Electric yard tools

There are a lot of good reasons to ditch my gas powered yard tools, chief among them noise, pollution, and general unreliability, especially for the tiny-displacement 2-stroke stuff. I buy 89 octane, add Sta-Bil to every can, and use premix oil that is specifically designed for Ethanol gas, so it's not like I'm just having problems with old gas either. 

But my string trimmer and my leaf blower both seem to be fighting each other to get to the point where I'm sick of trying to keep them running and replace them. The leaf blower has already been replaced once under warranty (failed in under 2 years) though this replacement one is on its 6th year, and I haven't started to diagnose why it just quit and decided it didn't want to restart after running for 2 full tanks of gas yesterday. Both are at the point where they won't run without partial choke, meaning the carburetors are getting marginal, and while it is frequently possible to find a cheap replacement carb (they're basically disposable, you don't rebuild them), there's no Zen in the Art of Small Engine Maintenance. 

Part of the benefit of the modern battery-powered tool set enabled by the significant performance improvement of Lithium-Ion batteries is that most manufacturers have a whole line of various tools that extend far beyond the typical handheld drills and saws and such that all use the same battery and charger, which means that you typically have more batteries to swap for longer runtimes, and generally a better investment. But after looking at options for a bit this fall, I'm starting to think we're not quite there yet on the larger battery yard tools, at least for my use case. 

Here's what I mean in terms of use case: 

I have a string trimmer that is one of those power heads with a bunch of attachments, including a brush cutter, a pole saw, a hedge clipper, etc. Rather than start over buying a new set of discrete tools that use the same battery, I'd like to keep using those bits, though the string trimmer attachment is due for replacement. So this narrows down the set of available battery string trimmer power heads to the ones that support the "universal" attachments, which fortunately do exist. 

I have a backpack leaf blower, because I have almost an acre, and between my neighbors and me, we have a loooootttttt of trees. Even with a tractor and bag or mulcher to handle some of it, there's a lot of leaves to deal with in areas they can't get to. Also, I need the airflow and the form factor of a backpack model because after using my wired electric one for a good portion of yesterday after the gas one decided it didn't want to run (again! still!) my arms and shoulders have made it clear to me that I don't want to be carrying something handheld around all day like that, especially given the weight in battery any reasonable runtime requires. 

Speaking of runtime, there is definitely a need for some regulations/standardization as to how manufacturers talk about their electric tool runtime. Seems like they spend a lot of time touting huge CFM/MPH numbers on their blowers (or cutting speed/power on their trimmers) using the highest speed, but then quoting the reasonable-sounding runtimes based on lowest speed, so it requires research to find third-party reviews.

Until the leaf blower got sick yesterday, I was thinking the string trimmer was going to be my entry point and that I could wait until next fall for the blower. So I'd found a couple of models that support universal attachments and was just starting to look at blower options to decide which one made the most sense.

• Dewalt 60v system - nice trimmer, but Dewalt doesn't have a backpack leaf blower, and at $350, pricey.
• Ryobi 40v system - more reasonable, and has a backpack blower but I suspect the lower voltage means it will require additional batteries to get decent runtime. It's kind of telling that Ryobi doesn't even list a runtime estimate for their blower, and Home Depot only sells the package with the second battery that is pushing $500.
• Greenworks 80v system - same price point as the Dewalt, and the backpack blower is shockingly (pun intended) expensive ($700!). They have a more reasonably priced 60v system but it doesn't do universal attachments. 
• EGo doesn't have a power head that supports universal attachments.
• Husqvarna might have an option but it's hard to verify whether their power head supports universal attachments or just their own, and their 40v system is pretty expensive for what it is.
• Milwaukee doesn't have any backpack options and I haven't confirmed whether they have a universal trimmer head. Same deal with Makita.

So I think if I had to replace it tomorrow, I'm probably looking at the Ryobi system. But part of me thinks I need to try to nurse my dinosaur engines a little longer and wait to see if the options improve over the next year or so. Or possibly redirect the money I'd be spending here on a fall lawn service. 

Music in the car

While I did listen to NPR while I was commuting for a long time, I pretty much constantly listen to music in the car. The means to do this in my daily drivers went from juggling CDs for far longer than I care to admit (a 6-disc in-dash changer in several, an in-trunk changer in the 911) to playing stuff from my fairly large MP3 collection, first by burning DVDs of MP3s that the 911 could play on the in-car single disc, and then moving to dumping a bunch of stuff on a thumb drive or SD card, which was something that worked great on my 2010 Ford Flex (not really my daily driver) but has been sorta so-so at best on subsequent cars. Longer discussion about this for the Jeep in the dislikes section of this post and previously in my discussion of the Tesla here.

