Rick's b.log - entry 2024/09/05

The other parcel

Three packs of Mississippi Belle Mac&Cheese to add to the larder. So this story has a happy ending, no thanks to ChronicallyBadPost.

As for the damaged one? I mixed some penne and some trigatelli with the little amount of macaroni still in the box (and I forgot, that American macaroni is made differently, it froths up something ridiculous) and the cheese-powder-from-Wisconsin was mixed into that along with a rather generous helping of marge (it was the end of the packet). I should have used a little bit of milk for a creamier cheesy sauce, but having just had a glass and a half of mandarine juice, I felt that adding milk to the mix would not make for a pleasant night.

A close-up food photo like this is Instagram.

Ghislaine de Feligonde

The demise of mom's rose.

...I guess I could ask one of the neighbours, but bringing a tractor in there might make an even bigger mess. Perhaps I can turn it into some sort of art installation? ☺

Anyway, looks like for about twenty two euros (including post), I can get a replacement Ghislaine as root stock (or a tenner more to get one in a pot). Depending on finances, I may try to time a replacement for sort of March-ish.
I may also dig around in the pile of mess he left behind to see if I can sort out Ghislaine from the wild rose, and have a go at taking some cuttings.

Blocked pipes

This is what the scam artist considered "unblocked" and charged me €€€€ for.

Does this look unblocked to you?

As it turns out:

Firstly, the guy made the right call regarding tearing out the old pipework. As it was a concrete pipe in sections, a tree root (which looks to have been that walnut) punched through one of the joins, and a huge bit of root forced its way in. Over time, "crap" accumulated and eventually it had backed up to the point where water just couldn't flow any more.
I smashed open one of the pipe sections (whee! pickaxe fun!) and there was a level part just before where the top of the pipe would be, that was blocked at one end by bits of gravel. So what that tells me is that the pipe used to drain by a small gap between the crap inside and the top of the pipe, but that bad thunderstorm washed a lot of junk into the pipe that wasn't able to pass through and, well, given the vast amounts of water flowing, it was like a family car being hit by a truck - no hope.

Secondly, he guy had to get out and look because he was digging out the old pipe and following it as he was doing so, until he had a "hang on?!" moment because the ditch and the outflow is over there. Yup. The pipe came out at a slight angle from the house and then suddenly veered off towards the pond, in a crazy arrangement that was the pipework opening up into this sort of concrete chamber (that's what the massive slab of concrete was over top of). This would explain why I was never able to work out where the pipe exit was. Because I was working on the assumption that if I drew a line between the downspout where the pipe starts, and the middle of the outflow where it ends...
...but no, it wasn't there at all!

Here's what I have now.

The replacement pipe.

It's a lot larger. I was hoping Anna might have felt like exploring it, but she wasn't interested. This ought to cope with whatever nature can throw at it (and, if you're listening, that's not a challenge! Been there done that...). Plus it's large enough that I can look inside it, and if it looks like it needs a clean I can pass the chimney sweep thing through it. Plus it's a single section of pipe, no joins for anything to wiggle its way into.

A new security camera

I got a second one of those cameras for two reasons. The first is that since these are not open devices, it's absurd to have three different apps for my three different cameras. Plus, even though it's a cheap Chinese thing, it is actually not awful. There are numerous problems with it, but if you don't expect miracles from something costing thirty euros (that's less than a toaster), it works outside, it copes with sun and cold, it's been surprisingly reliable, it can record when it notices movement, and it can even follow where the movement is. Again, it's a thirty euro piece of kit so it's probably not a surprise that brisk walking can beat the motion detection...disclosure, I have mine set to low sensitivity as the weeping willow weeping causes the thing to freak out and spend hours on a sunny day looking here and there and back again. Another reason I'm surprised it's still going.
Plus, if you notice the little dodah marked "SD" (because the default quality is kind of naff) and tap on it, you can bump the camera up to "QHD" which looks much better.
This is supposed to arrive on Monday, so I can take the jittery tilt'n'turn camera in (it's NOT an outdoors model, I have it partly wrapped in cling film!) and put something better out back.

Running my battery low

With my diesel cars, I used to go and start them about ten minutes before I was due to leave on cold winter mornings. This was to allow the cooling system to warm up enough that I could attempt to do something about the windscreen misting up. But it was often fairly futile as a dinky little engine on a cold morning didn't heat up much. It was also necessary with Caoimhe because the glow plugs were... iffy. Actually, I think the engine was iffy, it was fine in warm weather but it got hard to start below 10°C and painful when it was freezing. To my luck, the winters I had Caoimhe weren't particularly cold, just long and dismal.

Lucy's heater? It warms up in under a minute. I can be blasting hot air onto the windscreen before I've reached the top of the access lane. There's no temperature control, by the way. It's a simple on-off button.
It is also pretty powerful. It was low 20s (guess!) today. I drove home with the windows open. With the heater on, I could still feel the heat, with the windows open. I can imagine that, on a winter morning, I might run it for a few minutes to demist the windscreen if it needs it, and then turn it off until it starts feeling cold. Remember I have very little heat here by choice, so I'm sure my idea of "feeling cold" is not the same as most people's. ☺

I was home, from shopping and sorting out the rubbish for collection, for twenty past six. Charging was complete by twenty past nine. So pretty much bang on three hours to go from a quarter to full charge. Rather slow, isn't it?
The after-work top-up charge takes around 40 minutes (for about 38 minutes of driving). I drove for three days, which suggests two hours of charging. But add in some extra for the heater, and a little more for the fact that it's a non-linear consumption. My usual commute, from full, does not take me to three quarters. Yet three commutes (and a little bit of heating) took me to a quarter.
Like I said, it's not bad. It's about 80km and I would have been slightly over a quarter without the heat, so maybe about 25km or so? This is less than the estimated 117km range that the mechanic told me because it's real-world driving with hills and stuff. However since my commute is about 25km... no, I wasn't willing to try to let it go until tomorrow.

