Monthly Archives: January 2019

Electric Car Review – Ioniq PHEV

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I’ve had the new Hyundai Ioniq PHEV Plug-in hybrid electric car for just over a week now. So I can give a better account of what it is like to drive and own. As with most modern cars, it has a heap of complex software options in the inbuilt computer which is capable of doing more things that I care to learn about in the short-term. A bit like my phone or my laptop, it can do much more than I will ever ask it too. It will take me a little more time to work through all the options and internalise them to a point that they are at my finger tips and therefore useful to me. At the current time most of it is still opaque to me, so I don’t attempt to use stuff that I don’t see any need for. Especially if it distracts me from my driving, I don’t go there. 

 

I am not a petrol head, so I don’t know anything about cars. I’ve always bought the cheapest, fuel-efficient car that I could afford. That was nearly always a 3 cylinder, 1 litre engine car. We had a Daihatsu Charade and then a Daihatsu Sirion. We had them for about 10 years each and about 250,000 kms. Being one of the cheapest cars on the road, they came with manual everything, totally no-frills driving. I really enjoyed driving a small manual car. That is what I’m used to. So the hardest thing to get used to in this new car is not the technology or the electric propulsion, but the fact that it is an automatic! I’ve never driven an automatic car before. I still feel the need to lift my left foot to de-clutch as I approach a stop sign!


The car has 3 modes of travel. Fully electric directly off the battery, Hybrid electric where it starts off in Electric mode and sometimes switches to petrol mode if you put your foot down. and then ‘Sports’ mode, which seems to engage both motors at once. This mode is pretty zippy – I’m impressed! Changing between these modes is done electronically with the press of a button.


I have spent the first week mostly driving in ‘eco’ mode in fully electric selection, because this is why I chose this car. I have lots of solar PV on my roof and a Tesla battery at home, so I’m completely ready for fully solar electric living and travel. I have found that I can do all my local driving on the battery in eco electric mode. Recharging is done using a bog standard 10 amp 3-pin household power point and takes 4 hrs if the battery is almost fully depleted.


Because I’m not a pushy or aggressive driver, driving as I normally do and am used to doing around here, the car stays in ‘eco’  fully electric mode 99% of the time. Just occasionally when I come to a steep hill and put my foot a little harder on the accelerator, the petrol engine cuts in when I’m in Hybrid mode and I can feel the surge of extra power propel the car forward. Because the car is electric (most of the time), there is no engine noise or vibration when you pull up at the lights. The car pulls away smoothly and silently from the lights. If it is in hybrid mode the engine cuts in after a hundred meters or so, or if/when you get up to 20 kms/hr or so. This is totally seamless and the only way that I know that it has happened is the little icon on the dash that changes from electric to hybrid.


Most of the time it is just steady as she goes, totally silent, comfortably plush and comfy driving. The most noise that I hear is the tyre noise on the bitumen, I’ve become quite aware of the differences in road surface and the various noises that they each create. Visibility is very good with the mirrors. I really dislike cars that have tiny back windows. The back hatch on this car has a metal bar across it as part of the design to strengthen the huge flowing lines of the sculptured, mostly glass hatch. but visibility is still very good. I’m used to driving with the 5 point visibility habit and this design works perfectly well for me. However, I can see that I will eventually start to loose this habit, as I become more accustomed to the reversing camera and the active side mirrors.


Even though this car is the base model it has a few bells and whistles. Like side mirrors that have an alarm built-in that beeps and flashes to let you know another car is very close on that side if you put your blinker on to change lanes. It makes a humming sound that is generated when driving slowly in pedestrian zones like shopping centre car parks, so that people car hear you approaching from behind. It has adaptive cruse control, so that if you are cruising along and another car pulls into your lane in front of you, this car automatically senses that car and slows down to the same speed as the car in front, keeping several car lengths distance. The car also beeps if you cross a marked lane without indication. When reversing, it beeps if there is a car coming from either side that you can’t see, as you attempt to reverse out of your parking spot. The media player/radio also cuts the volume to half when you put the car into reverse, so that you become more aware of your outside surroundings as you reverse. All these little gadgets are very common in all new cars these days I expect, But our last car purchase was 13 years ago and it was the very basic poverty model. So this is all new to me.


