I found an interesting fact that surprised me on this point. According to the 1995 housing survey conducted by the U.S. Census—I know that’s been a while---- the % of housing in the US that was built since 1970 was only 4.9%.
I found the same chart from the 2015 census. housing built since 1970 was %60
My over 100 year-old farm house has a Square D 200 amp service panel upgrade some time ago, before my wife and I bought the place about Y2K. They had electric baseboard heating, now using propane central heating. Still expensive. Someday may get (make?) a back yard wood-fired boiler when I get my wood-based economy going!
I want to do that too, to get the fire/dust/dirt out of the house. But there are a lot of projects on the list. I think the first half of my house was built in 1908. It was upgraded too, along about 9/11. I would imagine that a great many of the pre-1970 homes have been upgraded—probably most of them…
Anyway, gotta go. Friends of ours have a son who has meningitis and also need some help getting someone to the airport…They’re off to the hospital So I get to do one of my favorite things today: Go to HotLanta in July. FYI. for anyone who passes through that way, the best seafood buffet in the south is at exit 34, I-20 west of Atlanta.
Most all the houses have been upgraded to atleast a 100 amp fuse box this was common in the late 80s. The farm house I live in was built in 1901 and has the 100 amp service. In the 1990 s the standard went to 200 amps. What drives the updating of home wiring in the usa is insurance companies refusing to cover the old systems or the sale of a house. So yes most all houses now have a 200 amp service at the very least a 100 amp service with breakers not the old glass fuses. When my grandfather passes away the other house on the property here built during WWII was upgraded to a 200 amp service from the old glass fuses and I think a 60 amp service at the time. My mother couldn’t continue the insurance in her name without getting a contractor to do the upgrade even with the same company that had insured the house since it was built for my grandfather.
Chris can we move this discussion to a new thread? I really enjoyed reading why everyone wanted to burn wood when I joined and was just thinking we should clean this thread up a little.
I ran the numbers a while back based on real world charging times and range numbers from a Tesla forum for a Tesla S including efficiency losses while charging. In Ontario, it cost about the same money per km to run a Tesla S as our 9 year old Civic… - in the summer time.
Best as I can tell, the range of a Tesla S drops about 20-40 percent from 0 degrees to -20 degrees. At -20 with snow on the roads and commuting in the dark - you get less than half the range you did on a nice summer day.
Electric cars are for urban use where there are charge stations, in locations near the equator, and in jurisdictions that charge less than .10/kwh for electricity.
I think you just hit the nail on the head. And that won’t even be the whole picture. In any given area you probably would have to triple or more the electrical grid to provide the power for the style of personal transport we expect.
An impractical goal, I contend. In Manitoba we have 95% green hydro power, but new dam sites are few, and costing in the billions. Never mind the transmission lines.
Electric scooters, trolley cars, and trains, anyone?
Agree with Dan, we have derailed this thread, but the discussion is worthy of a thread.
A couple of things to keep in mind with EV (Electric Vehicle) you don’t have to charge the entire battery pack everyday and your better off not to wait till the battery is fully discharged to charge it. So really you only have to charge your last trip. If a car has a 200 mile range that makes a big difference. In most places the avg commute is 20 to 30 miles one way. So figure about 1/4 of the battery will need to be charged everyday. That greatly reduces the demand on the power grid from what people expect. The next point is with smart cars and a smart grid you would want to allow the car to schedule the charging when the demand was lowest so the power company could bill you at a lower rate.
EVs have alot of challenges ahead of them but some of the problems are not as bad as they look on the surface.
If we clarify what your looking for the electrical side isn’t too hard to calculate. I would be willing to help with the math.
How many miles a day do you want to drive the car?
Are you thinking of using the car to double for off grid battery storage for the house?
How much power does the house need per day?
I have been looking at these numbers for my own system trying to figure out the best way to setup off grid solar. If I needed a new car and they where not so expensive I would consider an ev for battery storage. Of course you still need some batteries at the house can’t really drive off with your full power system around here in the middle of the winter. Which reminds me of another problem up here batteries don’t like cold so wintertime ev outside has issues as the only battery storage. I keep trying to figure out the best way since I have several tractors. I think in reality one electric tractor and a couple of wood tractors will work best for me. I have also thought about trading my genorator for a pto driven one then I could run it on whatever my tractor runs on.