It's clear that Tesla doesn't really care about supporting USB as an audio source anymore, because all of my complaints about it keep getting worse rather than better, and they really want that USB port and storage device for the dashcam anyway. It's now basically rotted to the point of being unusable due to frequent audio drop-outs, so I've been looking for other alternatives. 

I have Amazon Music but there is no native app for that in the Tesla, only for Spotify, Slacker, and Tidal, none of which I use and thus would require a lot of setup work/additional subscriptions, etc. I suspect the lack of Amazon at least has to do with Elon and Jeff's ongoing "rocket measuring" contest, and I'm annoyed by the fact that something so simple is being hampered by a pissing match between two petulant billionaires, but that's life in 2022's Capitalist Technology Wonderland, I guess. 

Streaming Amazon Music via Bluetooth on my phone kinda(?) works, in that it will eventually result in music coming out of the car stereo, and I can see what's playing on the screen and skip to the next track with the car controls. But it never starts automatically - it almost always requires opening the app and telling it to play something. It rarely remembers what it was playing even if you've only been out of the car for a couple of hours. There's a widget you can add to the phone's home screen that shows what's playing, but even if it's displaying a song, getting in the car and pressing play on the widget does nothing, and you always end up having to open the app. Plus because I'm on Prime Music, but not unlimited tier, I would either have to pay more to get all of the music I want and then go through and add it all, or fight with the app even more to see if it deals ok with a combination of online music and local files and put a bunch of MP3s on the microSD card in my phone. And given how poorly it seems to manage its primary function, I'm not optimistic about that combination going well. I suspect it'd work ok if I built a bunch of playlists, but what I really like to do is to just point it at the whole collection, tell it to shuffle everything, and skip what I'm not in the mood for. 

But in looking for a decent Android MP3 player app so I could bypass that nonsense and hopefully find something that Just Works for playing music, I discovered that Youtube Music (formerly Google Play Music) has retained a feature I forgot it had, which is that you can upload your own music to the cloud and then stream it from the app. I was further pleasantly surprised to learn that they didn't hide that behind their premium subscription service. As I recall, it used to have a fairly low limit to the number of songs you could add, but they've also raised it to 100K songs, so I was able to basically just dump everything I have on there. There are still some limitations on how you use that music (details in the link), but it seemed like a worthwhile experiment before using up all of my spare local storage on the phone and playing with a bunch of different apps. The other tradeoffs is that I'm finding it isn't particularly smart about recognizing songs from metadata so artist and album info is incomplete and inaccurate a lot, and it isn't doing what I thought it was doing and recognizing the song from file info and hashes and adding the Youtube Music source file of the same song to your collection. It's actually uploading all of that data, and playing back your version of the file! So if the original is low-quality, or has artifacts from the CDROM drive skipping when you ripped it, like some of my stuff unfortunately does, those are still present. There's no native Youtube Music app on the Tesla either, and I just recently discovered that while there is one for Android Auto (which I have available in the new head unit in the 911), it doesn't have the section that allows you to access and play stuff from your uploaded library at all. I haven't tested if I can start it from the phone and be able to control it properly via the native app yet. Also, YouTube Music isn't much better at resuming play when you get in the car than Amazon. At least their widget mostly works, but I'm rapidly concluding that this isn't really the solution I'm looking for either. 

I feel like this shouldn't be this difficult, given the amount of general computing and audio devices I have to solve this problem, even if my use case is probably a little different than some. I'm sure there will be more to come on this post. 

Musings on Water Heaters

I'm coming up on 10 years in this house. This is my third water heater. The original one failed about 6 years ago by springing a (thankfully small) leak that may have been triggered by a combination of me not knowing that my water is a little acidic if not treated properly (I have a tank of carbonate that has to be replenished as the water dissolves it and it wasn't replenished for the first couple of years I lived here), plus shutting it off for week for vacation and letting everything contract as it cooled. Since it was a matter of needing an emergency replacement so we'd have hot water again, I didn't have a lot of time to evaluate options, and ended up with basically the same thing I had - propane, power-vent, and at least efficient enough that it could exhaust through a PVC pipe rather than a traditional flue, but pretty much the only example of such that the plumber could get their hands on from existing warehouse stock. 

I've been periodically looking at options for the eventual replacement that reduced the rate at which I consumed propane, because in addition to its contribution of greenhouse gases, propane is expensive. Not as bad fuel oil (aka diesel), but still significantly more expensive than natural gas. This went from background research project to slightly more urgent when the current tank celebrated the end of its warranty by starting to drool from the bottom late last year. 

