bullet and bought an Asus Eee PC 1015PEM. The reasons why I bought this particular one:

• Dual-Core, Four-Thread Processor – Intel Atom N550 – 1.5 GHz
• Bluetooth 3.0
• USB 3.0 – up to 5.0 Gbits/s
• 13 Hour Battery Life – In reality 8.0 hours, still great

The first things I did after opening the box and setting up the netbook was to replace the 1 GB RAM card with a 2 GB RAM card, and then wiped the hard drive which contained Windows 7 Starter and installed Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook which I like very much.