The car has an automatic, 6 speed, dual clutch, gear box, so that either motor can operate independently, but also at the same time in unison, when you choose to. It is powered by an Atkinson cycle 4 cylinder, 1.6 litre petrol engine, as well as the electric motor. Although it is still a small car hatch back, it is also the biggest car that I have owned. The Atkinson Cycle motor is a very interesting design and is particularly fuel-efficient. Try searching for it on the Wiki. To get the best fuel efficiency out of the car, many of the panels are made of aluminium and the rest of the body is made from super high strength, hot pressed, high tensile steel making it lighter, yet stronger. This saving in chassis weight is taken up by the battery. In stead of using the brakes, the car uses  standard regenerative braking that is basic to all hybrid cars. An idea that has been around since the 50’s. Over-all there are a lot of little efficiencies all combined together to make this an impressive piece of engineering.


Of course, most of these ideas are not new. The Toyota Prius has been around for 20+ years, but it can’t drive on sunshine, it is strictly a petrol powered car. Many of the initial concepts of both electric and hybrid cars were introduced to me by Meredith Thring in 1980 when I read his book. Professor M W Thring pioneered many of these innovations in Yorkshire at the University of Sheffield and later at Queen Mary College, at the University of London in the post war period. See regenerative braking above. I bought the book that he wrote after he retired in 1980, called ‘The Engineers Conscience’. Interestingly, he was an Australian who moved to the UK to work, so maybe we can lay some marginal claim to the intellectual property invested in this car. I can safely claim to have been intellectually engaged in watching the long, slow development of these cars since the 80’s.


I have driven 500 km so far and the fuel tank is still completely full, the indicator hasn’t left the full mark yet. I must say that it is a very rewarding feeling to be able to drive totally on sunshine. I know that this will annoy some people, but the development of cars like this has been in the back of my mind since 1980 and has now become manifest in the availability of this car in Australia now. I have to say that it is so important to me and very rewarding to be able to drive for the rest of my life on the sunshine that I collect off my own roof. 

That’s priceless.

Driving on Sunshine

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I’ve been telling people that 2019 is going to be the year of the electric car. Yes, I’ve said it before, just a week or so ago. Well, It really is now. We have just taken delivery of our  electric car.

It’s a beauty, totally silent running. It’s quite a wonderful experience to behold a powerful, yet simple, quiet and elegant car perform so well. And mostly running on sunshine too! Why has it taken so long for this type of car to become available in Australia?

Our new electric car is a Hyundai Ioniq, plug-in electric car. We ordered it a few weeks ago. The first to be delivered here in Australia, or so I’m told by the dealer. We had to order it and wait for it to be built in Korea, then shipped to Australia. The local dealership system doesn’t carry the ‘basic’ model in stock, only the premium model. This car has been available in Korea and other countries like New Zealand for 2 years. Why so long to get to Australia?

The Hyundai Ioniq electric car is available in 3 models. Fully electric, Normal hybrid (like a Toyota Prius), and a plug-in hybrid. After considerable research, we decided to choose the plug-in hybrid model. A fully electric car has a limited range of 230 kms. Not enough for us to live here out in the country and travel to Sydney and back for the day. Maybe in another few years there will be more recharge stations and better batteries? As it stands, we would need to own two cars, a petrol car and an electric one. For this reason we chose the plug-in electric hybrid, because we can do 95% of our trips on fully electric, battery-powered, solar generated electricity. But also be able to drive longer distances on petrol power when we need to go the long distances occasionally. Like our once a year trip to Canberra or up the North coast.

It’s a very modest car. Nothing showy. I have only owned it for one day so far, so very early days. The company claims 63 kms of fully electric power with ‘normal’ driving and 1000 more on a full tank of petrol. The blurb claims something like 110 kms per litre of fuel. I drove it around and reduced the battery down to 20%, where the petrol engine started to cut in occasionally, acting like a hybrid does. I plugged it into the standard 3-pin, 10 amp power point at home and it recharged itself in 3 and a bit hours using the built-in charger. Fully recharged on solar power.

The onboard computer keeps a track of how you drive. I have always driven carefully and steadily to conserve petrol in all my previous cars. Which have always been very small, fuel-efficient cars. Mostly 3 cylinder, 1 litre cars. This is the biggest car that we have ever owned, but it is still classed as a small car. A 5 seater 1.6 litre hatch-back. After charging the battery the computer tells me the distance I can travel on the battery and even shows me on the built-in sat nav screen, the radius of the places I can reach on the map + where all the nearest charging stations are.

