That electric thing

Early mornin’ here on the hill, coffee flowin’, kittehs rampagin’, Voo bein’ the Voo,,, (poor ‘watch dog’ can only watch these days, can’t hear a lick,,,,)

And this ol’ grump gots ta thinking more about this electric shit.

Y’all know I live off grid, generate my own power in some form without tying into the grid in any way. Solar and wind are my sources, with gas powered backup in long weather conditions where the other two are lacking. Key point there, is the gas powered backup,,, There are times where, yes, I do need it. And even when I don’t, I fire it up anyhows since machines are meant to be RAN,,, Gas degrades, oils gel, things go sideways because of that sort of stuff and running that machine on the regular helps make sure it doesn’t go down when I need it most. (for the record, its a Honda unit, 2K inverter model, runs quiet as a mouse at standard load, and under heavy load is still below conversation level.)

And most of my power tools are battery powered. Portable to the extreme, no cords to get tangled in, and they assist in my continual quest for the ‘almighty dollar’.

I even have battery powered yard tools. My weedeater is a brushless model that runs almost as good as my old Stihl model did (before it finally went to the shiny old motor heaven,,, and why I went looking for its replacement to find no one and I do mean NO ONE within 50 miles had a gas powered unit worth a shit that wasn’t priced at OMG levels,,, I think there is a conspiracy to force us into using that electric stuff more,,,, But this post is about “why it won’t work”, not the conspiracy itself.

Now, I said that electric weed eater runs nearly as good as the old gas unit I had. It does, rips right through the brush and stuff on my place, trims it right down to the topsoil if I dig deep enough. Is capable of handling the larger trimmer lines (that are needed when a portion of what you are whacking are tree saplings)

Where the ‘almost as good’ falls flat is that battery; that battery is good for 30 to 40 minutes, depending on load (more saplings, less time) and then needs a recharge. the recharge takes about 3 hours. I can purchase more batteries for it and have them in standby, but when a single battery cost 10% more than just the tool,,, well, some things just aren’t in the budget if you know what I mean. Wanted a weedeater to replace my ghost of a Stihl and had a budget in mind, and replacing said unit three times for batteries wasn’t in it.

Now, if you have the means, and can get several spares, then ‘refills’ are fast, painless and not as smelly as using the 40:1 mix of two cycle. But. you still have to recharge those batteries and that recharge time is sort of FIXED. (faster with a ‘hotter’ charger, but the downside is more wear and tear on the battery=less lifetime.)

NOW, lets apply THAT to cars. Seeing how large the batteries are on the best selling unit (and the fact that said battery bank is part of the frame) you will NOT be ‘hot swapping’ a batterybank on a road trip. So that convenience of modern power tools can not be factored in. You will have down time for that recharge and even with a ‘hot’ charger, TIME is what you will pay. You can’t take that five minutes to fill up a tank like our current majority of transportation does, and that means FINITE TRAVEL AREAS. Now, that may fly in Europe where things are a lot closer together, but here in ‘Murica,,, It take me 20 minutes to drive somewhere where a burger isn’t ‘mystery meat’: things are more spread out and not always packed tight when they are together. (like in NY where they stack the stuff on top of each other,,,)

And none of the above even talks about the infrastructure required to do the charging, only the batteries and chargers themselves. There are days where my storage unit (the other crossed eyed dog in the whole ‘go green’ movement.) is below nominal and charging up other batteris is out of the question. What happens when suddenly EVERYONE and there sister are driving electric,,, Both on the road and at the plug,,,driving on the road and pulling amperage at the wall.

This in a system that, without that load, regularly ‘crashes’ when the wind blows, or some dumkoff rams his ride into a utility pole,,,, and those in Kalifruitopia can attest to the rolling brown-outs WITHOUT all the cars and trucks being electric, and THAT administraton telling people to stop charging their electric cars overnight,,, wait, what? then how are they supposed to,,,, Yeah,, gotcha.

My saying ‘there are no problems, just unseen solutions” applies here. The issue is that the Administration has no clue that solutions must be found FIRST or you DO create problems, and that forcing the issue does NOT speed up the solution process. These things take time to find, test, and scale to need. I realize that electric vehicles are quite capable of replicating the power of a gas/diesel engine, but they can NOT replicate the convenience of one, and until that, and the source to ‘fuel’ them is addressed, they are NEVER going to work as well as the “suck, squeeze, bang, blow” model does.

gotta go do the J.O.B. thing, more laters,,,