Trekkie Owl

Switched on the TV news last night and thought I'd inadvertently switched to an episode of Star Trek..

While walking on the road outside our house on Saturday, Hay found a very badly injured tawny owl. It had probably been hit my a car while swooping down to catch a rodent scuttling across the road.

She picked it up and brought it home, placing it in a warm, cardboard box. It was still breathing, but totally immobile. We took it to a local vet after phoning an owl sanctuary in Gloucestershire, having been advised that, if any bones were broken, it would in all likelihood be euthanased. 

She left her phone number with the vet, but she received the sad news on Sunday that the owl was too badly injured and was put down, that being the kindest action.

Elecktrickery IV

Well, after only 2 days of being up for sale, the VW e-Up! sold for the asking price, the customer being from Lymington on the South coast. My strategy of taking a calculated risk and underwriting the car for the dealership, simply to prove a point, has paid off. Hopefully, we'll now be buying more, if we can find them.

OK, so I'm doing a bit of blatant advertising for my employer...

The customer wants it delivered. Given I'm headed to Winchester next Sunday to collect No.2 Son from university for his Christmas break, I'll probably drop it off with Hay following me in our car. She can do a December swim in the sea off Hurst Castle too, thus killing three birds with one stone.

Looking at the route and consulting the PlugShare App, I can recharge the car at Chievely Services at the junction of the M4 and A34. That will save us £200 on the hire of a transporter. It also means I can perform a proper hand-over of the car.

We were doing some fixed point photography of an ecological site between Slad and Painswick yesterday and I spotted this wonderful sign of solidarity and common sense on the Ecotricity HQ building in Stroud.

Ecotricity is a very interesting company, especially in the way it's promoting the use of EVs. I'd rather trust Dale Vince, its CEO, than any politician when it comes to green matters.

Pencils and Broomsticks

We've been watching all three and a half hours of The Irishman on Netflix (reasonably watch-worthy, if you like watching pensioner actors renowned for playing Mafia mobsters). Overheard while The Chairman had Wikipedia open on Rober De Niro:

Hay: "How many times has Robert De Niro been married?"

Chairman: "Twice."

Hay: "To who?"

Chairman: "A couple of women."

Hay: "You don't do detail, do you?"

The new unicycle came with a book and a video. I read the book and watched the video yesterday - and learned that there was a minor problem with my technique.

It's actually better to be further off the ground with the seat than too close to it. This is explained best by the analogy of balancing an uright pencil on your finger and a broomstick; the broomstick is easier to balance because it unbalances more slowly due to its greater inertia, which is why tightrope walkers carry a long pole.

I heightened the seat by an inch or so, resulting in my legs being almost straight at the bottom of the pedal cycle - and it did make a noticeable difference in the stability when moving.

I still think it will be a while before I graduate to unicycle jousting though...

Miles

Since the start of the year I've been tracking my daily mileage. While perusing the Excel spreadsheet I use, I came across a graph of the results for weekday miles, which I forgot I'd made.

You can click on the image to blow it up. 

Nothing particularly interesting about it; however, it does show that, on average, it could warrant the use of an electric car in terms of the average mileage, which is generally under 100 miles a day.

That said, many of the miles can't be travelled in an electric car, as I'm moving petrol and diesel cars between HQ, the bodyshop, the MoT station and the valeters'. The remaining miles, which are travelled in the company runaround, certainly could be.

The very high daily miles were when I was collecting cars from auctions around the country, including some from Glasgow, but these have disappeared since we started buying from nearer home and having them delivered.

Electrickery III

Contrary to all expectation, the wall charger for the VW e-Up! actually arrived yesterday and so will be installed at work today. Of course, it's not just for the e-Up!, but will hopefully be amortised over a large number of EVs in the future.

I performed some training on the |EV yesterday and imparted all I had discovered to the rest of the crew. Even Hay attended - and had a drive of it. She fell in love with it immediately. 

The car is now on the front row of the dealership and has already attracted an enquiry from someone with a Renault Zoe EV to part exchange. Now the Zoe has a larger battery than the e-Up!, so it will be interesting to see why she wants a change.

Having inspected AutoTrader, ours would appear to be the only 2nd hand e-Up! in the country. As of this morning it has had 141 views on Facebook Marketplace too, which is encouraging.

At the end of the day, when all is said and done, to coin a phrase, as it were, this is an experiment to get us into a new and fast increasing market area, and as such is a bit of a risk - but a risk Hay and I willing to take, as we underwrote the purchase and all the risk is on us.

New Unicycle

Well, I succumbed and obtained the whitewall tyred unicycle I found on Facebook Market; however, the story of the acquisition is serendipitous. It transpires it was advertised by a salesman at a local Hyundai dealership - the very dealership we buy part exchanges from. 

It was advertised for £40 and I offered £20. We settled on £30, which I consider a bargain. I must have the coolest unicycle in Old Sodbury - come to think of it, probably the only unicycle in Old Sodbury.

The reason for buying it is that my old unicyle was suffering from a loose pedal which, despite repeated attempts at tightening it up, kept falling off halfway through practice sessions and curtailing them after two or three runs.

The chap who sold it couldn't get along with it, but that was hardly surprising as he had it set to 30 psi, which is far too low (they need to be around 90 psi). It must have been like trying to unicycle through treacle. He'd had exactly zero offers, probably due to the lack of circus performers in the locale.

