Month: January 2019

Reducing the mass of vehicles on the road might contribute to a climate change win

This little epiphany occurred to me when I was reconsidering some of the past work I had done on ebikes. Ebikes are incredibly eco-efficient when compared to petrol cars and even electric vehicles, not just because they utilise electric power as well as pedal-assist, BUT ALSO because the vehicle itself has a far lower mass than virtually all motor cars. In fact, I calculated in a previous blog article that an electric bike is roughly 21 times more eco-efficient than a Nissan Leaf. 

Currently, most climate change goals focus on switching petrol cars to the electric fleet. An equally valid goal might be to reduce the overall mass of motor vehicles on the road by a certain date. 

But if you think about it, what really does the damage when a car drives is not the fuel type that a vehicle consumes, but the amount of mass of that vehicle. The greater the mass, the more energy required to motor the vehicle. 

Putting incentives in place to get people to switch down from large gas guzzlers to smaller, more eco-efficient vehicles, even if those vehicles still run on petrol, could in some ways be very effective and another way (on top of the switch to renewable energy vehicles) that one could compound the reduction in carbon emissions from more efficient vehicle use. 

Switching to an ebike has reduced my carbon emissions from travel by around 900 kilograms last year. It has also saved me a pretty penny in fuel expenses. 

The point is that there are vectors to reducing carbon emissions through motor vehicle use that are not currently being considered and that ought to be forefront of people’s minds. 

Did CRC improve my ebike battery efficiency by 35%?

I noticed this on my way in to work this morning. December was a very busy month for me, and with the ebike having heavy use, I nonetheless had very little time to give it the TLC it deserved. In particular, I fed it no CRC across about 7 weeks and at the end of it the ebike was squeaking like a baby mouse.

My standard trip into work during this period consumed around 35% of the battery charge. This would leave me enough charge to get home and enough to pop down to the shops if I needed to.

Last night I applied CRC for the first time in a while. The result this morning was that the bike rode incredibly freely, with far less squeak, and in addition to that, only took me a 26% charge to get to work!

That is an improvement in battery efficiency (for the same ride, on the same settings) of just under 35%.

While this won’t make much practical difference in how I use the bike, the implications are massive.

It means I could go an extra 10 kms to and from with a well maintained bike for each recharge.

It also means that problems I attribute to the battery may in fact just be not enough oil on the chains.

I’ve always applied CRC in the past more as a chore, rather than something that could actually help me. I didn’t realise that by failing to apply CRC I was making my bike ride a third harder!

But now with ebike batteries, these sorts of minor things are much easier to quantify.

Understanding how solar works conceptually, so you can explain it better

Solar power has changed our household. It was not necessarily the wisest investment, and had I known all that there was to know before I installed it I probably wouldn’t have installed it. But even so, it has completely changed how we understand and use power within our own household, and in addition to the power the panels have provided, it has led us to reconsider our use on many appliances to make more efficient use of the power supplied.

Solar power does not generate a consistent amount of power every day. The worst days will be when it is rainy or overcast the whole day through. On these days, even our 1.5 kWh system might only generate 1 kWh of total power – barely saving us 25 cents.

On brighter days, it may generate ten times this amount. The problem is, during the brightest of days, we have very little need of daytime energy.
We are with an energy provider who offers us a very good rate overall, but who does not allow us to sell surplus energy back to the grid. This means we must find creative ways to use the surplus. One of the best ways I’ve found of using up surplus solar energy is to make evening meals using a slow cooker that you leave running during the daytime. This can easily consume 1.8 kWh of your surplus, and take that energy off the grid for the requirement of cooking an evening meal – a process that is far more efficient, as evening meals regularly use 2 to 3 kWh to cook during peak hours when solar supply is not available.

So to make better use of solar, you need to make sure that you have not only the supply, but also the household demand. Planning your solar use effectively is like a game that can literally save your household thousands of dollars over a few years.

I would not recommend solar for just any household. One of the first things you must do is assess your own household consumption. There is no real automated way to do this, so it requires a lot of planning and recording. You cannot glean these sorts of insights from your energy bill.

That means standing at your smart meter and recording power consumption levels on the hour, day after day if need be, and across multiple seasons if you want a really accurate forecast. Getting a real time picture of how much energy you use during daylight hours will improve the viability of your solar installation. Half of solar is in the planning.

This is an important step. One of the worst mistakes you can make environmentally is to buy more than you need.

Were an app or piece of software available that could parse your power consumption data and do the maths for you, this would greatly improve the efficiency of solar power installations worldwide. An upfront understanding of how and when your household actually uses power is critical to planning.

Solar is something that can be optimised through planning.

Sculpting home energy use to suit solar panels, or sculpting solar panel use to suit home energy needs?

One thing I just keep going back to is the optimal usage of solar panels, once installed, and the question this raises about how far one should tailor one’s energy consumption to suit the renewable energy that is now available.

The usage of solar panels is almost a question or architecture and urban planning. Knowing that one will receive a certain amount of (somewhat) predictable renewable energy supply means that one can plan obsessively over how to get a bit more squeeze out of the lemon, so to speak.

Solar panels are a very poorly understood asset. Their value is all too often overstated, and yet there are many opportunities for their deployment where they would deliver exceptional returns.

The question for me is, do I allow solar panels to dictate my usage of energy, particularly in summer when we have an abundance of it, or do I instead prioritise the (sometimes whimsical) use of energy in my household, and just use the panels as a mop to catch the consumption?

A better understanding of solar panels could potentially save me thousands. Yet I struggle sometimes in summer to come up with ways to use the power. 

I also struggle to adjust my habits quite as far as I should. I know I could make better use of my slow cooker, for instance. But with spare time across the holidays it’s actually more fun to chuck something on the frying pan.
This year I’m going to learn at least 15 new recipes. At least 10 of them will be slow cooker recipes. I could perhaps go so far as to invite a few more people over for a feed.

I also want to concentrate a bit more on legumes as a source of nutrition, and find ways to make better use of the stock I make.
It’s a fun little exercise, and cents are on the line.