We live 25 ks from the nearest towns where we do our shopping and banking, where we have all our accounts etc. So I expect that I can do 100% of our local trips on solar power in future.

So the first day has gone very well. The car does everything that I expected, It comes with an 8 year warranty on the battery and mechanical parts. I look forward to only visiting the fuel pump a few times a year in future. It’s a nice feeling to look forward to driving mostly on sunshine for the rest of my life. Because we already own a Tesla Powerwall II battery, we can always recharge the car on stored sunshine, even on dull over cast days.

   

Solar PV Fired Pottery Kiln

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We have been creating a life here for over 40 years, living as much possible as off our few acres of forrest, orchards and gardens. We have spent a lot of personal energy in converting all our energy needs, to wood fired everything. We have chosen to leave half of our land as forest, and there are always trees that are maturing, dying and falling over in that forest.

We haven’t harvested all the trees that have fallen on our land, as there are too many, so we have left the ones in the most remote locations to rot, as it was just too much effort to make a track into the bush to get to them out. If a tree falls in the forrest – does anybody hear? No! That is line from a song. If a tree falls and we let it rot, then it ends up the same as if we cut it up and burnt it in the house oven or kiln. The carbon that was taken from the air and soil, returns to the air and soil, only just a bit slower with composting than burning it in the kiln. Composting is a slow form of combustion.

Having spent a lot of thought and energy converting our life over to non-fossil fuel energy, we now find that with global warming, the fire bans start a month earlier and go on for a whole month or more longer in the autumn. This has caused us some trouble lately, as we have had to cancel the last few, late winter/early spring wood firing workshops here in the past couple of years.

So, if this new warmer future is to be our new reality, we had better make plans to adapt. Well we have. Starting 13 years ago we decided to go fully solar on our house and workshop and haven’t paid an electricity bill since. Those early Australian made solar PV panels have now paid for themselves, and from now-on we will have free electricity for the rest of our lives.

We live so frugally in our home these days, that we have found that we can now live on a quarter of the electricity that we used to. We have done this very simply by introducing efficiencies. As old appliances wore out, we replaced them with very low energy newer models. It’s not hard to do, but it takes time and a lot of research. It has taken time because we didn’t just throw out working appliances. We waited until they died of old age. There is so much embedded energy in electrical goods, that it is a crime to replace them before they are worn out. We have reduced our daily energy consumption in the house from 11 kW/hrs per day down to 2.5 kW/hrs. This means that there is now a lot of excess, clean, solar electricity that we can use to fire our kilns cleanly and efficiently.

As we now have a problem with firing the wood kilns all year. I have decided to convert all our Electric firing over to solar PV.  I have built a new light weight, portable electric kiln from very low thermal mass materials. I have included a couple of small LP gas pilot burners into the design, to allow me to create reduction atmospheres after 1000oC with tiny amounts of LP gas while the solar panels and the battery fire the kiln load of pots up to Stoneware.

There is nothing earth shattering about this. Korean, Japanese, and Chinese potters that I have met and worked with have been using a combination of LP gas or wood fired electric kilns for years.

This is my version of the idea. Light, flexible, portable, low energy and suitable for solar PV and battery firing.

It didn’t hurt that I was able to build it totally from spare parts and waste material that was left over from my many years as a kiln builder. I only had to buy a thermocouple for this kiln, as the old-fashioned temperature controller unit that I had sitting in a box for the past 20 years, needed a specific thermocouple to make it work.

I find it amazing and very rewarding to be able to convert a few boxes of  old ‘rubbish’ that other people had thrown out, plus some left over material, and turn it into an amazing, functional, energy-efficient, working kiln.

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I had a couple of sheets of stainless steel left over from other jobs.

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I have been storring a few sheets of ceramic fiber for over fifteen years. They are left over from a glass kiln job that I did many, many years ago. They are pre-fired, pre-shrunk, hardened and ready to use for a job just like this

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I even find that I have a shrink-wrappped coil of Kanthal A1, element wire sitting in my store.  It’s been there for years. It was left over from a job that I tended for, but which never materialised. I spend sever days working on these new heat flow and emisivity calculations to get the best answer for what I have in stock, compared to what I really want to achieve. After 5 goes at the problem, I have generated many pages of mathsand enough energy to warm the kitchen when I’m working and re-working out all the perameters. I eventually get a good answer that I can live with. I have to make a new mandrel for my lathe to suit this job.  I find that I can use some of the left-over stainless steel fire-bar material that I still have from the little portable wood fired kilns jobs of the last few years. It turns out to be just about the exact size that I need. I alter my calculations and go ahead and use it.