How low can you go?

Plus, remember, if I did something like break a tooth and had to go for an emergency dental appointment...well...not today I couldn't. Maybe not yesterday. At least, not without enduring pain for however many hours it took to get the battery charged up.

I wonder how many people let their battery run down for a full charge, and how many just top it up like it's a fuel tank? It's not great for the battery to keep on doing that, but it's not great for the person to know that their possible travel distance is restricted. Obviously it's likely to be less of a problem to people with proper cars that can hook up to one of those charging points and get a couple of megawatts dumped into the battery in a few minutes (not that that is great for the battery, either...). But for those of us who have only the slow mains-plug style of charging, it's a very valid potential concern. [not that the high current high power quick charge is necessarily nice to the battery either]

If I ever get myself a proper car (which means passing the driving test, in French, so don't hold your breath), I will probably look for a dead-dinosaur-juice model, most likely petrol as it's less awful than diesel in what comes out the blowpipe and modern petrol engines are pretty decent. Not zero emission, but then neither is an electric car. That electricity comes from somewhere, and I think in a few years when we get enough electric cars to have a churn of them, we're going to find a hell of a lot of mechanically decent cars get scrapped because the battery has packed up. And if the battery gets swapped out? Well, there's the battery waste to deal with.
Not to mention the very real risk of thermal runaway in the battery pack. It doesn't happen often, but that it happens at all may necessitate a rethink about the idea of parking cars underneath habitable areas. Particularly the likes of blocks of flats, condos, and such. Or maybe even houses with a built-in garage, given the difficulties of extinguishing a battery fire. A standard fire wall might be insufficient. And god help you if you're in an older house that actually has a bedroom over the garage.

Work woes

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C Ferris, 6th September 2024, 09:26

Can you get a adapter to be able to charge the car at other chargers?    I suppose you could cary a little petrol charger in the boot space - so you could get home :-)

Rick, 6th September 2024, 18:56

No, you can usually adapt down (super fast running off bog standard mains) but not the other way around.    Yes, I did wonder about having a Genny in the boot, but since the car takes around 2.2kW, it would need to be a pretty powerful one. Which means weight and size.

David Pilling, 7th September 2024, 01:34

"The AA's mobile EV charger can add about 7.5 miles of range to an EV in 15 minutes. The AA's EV charger uses lithium batteries that trickle charge through a smart charging system, so there's no need to run an engine or generator."

C Ferris, 7th September 2024, 09:46

Looking at the Zero motorcycles - they seem to come with 3 pin plug 110/230 'Granny' supply.    As a option - a adaptor to allow the use of faster external chargers  2000ukp.    There are third party adapters available - so there may be available for your car - so you can charge away from home.

A tree-dwelling mammal, 7th September 2024, 13:28

I've been keeping an eye on what's been going on with EVs since a friend bought one about 18 months ago.    A home EV charger costs about £600 if you install it yourself (I'm a qualified electrician amongst other things so this won't be a problem).    My friend's Skoda Enyaq has a range of about 300 miles if he's careful. My diesel Audi can do nearly double that on a tank of dinosaur juice.    On its fastest charge mode, the Enyaq takes 2-3 hours to go from 'almost empty' to 100%. I can sling 65 litres of diesel in my tank in under 5 minutes.    Having said that, there's a new A4 coming out next year that will be all-electric (the petrol and diesel models are going to be odd-numbered so the new A4 will actually be called the A5 saloon or estate, with the EV version being called the A4). Some new cobalt battery technology is promising a range of over 400 miles, with 250kW charging capability being able to put 150 miles range back in about 10 minutes. So just enough time to stop at the motorway services, plug in, go and empty one's bladder, then come back with another 150 miles of range. That might actually work.    Problem is it'll have a price tag to match. Not expecting to get much change out of £50,000 for something like that.    I shall keep driving the diesel for now, but as I was saying to someone yesterday, EVs seem to be at the point where flat panel TVs were in around 2004-05. It's showing promise, it'll get there in the end, but it's not there just yet - so be patient.

Rick, 7th September 2024, 14:03

I'd be wary of hooking up unapproved chargers to extremely large batteries. It may well be that doing such a thing would instantly invalidate any guarantees, so if the thing reacts in a forceful manner, "your bad".    As Gl^W tree rodent says, it's a technology that is "getting there".  To be honest I think hybrids are the best option. Zero emission batteries for town driving, and combustion for distance driving on the major roads.

C Ferris, 7th September 2024, 14:34

Get a local farmer to tow you home - Brompton in the boot space :-)    In the USA it is suggested that you can ask Large Stores if you can make use of their external mains sockets.    Like long distance walkers charging their phones :-)

A tree-dwelling mammal, 7th September 2024, 19:10

The problem with a hybrid is that you're effectively carrying two engines around, adding weight and complexity.    That said, the latest generation of hybrids appear to be doing things rather differently (and to me, more sensibly). Instead of having, say, a petrol engine driving the front wheels for longer trips and a motor driving the rear wheels for zero emissions mode, the latest models (again from what I've been able to find out) drive one or both sets of wheels with an electric motor depending on whether the vehicle is rear or four wheel drive, and the petrol or diesel engine isn't direcly coupled to the wheels. Instead it powers a generator, which both charges the batteries and provides traction power.    Now, just a minute, haven't we heard this somewhere before? Oh yes. Nicked an idea from railway locomotives. Basically a diesel-electric (or petrol-electric) system, but with a battery shoved in the middle.    It's a lot simpler than a combined drive, and means when it's running on dino-juice the engine can run at a constant RPM, at its most efficient setting.

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