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Cars (all fuels and electric)

Peter wrote:

When I was 13 I was building pirate radio transmitters and we used to power the output stage (2×807) from 700V DC. One proposal was to use the electric railway supply (700V DC) but we backed off that – got too scared

Probably a good job, given the amperage it could sustain with you as a wet resistor in the middle :-)

I have a Yaesu FT901 transceiver (which I really must get around to fixing, it has an intermittent fault most likely caused by a bad solder joint), it has valves (tubes) in the power amp final stages even though it was built in 1979. The manual has a great section on troubleshooting:

“Because not all service personnel are as familiar with tubes as they are with semiconductors, we would begin by cautioning you that tubes are voltage devices. To produce power in useful amounts, they require voltages well in excess of that needed for solid state devices. Take care, lest you quickly develop “serviceman’s elbow,” a malady well known to old timers. It occurs when your arm jerks back from the +800 volts right into some immovable object. Accompanied by a few colourful phrases, it is not an experience one knowingly encourages, though it is seldom fatal"

Andreas IOM

alioth wrote:

Indeed, but throwing away 1.5 to 2 hours of your life sitting in a car every working day doesn’t seem healthy or smart (you’re probably actually throwing away about a factor of 1.2 in healthy life by doing that). If I were in his shoes, I wouldn’t be more than cycling distance from anywhere I had to be every day. Being absolutely car dependent sounds like my idea of a bad time.

I agree, and luckily I’ve managed to arrange my life that way. Realistically there are many people for whom this isn’t practical e.g. many people at my work are married to farmers. If more than one person in a couple works then it is going to be hard for them both to find walkable jobs, particularly if both are professionals who tend to have more specialised jobs that are scarcer. And moving house is miserable.

kwlf wrote:

If more than one person in a couple works then it is going to be hard for them both to find walkable jobs, particularly if both are professionals who tend to have more specialised jobs that are scarcer. And moving house is miserable.

Hence working from home. I made a conscious decision fairly early on to try and engineer the commute out of my life, and I’ve managed to do that. It means that the company I work for and where I choose to live are totally unrelated issues, which is very valuable to me.

Different things work for different people and their differing priorities, but I wouldn’t want to be tied to living a commutable distance from my employer or other potential employers, especially when most companies in my sector have their UK offices in undesirable (to me) but very expensive towns close to London.

You could take my car away from me for a couple of weeks and life would largely go on as normal. We could easily manage with one vehicle between the two of us, but we choose not to for the sake of convenience.

EGLM & EGTN

Did you manage that pre pandemic too? Well done!

kwlf wrote:

Did you manage that pre pandemic too? Well done!

Indeed. I went home-based in about 2013, when I realised how pointless it was driving 30 minutes each way in heavy traffic to sit in an office by myself, no-one else in my part of the business being based in that office.

The pharmaceutical industry is >60% female, and thus fairly ‘progressive’ on such things. Thus when the pandemic began and everyone started talking about videoconferencing like it was some new phenomenon, people in my industry were like “Yes…… this is normal….. why are you all getting excited?”

I do miss the buzz of a big office where there are lots of people that you directly work with. I worked in such an office 2005-2007, but the roles of people I work with are spread much more globally than they used to be so the model won’t exist (at least for my function) in this industry again during my career. Today I’m working on something with people in Boston, Verona, Barcelona and someone somewhere else in the UK. Even if we were all ‘in the office’ it wouldn’t be the same office and we’d be communicating via technology just as much.

EGLM & EGTN

What you need for domestic use very much depends on local practise. Here power companies don’t offer anything less than three-phase 16A (total of 11 kW) for houses. My house has 20A three-phase. Flats may have one-phase but even that is becoming less common as many electric stoves need two or three phases.

That’s really funny, because a friend in France, near Artaix (near St Yan LFLN), has an old house where I have stayed a few times, and it has long-dead 3 phase outlets, for cookers and such. Evidently France used this system decades ago. I would expect France to always go for the best theoretical approach

20A x 3 is not a lot. 3x more wires and zero benefit. Load balancing across phases is done by putting different streets (etc) on different phases. We have 100A x 1 at home. If I went 3-ph I would have 100A x 3.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

Indeed – both our places in France are wired 3-phase, 60A total – i.e. 20A per phase. We have no idea why. It’s a nuisance because even though you stay well under 60A total, you hit 20A on one phase and everything goes dark. It’s also a bit more expensive per month.

We are trying to get one of them converted to monophase but… EDF. They have been unable to schedule a visit to do the work, in four months.

LFMD, France

I have 3 phase coming into the house 12 Kva on each phase. At the distribution board the phases are split and distributed from the bus bars. 3 phase is more expensive because the price is based on the amount of electricity youbwish to draw, eg if you are happy with 3kva on each phase, the fixed cost is cheaper than my 12kva on each phase. I haven’t looked at the supplier’s price list recently but I don’t think there is much difference in the fixed charge of 3kva on each of 3 phase and 9kva on a single phase.
I run approximately 40kw of electric convector heaters on mine plus 2×300 litre water heaters plus cookers, lights etc. No problems over the last 30 years.

France

Back to the title topic:

Everyone knows that cars can run on electric power, we know that for more than one hundred years. First car going over 100km/h was electric, it had a beautiful name Jamais Contente. Btw, piloted flying objects propelled by electricity are here for more than one hundred years, too.

We shall also know that every electric thing, including electric cars, gets 62% of energy by burning fossil fuels, 10% from nuclear, 15% water, 13% renewables. Source here .

With this on mind, which battle do we fight?

Against CO2? EVs are scam, see above. Exceptions such as charging via solar cells at the rooftop are – well – exceptions, they do not change the big picture. Why did I say scam? Because they are pushed by force, by subsidies, by making people feel guilty for not driving the clean green technical miracles, and that is a lie.

For better efficiency? Burning a tank of fuel in a car, or burning a tank of gas in a power station plus high voltage transfer, voltage transformation, battery and engine efficiency, gives the same result. Swapping two-tonnes fuel gulping SUV for electric scooter to move my 200lb body around is a very energy efficient step. Swapping it for an electric SUV is not.

EV meets my personal mission profile best? Yes, this makes a perfect sense. But then we are not solving global problems, and shall not subsidize EVs.

(Error in percentages above fixed. Thanks, Silvaire, for pointing that out)

Last Edited by Pavel at 10 Aug 17:22

We shall also know that every electric thing, including electric cars, gets 82% of energy by burning fossil fuels, 4% from nuclear, 7% water, 7% renewables.

If I understand correctly I believe it’s lower than 82% at the moment because that number is for total energy consumption of the world, which I assume includes direct consumers of fossil fuels, mostly meaning oil for transport where it dominates as an energy source. The energy from that oil does not make it onto the grid, so the percentage of fossil fuel derived energy currently on the electric grid is probably a lower percentage, in the 60s IIRC. However if all vehicles were miraculously converted to EVs, the energy to run them would have to come from somewhere, and that means that the newly available oil would need to be burned in new power plants and the energy put on an expanded grid… and then the 82% number (or whatever it would become) would be correct.

So I think you’re essentially correct and I think your point is well made. I suppose it is not inconceivable that Europe specifically, with its serious energy security issue, might reverse course and start building nuclear plants/grid to power EVs, but I doubt it.

Last Edited by Silvaire at 10 Aug 18:37
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