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When I go looking, I even find that I have a few control pyrometers and a couple of infinity switches to do the basic job of controlling the kiln. It’s not an electronic, solid state, ramp controller, but it will do nicely. I will have to do the first few firings in conjunction with pyrometric cones viewed from the small circular spy hole.

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After a few weeks of part-time work, fiddling away in my spare time. I have what I think might be a functional kiln. I have sifted through several piles of ancient junk, destined for the re-cyclers. I have discovered a lot of functional bits and parts that I wasn’t very interested in using 20 years ago, but which I can see potential in now. So many potters wanted to have their kilns converted to electronic ramp controllers in the past. I did the conversions for them, but couldn’t bring myself to throw out a perfectly good, working order, analogue kiln control unit. I’m now glad that I persevered, and storred all this junk for so many years.

I’ve found that I have enough parts to build two kilns, so I probably will. This first kiln is designed to be very low thermal mass, firing to stoneware on solar PV + with some back-up later in the day, as the sun goes down, from our Tesla Battery. I have a couple of very old, but un-used, brand new, pilot burners, these are so old that the company that built them has now ceased to exist. My plan is to use these two tiny pilot burners to create just enough CO atmosphere to give me adequate reduction, while the elements powered by the solar PV fire the kiln.

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I’m hoping that it will work as I planned. Only time will tell. Watch this space.

It’s been quite good slowly fading into semi-retirement. Cleaning out years of old boxes that I had forgotten about on that dusty top shelf. There were two whole kilns stored away in the form of spare parts.

 

Note to self, don’t buy plastic crap – again!

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I wanted a simple dust pan and hand broom to clean up in the workshop. The only choice in the shop was between 2 similar styled plastic ones. What happened to wooden handled hand brooms with stiff bristles? And metal dust pans!

Long gone in the race to the bottom of quality and price. Couldn’t someone at least produce something of quality that would last? I hate having no choice but to have to buy plastic junk. this is just land fill in waiting. Well, as there was no choice I had to choose a plastic one and lo-n-behold, what happened, but the handle broke in two in the first few weeks. I refuse to be so insulted with such blatant built-in obsolescence, so I determined to fix things.

I made a pair of reinforcing brackets out of some scrap pieces of aluminium and bent them to fit snugly into and onto both sides of the broken handle, then pop riveted them into place. This is still a piece of plastic crap, but at least I have fore-stalled its trip to land fill for a while.

 

I still want to buy a wooden handled, natural bristled, long-lasting broom. I’ll have to look harder. This impromptu repair won’t stop the rest of the plastic from collapsing in time.. Maybe I can dismantle it and reuse the bristles?

Watch this space.

The old dust pan too is on its last legs. At least this one has seen a bit of use to justify its existence.

I decided to make a dust pan that will last couple of hundred years out of a piece of Stainless steel scrap. The off-cut is a bit smaller than I would have liked, but I use what I have.

It all sort-of goes to plan. It’s a bit narrow. The next one will be better. This is my first attempt after all. When I get a bigger piece of off-cut, I’ll make a wider one.

Home Made Ice Cream

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Over the summer Miss Sweet Tooth has been making home-made ice-cream with our excess of fruit from the orchards. Never a dull moment.

Her latest experiment was lemon grass ice cream. That was pretty nice. She crushed some lemongrass shoots. Home-grown, organic, free range, lemon grass. It grows wild under the tank stand these days. She boiled it with a couple of tea spoons of sugar to give it a little sweetness. Then, after cooling it down she whisked it together with a 300 ml. jar of our local dairy’s fresh cream. She did it the simple, old-fashioned way, just using a fork.  The mixture has to be put in the freezer and taken out twice or three times during that day to re-whisk it to get it fluffy and light while it is freezing.

She has made all sorts of fruit based ice creams this season. What ever is in excess gets pulped, boiled, sieved, creamed, whisked and frozen.

So far she has made youngberry, yellow plum, peach, red plum, Japanese green tea, cumquat and now lemongrass. If it’s got a nice flavour, if you can boil it and freeze it, then it can be made into ice-cream. Don’t stand still for too long in this kitchen!