There has been alot of talk about using a hybrid as a genorator off grid. The auto manufacturers don’t support it out of the box because they don’t want you to fill your house with car exhaust. Too many people park their cars inside a building.
My electricity provider is in the process of changing the rate structure for those of us that have solar panel arrays. Any power we feed into the grid is paid for at wholesale rate ($0.04 - $0.06) and any power we take from the grid is billed at retail rate ($0.10 - $0.12 + distribution charge). Therefore, to minimize my electric bill and maximize the benefit of my solar array, I need to use all the electricity my solar panels produce. That means I charge my EV when the sun is shining, and not in the wee hours of the night. We do not have Time of Use Metering (yet). Of course, there will be exceptions such as when visitors arrive in their EV and need a charge, or when we need to make more or longer trips than usual. I have two EVSE outlets. One is on 115 vac and draws 1340 watts. The other is a JuiceBox Pro 40 that plugs into a NEMA 14-50 outlet and can supply up to 10 kWh for EV’s that have charging circuits that can handle it. There is a smart phone app that allows the power to be adjusted upwards or downwards, similar to what you can do on the Tesla Touch screen monitor.
Just because a house has a “200 amp panel” doesn’t necessarily mean the you can draw 48KW from it (200 X 240).
I am making this post since there have been several references to “200 amp panels”,
We built a new house on an old property in 1992 and installed a 200 amp panel at the time. The power company brought “400 amp” leads from the pole to the breaker box. A couple of years later, during a hot summer day with about 30 blacksmiths attending a 2 day workshop, the power went out. The electric company came right away and told me that we had blown the breaker on the transformer. They complained that I was drawing 50 plus amps on each leg. I said “sounds pretty well balanced to me.”
They said that they’d have to install a bigger transformer. The one on the pole was only 15KW! I said: “Hey, you guys just recently connected up the service to my 200 amp box. Why didn’t you put a big enough pig on there at the time?”
They said: “We never put that big a transformer on a residential service that’s not electrically heated.” People usually only get a 200 amp panel so they get plenty of breakers." (Even then, they only put up a 25KW transformer)
Moral of the story: Go look at the size of your transformer before you start pushing your power usage.
Hi Koen,
I am also interested in charging batteries for a home off-grid battery/inverter system and/or electric car charging with woodgas. I think it could be done, but to me it only seems practical if used as a backup to a solar-based system as the generator would only need to provide power on cloudy days when the solar panels are not providing power.
If a woodgas powered generator was your only source of battery charging, even if you were charging expensive Lithium Ion batteries the generator would probably still need to run 3 or 4 hours each day to recharge batteries in most applications so it seems like the maintenance cost per year for the internal combustion engine powering the generator would be high. If using lead acid batteries for storage the recharge time for the batteries would be even longer, further increasing wear and tear on the engine driving the generator. Another thing to be considered is the large amount of wood to be consumed by the gasifer and the time it will take to process the wood into a useable form.
If using a woodgas-powered generator to recharge an electric car it seems there would be a big loss of efficiency in generating the power and storing it in the car’s battery for later use. It could be done, but I think it would be much more efficient to power an internal combustion engine vehicle directly with woodgas.
Let me relate a real “electric (partial)” cold weather car experience. I Live at 672 feet in one of the third layer in the mointains valley. We get 2x, 3x the snow day occurnaces as Columbia River basin Portland Or/Vancouver WA. Friend of mine lives rigde top 3 miles from me at ~1100 feet. Have to go a bit to 1300 feet to his house. Same snow days as me. Higher nad North slopes he get MORE depth, and it stays longer.
He has a new lady freind drive out for week end visits from Portland in her 2014 Prius.
Ha! Ha! Twice I’ve been call up to drive her over the top and out down the main road.
Hit the Power button on the Prius to enable the system.
Turn on the defrost-heater system. The engine will then start up to sully the hot water heating.
Turn OFF the Economy drive mode.
Put it into Power drive mode to get the now warmed up smooth power IC engine to be the drive power. On transitioning glare packed ice and snow you do not want engine off/on - electric traction motor transitions.
