Member postings for Mark Rand

Local trouble makers from 2000 years ago have nothing to do with science, the climate or how it works.

Edited By Mark Rand on 26/07/2023 13:26:45

Read, mark, learn and inwardly digest:- **LINK**

Is it really so hard to understand?

Edited By Mark Rand on 26/07/2023 11:04:55

There seem to be a lot of folk falling for the devon farmer's fallacy (my term):- "If I wanted to get there I wouldn't start from here".

Simple economics dictate that most people do/will-do most of their vehicle charging when electricity prices are lowest. This evens the local and national load out to a greater extent than the worst cases.

Parking of cars on the street (what the lamp posts are, with their connections to the local supply) and the local supply cables are just means that additional connections and metering need to be developed.

Connection times tor local charging hubs and local generation projects are no better or worse than they ever have been, with the caveat that if you and your neighbours don't want infrastructure anywhere you can see them, you won't get the benefits of said infrastructure (Bloody NIMBYs ).

generation capacity and distribution capacity have been evolving over time ever since Joseph Swan put his plant in to supply his house. It's a continuous process and there aren't any major step changes. Even the govenrment's 2030 and 2035 deadlines are not step changes. The average car age in the UK is 8.4 years and average age when scrapped is 14 years, according to Google,. This shows that the change from IC to EV won't be a sudden event and economic/commercial forces will allow needed infrastructure to be installed as required.

In the meantime, I'm still pondering on the payback calculations for putting solar panels on the youse roof to complement the 5.4kWp on the workshop roof.

The book I linked to is actually an extremely good SF yarn. which should appeal to most-all of those with an gengineering mindset. I certainly enjoyed it .

In further Interweb related adventures, I've just finished watching a Panorama program about EVs. It was quite interesting, even if dumbed down like all television programs are. In it, they say that National Grid reckon that EVs will increase overall electricity consumption by 10%, which is fairly trivial. They also say that the end date for sale of hybrid vehickes will be 2035. I like that, since plug-in hybrids seem to tick all the boxes if the price can be competitive.

Don't forget to take some potatoes with you.

Mick, a couple of of points:-

1:- the grid won't need Massive improvement. Average car milage tends to be about 12,000 per year. Average EV energy consumption tends to be .3kWh per mile. That works out at 14kWh per night assuming only 5 days per week and only night time charging. If people charge during the day and/or use installed solar capacity for charging, the load is that much less. That is about a 75% increase based on my, relatively small consumption and will mostly occur during off-peak times, when the grid is under-utilised.

2:- 2030 isn't the cutoff date for use of IC engined vehicles, it's the cutoff date for sale of them. There will be IC engined vehicles on the road for one or two decades after that. OK, one might have to buy fuel at the local chemist's shop, but that's happened before .

My 1983 Triumph TSS had/has a wire mesh strainer for the oil. Might catch flies, but wouldn't catch mozzies.

Must get it back from the brother-in-law...

But barley is both a desirable and a neccessary ingredient in beer or, at least, decent beer.

Since gluten is what holds the structure of the bread together, the bread is going to be a bit odd without it. As for the taste, rice and wheat don't taste the same as each other!

Two things on the direct reduction:- It can use methane/natural gas because hydrogen will reduce the iron oxide as well as carbon. This will automatically cut the CO2 production by a proportion. the second point, as noted by Nigel is that there need be no surplus CO in the furnace output. At Port Talbot, the excess CO (blast furnace gas) and surplus coke oven gas (town gas as was) were consumed by the Margam A and B power stations on site to generate process steam and electricity. At least, they were when we (GEC Turbines and either ICL or Babcocks, can't remember that bit) installed and commissioned the plant in 1984. But that still produces a lot of CO2 as an end product.

On cars, I feel that the current best option is a plug in hybrid. Use the electric for the vast majority of the mileage, especially the solar panels on the house/garage/workshop roof, but still have the Diesel (more efficient than petrol) engine for trekking from one end of the country to another.

I really can't understand the attraction of non-plug in hybrids!

Stuck with the Diesel Dacia for a few more years until the market for electric and PHEV cars has matured a bit more.

For those awfulising about Lithium battery fires in cars etc. Have you ever been involved with a petrol or Diesel fire in an IC engined car? I have...

Lithium iron phosphate batteries don't have the thermal runaway issues that lithium cobalt based ones do. They also don't contain large quantities of cobalt, manganese or nickel, which are all expensive elements.

As for range, My Dacia Sandero Diesel will do 650 miles on a tank if driven gently, but dad's Morris Marina wouldn't manage 300. That's no better than the best current EVs.

Edited By Mark Rand on 19/07/2023 16:22:01

I'm guessing that they got a better grant/subsidy offer than what was available for Coventry (Baginton) aerodrome. Coventry would have been closer to Tata/JLR's other plants.

Personally, I've been feeling the urge to make some knives recently. I'm getting sick and tired of the stainless steel kitchen knives that bur over as soon as any other member of the familiy use them. I like to be able to slice the tomatoes for my salads and cut the meat when preparing it and find that I'm having to steel every knife before I can use it. There are far better alloys available than 412 and 420 stainless which still have some corrosion resistance.

Humbrol used to be an oil based enamel, the current water based acrylic version isn't all that brilliant.

The paragon machine enamels really are pretty bulletproof. Turn the tin upside down after using it (with the lid on ) and it'll keep for a very long time

I hope you don't use him as a mechanic...

My 1.5l DCI Dacia specifies 10-30,000 miles and/or two years.

No one seems to have come up with the obvious answer:- Draw a sample of the oil, inspect/have it inspected and base the decision on that.

Some of the intervals folk assume seem to be driven more by advertising than by chemistry/tribology.

So, what is supposed to go bad in mineral oils after such a short time?

I assure you that it can and does work. Cheap VFDs won'd have the capability, but ones from the likes of Danfoss manage it. For that matter, if you've got an inverter TIG welder, it will be arranged that way as well. Unbalanced loads aren't a problem for any inverter, since the three generated phases are independent of each other, apart from timing. Some will fault if the unbalanced load limits are set too tight, but their purpose is to detect loss of phase in the load, not to protect the VFD.

I don't, personally, have those problems in the shed, since I use a seperate delta-star transformer downstream of the VFD/inverter in order to allow for a grounded neutral.

Regards
Mark

PS:- sorry for the thread drift everyone.

Point of order:-

If the inverter has balanced positive and negative DC busses, then it can produce star output as easily as delta. That's just a matter of a centre tap on the HF (DC-DC or AC-DC) converter transformer that generates the DC bus voltage in the first place.

Regards

Mark

You may need to provide some indication of location eg. address, or town or post code.

I'm tempted, but I broke my ankle last week and probably won't be up to driving for another 7-8 weeks .

Regards

Mark Rand