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Simple and very interesting, tangy, fruity, sweet and delicious stuff. Lovely mouthfeel and with that ultimately satisfying hint of saturated fat on the finish! A lovely way to end a meal on these hot days.

She used to make her icecream using an egg custard base to make the ice cream richer. I believe that this might be the traditional way. However, this straight forward simple recipe is quicker and works well enough for us. The only thing to be carefull of is to not use too much water in the fruit juice syrup, or you will get a lot of ice crysytals forming.

Health warning – don’t eat ice-cream. It contains sugar and saturated fat.

Life advice – Chase more butterflies , eat more ice-cream!

Driving on Sunshine

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I’ve been telling people that 2019 is going to be the year of the electric car.

Well, It is.

I have just taken delivery of my first electric car.

We took delivery on Friday.

It’s a beauty, totally silent running.

Amazing torque.

It’s quite a wonderful experience to behold a powerful, yet simple, quiet and elegant car perform so well.

And running on sunshine too!

No petrol tank to fill.

Why has it taken so long for the powers that be to get on board.

I’m a very proud owner.

I love it.

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All they need to do now is to scale it up.

Seasonal Vegetable Pasta

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We are now harvesting the late yellow peaches and although the early youngberries are long gone now and just a memory for another year, the thornless blackberries are in full swing and they integrate very pleasingly with the constant supply of blueberries. All the early season blueberries have finished, but the crop seamlessly flows into the mid season varieties and we still have un-ripe late-season berries slowly colouring up in the bushes. Either it’s a very good season for the blueberries, or after 10 years, the bushes are hitting their stride.

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Breakfast is just the freshest and most delicious meal of the day. Mouthwateringly vitamin C tangy, crunchy, succulent and sweet. Each mouthful bursting with sunlight and vitamins. All the ingredients picked fresh every day, straight from the garden. They couldn’t be fresher or more vibrant. Such a refreshingly interesting way to wake up the taste buds and kick-start the day. We are now vegetarian this month, as the fish truck that comes up from the South Coast 2 days a week, is now on summer break for the whole month. We won’t be seeing him again until February. But as there is so much coming in from the garden each day, we haven’t noticed any lack in our diet.

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Last night we picked tomatoes, capsicums, chillis, Zucchinis and fully formed scarlet runner beans. These are too coarse to eat whole now, so I peeled them and we added the fresh beans to the vegetable marsala mix. Starting off with my Xmas present of lemon myrtle infused olive oil, onion and garlic, then sweating down the vegetables in the juice of the tomatoes, aided by a little dash of white wine. To keep the lemony theme going I add a little sprig of lemon thyme, some basil leaves and two quarters of diced, preserved lemon rind. This is simmered down to a delicate crunchy softness.

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I served this super-fresh garden passata-like sauce over soba noodles. I love watching soba noodles cook. They take one minute to soften, then as they loosen up, they start to roll in the boiling water, for about 2 minutes, and then as they swell and expand, they slowly stop rolling and tumbling, about one minute, and they are ready. To keep the fresh lemony zangy flavour profile going, I served the meal topped with a very tiny sprinkling of Japanese Sansho pepper. 

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This stuff is exceptional. It has a delicate lemony fragrance and initial taste. The taste is so good and so complex that I want to taste more, zingy, zesty, bright, savoury citrus-like flavour. It is so more-ish, but when you have that little bit more, it starts to make your tongue go numb. So I restrain my self adding just the very smallest amount. We buy this pepper in the markets in Japan each visit, freshly ground each day and then vacuum sealed in a foil sachet. We buy it on our last day before flying out and take it straight to the freezer compartment of out fridge. Here it keeps its freshness and full flavour for a year, or until we run out. last trip I bought several packets, some as gifts, but mostly because I’m greedy.

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Now it just so happens that I have the perfect pot to serve the right amount of sansho pepper in. This tiny little dish was once an ancient, broken Chinese Bowl. The only part left in tact was the foot rim. The remnants of the bowl body was ground away down to just the undamaged foot itself. Measuring about 30mm across and 25 mm inside and just 6 mm deep. It is ideal for presenting just the smallest amount of sansho pepper. A perfect re-imagining, reworking and re-use of a remnant of a gorgeous ancient Chinese bowl. Perfect!