Some of the options I considered and some thoughts about them:

• Tankless - still propane, but notionally more efficient because you're not storing a tank full of water. Tankless hot water heaters deal in the number of degrees that they can heat water at a given flow rate, meaning that things like your water inlet temperatures matter a lot, as well as how you use hot water. I'm on a well, and so my inlet temps can be fairly cold in the wintertime, meaning that I would need something that can handle ~80-90°F temp rise at typical flow rate, and let's just say that my showerheads are "probably" not in their original 2.5gpm configuration, so fairly high BTUs, or I'd need to put 2 units in series. I also have a furnace-mounted humidifier that can run independently of the furnace and uses hot water, which means the demand is long-duration at very low flow rate. This would mean either the flow rate would be too low to trigger the hot water heater at all, meaning that the humidifier would be much less effective because it was using cold water, or it'd run the hot water heater way too often and waste energy even if it's good at throttling back to match flow rate demand. Basically, it's a really good demand for a tank full of already hot water. 
• Add-on heat pumps (option one, option two)- these are basically a standalone air to water heat pump that you plumb into a circulation loop so that they are adding heat to your existing hot water tank. In my application it's sort of the equivalent to a hybrid heat system like I am using for my main furnace- heat pump when it's efficient, propane when it's not. This is obviously more attractive if you have an existing tank with a fair amount of life left such that it's not a great plan to replace it, but my problem was that the two options I linked to above were the only ones I could find, and they were either discontinued or otherwise unavailable when I would have been looking to do this. In retrospect, I'm glad they were since I ended up having to replace the tank anyway, and a purpose-built heat pump water heater is way better at this than the bolt-on would be.
• A desuperheater - This is a secondary heat exchanger that pulls the excess heat out of the refrigerant on a heat pump before it's sent outside. These are pretty common on ground source (aka geothermal) heat pumps, but I found this one that is intended to be added to regular air source systems. I exchanged some email with the company and we jointly concluded it's not a good fit for my setup due to the installation requirements. First, the unit has to be mounted higher than the compressor right near the outdoor unit, and if you want it to run year-round, it has to be somewhere that doesn't freeze, meaning I couldn't mount mine outside. My heat pump outdoor units are on the exact opposite side of the house from my hot water heater, so that means a new plumbing loop, and because the ground level is only a foot or two below the basement ceiling, I'd have to mount it in my living room, instead of in my basement. I asked if I could mount it below the compressor, and apparently that causes problems, so while this may be an interesting option for some folks, it's not for me. 
• A more efficient storage hot water heater - traditional tank-style, but best possible efficiency.
• Condensing gas hot water heaters, where they use a secondary heat exchanger to pull enough heat out of the exhaust that some of it actually condenses, are less common than their furnace counterparts, but are at least available. They're quite expensive, and the increase in efficiency (98%) vs what I had (high-80-something%) felt like diminishing returns.
• Heat pump water heaters - these come in two main types: a split system with the heat pump part that mounts in a different location than the storage tank, and all-in-ones that basically just look like a taller electric water heater. The split systems give you additional flexibility in terms of where you source your heat and sink your cooling/dehumidification, along with the noise and power run, and some of them skip the backup heating elements in favor of a more heavily insulated tank and higher capacity heat pump. They can be put outside where the weather goes below freezing, but they're better suited for places where that's not the case, both in terms of effectiveness and in terms of how they keep themselves from freezing up when they're not actively heating your water. My hot water heater closet backs up to my garage, so in theory I could have put a split unit there, but my garage doesn't always stay above freezing either, nor does it have a lot of spare heat in the winter. Since the all-in-one units also have the usual 4kW heating elements as a fall-back, they require the same 30A 240v circuit as a regular electric water heater, which I had to add because I was switching types.  

I ended up going with this Rheem Performance Platinum model, or at least the Home Depot equivalent (there are some very minor differences between the Harry Homeowner version and their pro-series that is only available through a plumber/plumbing supply). I went with the HD version because it was in stock, while the pro series one was quoting lead times measured in months. Between the leak and the looming end of the tax year for rebate purposes, I went with expediency. It's considerably taller than my old water heater, and has slightly larger capacity - the old one was 60 gallon, this one is 74, although it is considered an 80-gallon due to the size.

Water heaters have an efficiency measure (UEF) that tells you how much of each unit of energy is going to the actual water heating vs being wasted in exhaust gas, etc. The best gas ones are .90-something, electric are 1, but the number can actually be greater than 100%. In this case, the one I bought is rated at 4, because the electricity to drive the heat pump nets roughly 4x the heat output of running a resistance coil of the same draw. I can't do a direct comparison because I didn't have a traditional electric water heater before, but electricity around here is below national averages and it's definitely an improvement over propane. There are also some asterisks on that efficiency number, because during the heating season, I'm pulling that heat and humidity out of space that I already paid to heat and humidify, albeit via a similarly-efficient heat pump, but the balancing factor is that during cooling season, I'm getting some "free" additional cooling. 

My hot water heater closet is already ventilated (louvered door and two wall registers) because of the former unit's combustion air requirement, so my initial installation just had it pulling air from that room, and it worked fine, but probably was not as efficient due to the resulting low temperature of that room. 