Practice continues, with incremental improvements.

I filmed it in the hated portrait mode due to me not being able to keep the mobile phone upright in landscape; however, I have a solution to that, but it's still in the post - a nifty, credit card sized thing that acts as an adjustable stand.

Electrickery II

Had a play with the VW e-Up! yesterday - sounds like something from deepest Yorkshire.

Started by having a look at the charging point on the car and cable supplied with it.

It is capable of taking two types of connecting cable; a fast charging Type 2 (the upper section of the connection) and a CCS (combines part of the upper connection with the DC pins of the lower section) which facilitates rapid charging (DC charges much faster than AC).

The photo below is the charging cable that comes with the car, which is a Type 2 fast charging cable (not as fast as a CSS rapid charger).

I connected the cable, despite not having a charger, just to see how it fitted. However, I couldn't remove the damned thing. It took me about 15 minutes to realise that you had to unlock the car to release the cable. That actually makes sense, as you don't want some bugger running off with your cable while the car is unattended.

Below is what's under the bonnet. A total mystery to a piston-head like me.

Given we don't have a charger at work, I took the car to our local Morrison's, which has three different connector types - Type 1, Type 2 and CCS. I chose the CCS rapid charging connector.

Then came the kerfuffle of following the instructions on the charging unit. There's no app and you have to login to a website to register your vehicle and buy £10 of credit. It took a few attempts before I managed to get the current flowing. Then off I toddled for about 15 or 20 minutes of browsing in Morrison's.

The application allowed me to monitor the charging remotely, although I didn't have a clue as to whether I'd reached 100% capacity or not.

On returning to the car I noticed the battery level monitor (on the right) was close to 100% and so called it a day.

I received an email telling me how much I'd spent, which didn't tally with the figure shown on the software application while I was in Morrison's.

I'd been charged £1 for some 60 odd miles worth of electrickery juice, which had taken some 15 or 16 minutes to load. Very economical indeed, and fast.

Next came the quandary of which charging unit to choose for work, as this is the way the business is headed. The Type 2 ones were between £300 and £400, the difference being down to whether they came with a tethered cable or not. They are more than adequate for our business, as we can charge cars overnight; however, when it comes to customers, they may want to charge their car rapidly through a CCS cable. That's where you run up against horrendous cost, as they are between £7,000 and £8,000.

I decided to go for the Type 2 charger below, which is what most domestic chargers are.

Yes, we could have gone for the government scheme whereby if we get one installed by an approved installer we can get a £500 rebate, but a) we don't have the time to go through all the hoops, and b) an approved installer would be much more expensive than our tame electrician anyway, so it's doubtful we'd make much of a saving. The registered installer would obviously have to pass on the cost of registration to his or her customer (like a Corgi registered plumber - basically it's a bit of a scam), and wouldn't know our electrical system that well, which is littered with quirks that only John knows intimately.

Then came the biggest problem - I ordered the charging unit from Amazon using my Prime membership and a promised one-day delivery. It was only after having paid for the unit that I discovered that it won't arrive till Monday 9th December. At least I can carry on using my Genie Point credits till then

The car is currently having a service and MoT. Our usual mechanics have never had an electric car to service or MoT and there was a lot of hilarity when they asked whether we required the car to have an oil change.

I get more impressed with this car by the day and everyone at work is queuing up to drive it when it returns from the garage. Valeting will have to be conducted somewhat gingerly, as we don't want any water near the motor.

Electrickery

Bought an electric car yesterday - a 2014 VW eUp! It's a bit of an experiment at work and to enable us to learn more about them. Picked up the car in Wickwar, which is about 5 miles from Chipping Sodbury. The remaining charge read 28 miles, but by the time I got to base it had gone down to 12 miles. I guess that's as a result of a) me booting it (and it was surprisingly fast), b) having the heater on full blast, and c) having the lights on.

It was very disconcerting to drive - not a sound. Reversing up a slight slope was the worst - you keep expecting to hear some revs and a taking up of the slack though a clutch, but no - it just takes off at a great rate of knots.

Looking forward to read more about them. Seeing as we don't have a dedicated charging point at work, we're going to have to make do and mend with an EVSE cable. I'll be talking to our tame electrician today about getting a 32 amp connection put in, so something like that.

Talking of electricians, I've had a brilliant idea. We have an earth problem at work and some fuses keep tripping. It has been an ongoing problem for months, but finding the source of the earth has proven difficult. I told to our electrician, John, that the problem with electricity is that you can't see it. If one were to inject dye into it, it would be relatively easy to see where the leak is.

John looked at me rather strangely... I had to laugh at the expression on his face.

Caravaggio

My sister-in-law discovered, at a relatively late stage, that she has an artistic bent. Her speciality is copies of old master portraits. 

A few months ago we asked her to do a commission for us, which we have just framed.

The painting we chose was a Caravaggio, but not the entire painting - just a small section of the original, The Entombment of Christ. We were extremely pleased with the result.

Sniper

Decided to pressure wash the front and back patios yesterday, as they were a bit green and getting slippy. On the basis of my protective clothing, I'm considering a career swap to a sniper. The waterproof protective clothing is perfect camouflage.

Here's me disguised as a pressure washer.

And as an extension cable.

I bet you had to look hard to find me. I'm really good at this.