Vehicle then does quite nicely considering no winter traction STUDDED tires. Flat lander Portland Oregonners are always trying to illegalize “pavement eating” studded tires. (unless they are Mt Hood snow sking bunnies and snow-barding dudes!).
Hybrid electric allow you tohave as much as ever will be possible your vehicle cake and be able to eat it too.
Regenerative braking energy recovery.
Reduces elecrtic grid stressing.
Reduced dino-fuel dependency.
Long no-angzity travel ranges.
Use now-today battry tech.
And a proven now over ten years world wide depoyment on the Toyota and Honda systems.
With the amount of electrical-mechanical-electrinics nned to run these safely, smoothly as needed to launce to Mars, land and operate a surfec rover, you wan to onlly use what had proven out.
All other is YOU being the “science experiment” beta-tester.
Nope. Hybrid systems will not be idealistic, perfect: zero-pollution, zero carbon emmiting; use absolutely no pee-looting, non-replenishable fossil fuels.
But hey! The practical we do Today.
The impossible, tomorrow.
Perfection just never get done. Because ideally, it can never be good enough.
J-I-C Steve Unuh
O.k. now.
My post above was not at attempt to be a topic stopper.
Just a true experience related.
Look around for an early 2000’s video made out of California called, “Who Killed the Electric Car?”
Related the experiences of those who wanted and “leased” (not able to actually buy/own) GM’s version; Ford’s version, Nissan’s version; and Mitsubishi’s version after the turn over from Clinton/Gore programs to Bush/Cheney programs.
These enthusiasts do a good job contrasting and comparing WHO killed off the 1990’s electric cars from wider developments…
Consumer “range angst”, reluctance’s? Probably.
Big-Oil, Big-Coal back door lobbies trashing’s? Undermining the CARB chairman and processes. Negative add campaigns. Etc. Most likely.
The auto manufactures themselves wanting to extend profiting from higher margin gasoline vehicles? Absolutly, true , proven!
Bottom lines were once the 100’s of millions of dollars of Gov’mint development subsidies were gone. These major Auto Makers pulled the plug on new productions. Re-possessed their “leased” vehicles and quietly hauled them off for crushing and scrapping.
Very interesting video.
The GM’s car was much better than the nay-sayer’s said. But even widely know Jay Leno could only retain his in his museum after he let GM rip the powertrain guts out of it. A non-driveable display shell only.
And as a member said here - WHY stop those who wish to own and pursue this??
My hybrid point was Honda and Toyota beginning in this same time frame sensed the market demand for an alternative and with their own moneys developed, then marketed their Insite, and Prius’s.
Ha! Ha! That little, nearly constant speed, modified Atkinson cycle water-Warming engine gives the all-world, all-climates capabilities.
No house/home electrical upgrades needed. No built from scratch Re-charging stations network; or Hydrogen stations networks to fiance, design and construct.
Just use the existing fueling stations. Only, now use MUCH less.
And now advanced twenty years later through 3-4 generations of upgrading are knocking at the door of the “impossible” (then) Clinton/Gore mandated goals. Four people, with luggage, capable of an overall 60 MPGe.
Steve, I have the DVD of the “Who Killed the Electric Car” movie. I first found it at the local library, then wanted my own copy. It is part of my electric car library of stuff! It is a very good movie and makes you sad about how the world works. I think we have gotten past some of the road-blocks mentioned in the movie. Like you said, the hybrids are building a road to more electric and less I-C operation. I would include the Chevy Volt. As controversial as that car has been, I see a lot of them driving around Ft. Wayne, and the used ones are bringing a much better price than the “scary” pure electrics. It also has popularized the idea of “Plug-In Hybrids”. I would like to buy a used pure electric car. They are practically giving away some models and I would take a chance on the battery pack life and replacement cost. I would only expect to use it as a commuter car.
I am still stuck on the “believe or not” for the super capacitor stuff.
Same as you, many irons in the fire, time to read yes, but no time to write what i am doing…
Electric cars… where i am now i have many… ( small golfcarts ) to drive around in and out the factory, and one big one to “rebuild, rethink”
The main issue , IMHO, with electric car’s is… the energy storage… AKA the battery…
The second issue: why the need for high power / fast acceleration ? its a kind of human desire ? show me a energy saving electric car… one that’s easy to understand and easy to work with ourselves…
