8 month summary of my leap to offgrid EV life
https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/offgrid_electric_car/

#offgrid #electricvehicle

Eight months ago I came up my rocky driveway in an electric car, with the back full of solar panel mounting rails. I didn't know how I'd manage to keep it charged. I got the car earlier than planned, with my offgrid solar upgrade only beginning. There's no nearby EV charger, and winter was coming, less solar power every day. Still, it was the right time to take a leap to offgid EV life.

My existing 1 kilowatt solar array could charge the car only 5 miles on a good day. Here's my first try at charging the car offgrid:

first feeble charging offgrid

It was not worth charging the car that way, the house battery tended to get drained while doing that, and adding cycles to that battery is not desirable. So that was only a proof of concept, I knew I'd need to upgrade.

My goal with the upgrade was to charge the car directly from the sun, even when it was cloudy, using the house battery only to skate over brief darker periods (like a thunderstorm). By mid October, I had enough solar installed to do that (5 kilowatts).

me standing in front of solar fence

first charging from solar fence

Using this, in 2 days I charged the car up from 57% to 82%, and took off on a celebratory road trip to Niagra Falls, where I charged the car from hydro power from a dam my grandfather had engineered.

When I got home, it was November. Days were getting ever shorter. My solar upgrade was only 1/3rd complete and could charge the car 30-some miles per day, but only on a good day, and weather was getting worse. I came back with a low state of charge (both car and me), and needed to get back to full in time for my Thanksgiving trip at the end of the month. I decided to limit my trips to town.

charging up gradually through the month of November

This kind of medium term planning about car travel was new to me. But not too unusual for offgrid living. You look at the weather forecast and make some rough plans, and get to feel connected to the natural world a bit more.

December is the real test for offgrid solar, and honestly this was a bit rough, with a road trip planned for the end of the month. I did the usual holiday stuff but otherwise holed up at home a bit more than I usually would. Charging was limited and the cold made it charge less efficiently.

bleak December charging

Still, I was busy installing more solar panels, and by winter solstice, was back to charging 30 miles on a good day.

Of course, from there out things improved. In January and February I was able to charge up easily enough for my usual trips despite the cold. By March the car was often getting full before I needed to go anywhere, and I was doing long round trips without bothering to fast charge along the way, coming home low, knowing even cloudy days would let it charge up enough.

That brings me up to today. The car is 80% full and heading up toward 100% for a long trip on Friday. Despite the sky being milky white today with no visible sun, there's plenty of power to absorb, and the car charger turned on at 11 am with the house battery already full.

My solar upgrade is only 2/3rds complete, and also I have not yet installed my inverter upgrade, so the car can only currenly charge at 9 amps despite much more solar power often being available. So I'm looking forward to how next December goes with my full planned solar array and faster charging.

But first, a summer where I expect the car will mostly be charged up and ready to go at all times, and the only car expense will be fast charging on road trips!

By the way, the code I've written to automate offgrid charging that runs only when there's enough solar power is here.

And here are the charging graphs for the other months. All told, it's charged 475 kwh offgrid, enough to drive more than 1500 miles.

January

February

March

April

help I am trapped
in a major corporation

This reply from mozilla re firefox's TOU is fucking unbelievable in form and content. This is a formerly technically competant individual. I am reduced to looking for the hidden message in the formatting at this point.

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1099130#39

#thunderbird's ssl cerficate checking is so secure that I had to tell my dad to disable it and use cleartext

why is a new, valid certificate something they insist on confirming each time letsencrypt mints a new one?

Today starting to clear ground for my second solar field. This will be located North of House and will hold a 12 panel ballasted ground mount array, 5kw. It will also serve as a firebreak on that side of the house.

gotta say it's nice when an org, who is funding my work, picks out some items from the todo list of infinite length and says, maybe work on these

I know that sounds a bit like a job job, but sometimes it's nice to be managed just a little bit, especially in these times

(thanks, you know who you are)

Doing my weekly installation and then removal of #firefox to check if it presents the Terms of Use to new users. Like Mozilla claimed they were gonna do in their blog 1.5 months ago:

"actually asking you to acknowledge it is an important step, so we’re making it a part of the standard product experience starting in early March for new users and later this year for existing ones."

... Still no sign of the ToU on a fresh install.

Spent $18.77 charging my #EV over the past 2 months. Drove 1194 miles, so $0.016 per mile.

Knoxville TN #handsoff

yesterday I poured some soup out on the cutting board and chopped it with a knife

at least I am not dealing with this actual KYC procedure, which can only be passed by an owl

ascending to the 4th dimension will surely be needed to make this horrible selfie KYC tool finally realize my head doesn't perfectly fit within their oval due to not being exactly the shape of an oval

stuck in KYC hell and now it wants pictures of all 4 sides of my driver's license

Solar panels installed on the planters I started on Friday.