But both intake and exhaust can be ducted, so very shortly after installation, I took advantage of the fact that my basement is all suspended ceiling and I have a utility room where my network switch and two servers are happily converting electrons to heat 24x7 and set it up to pull air from there instead. Exhaust still stays un-ducted in the water heater closet for simplicity, and because the intake and exhaust shrouds are both sold separately, the maximum acceptable ducting length is cumulative between the two sides, and the exhaust shroud is almost $200. Either way, the water heater is now pulling the warmest air available (that room stays in the neighborhood of 5-10°F warmer than the rest of the basement) and the closest I have to indoor waste heat.

I considered running a ducting loop out to the garage so that it would be partially cooled in the summer, but since that involves some pretty large wall perforations (they recommend 8" duct), and would also require some relay logic to ensure that I don't do this when the garage is below the minimum operating temperature for the heat pump (40°F) I'm not sure how much benefit this would provide unless I at some point stop having as much waste heat in the utility room. 

As with many appliances in our Internet of Shite future, There's An App for That. It tells me when the water heater is running, what mode, how much hot water is available, and allows me to manage all of the settings including setting schedules, set temperature, getting cute with geofencing, and keeping track of power usage. So far, according to the usage stats, I'm averaging about 24 kWh of electricity per week, though there are some posts online implying that the power usage meter in this thing is not all that accurate. Using the rule of thumb I'm finding other places of a 3-4 hour runtime per day at 4kW, this seems well under an equivalent electric water heater, and now that the coldest part of the season is behind me, my propane demand drops to zero until next winter, so I'm happy with it. I have not run out of hot water, so it seems to be managing demand pretty well. 

Tesla Safety Score is Frustrating

Lots of digital ink has been spilled about Tesla's Full Self Driving beta, so I won't retread it here, except to say that I was hoping to be able to talk about my experience using it by now, and I can't, because I haven't. I have growing annoyance about the fact that I paid a substantial premium for a set of features I have yet to be able to fully use on my car, nearly 18 months into ownership. I do use Autopilot extensively, and some of its features were only available if you opted for the FSD upgrade, so it's not a completely wasted investment, but it's also been 6+ months since I requested access to the beta without getting it. 

What "requesting access to the beta" actually means is that I agreed to let Tesla grade my driving to prove that I'm a safe enough driver to be a good beta tester. It's sort of like one of those insurance company nanny widgets that you plug into the OBDII port to get a discount because you drive fewer miles or more safely than the average driver in your area. The FSD beta was initially opened to drivers with a perfect 100/100 safety score, and supposedly Tesla decrements the minimum acceptable number periodically when they want to let another tranche of people into the beta. I'm seeing things online that they're at 98 or 97 right now. But I still have no FSD beta access, so let's review what this means in real-life driving situations. 

Tesla's Safety Score is a daily score that contributes to a 30-day rolling average, which is the figure that Tesla looks at to determine who is a safe enough driver to be eligible for FSD beta. The cynic in me thinks that this is actually Tesla's way of making sure that those with more consistently complex driving environments don't get access to FSD and end up having a bad experience when the limitations of the relatively stupid robot that people are expecting to drive like a human are exposed. Anyway, my safety score tends to be in the 96-98 range. I've managed to get it to 99 periodically, but apparently not for long enough to qualify for the beta. There are 5 categories, and each is graded as green/yellow/red (increases your score/improving this will increase your score/decreases your score) based on your performance against an opaque figure Tesla calls "fleet median". I call it opaque because I don't know if it's the entire Tesla fleet or just those actively trying to qualify for FSD beta but not in the program yet, or if it includes those using FSD, or what geographic area is included - US only vs worldwide, etc. The app says "Median value for the Safety Factor based on the vehicles used to calibrate the safety score" which makes me think maybe it's none of those, and instead a carefully-selected control group of people who are also capable of consistently driving like the EPA range test group - the safest, most conservative few percent of drivers in the easiest traffic environments. Below is each category, and some thoughts about why I am where I am.

• Forward Collision Warnings (per 1k mi)
• This cares a lot about closing speed vs speed of the vehicle in front of you, and whether you're still holding the accelerator rather than braking to adjust, but it's a bit aggressive. I would be willing to own it if this was a situation where I wasn't paying attention and almost rear-ended someone, but that's not what happens in my case. Almost every one of these dings I've had are times where the warning triggers as I'm reacting to whatever set it off, which is frustrating, because I'm being graded on my reaction time rather than how safely I'm driving. Plus this one often goes hand-in-hand with a ding in the next category, so often it's a double-whammy. Given the amount that I drive, I almost always have one of these in the 30 day history, but usually not more than 1.
• Hard Braking (>0.3g)
• Assuming that you're not driving aggressively (accelerating hard and then braking hard) and are trying to drive smoothly, there are two main ways that this gets triggered, and in my opinion both are a bit unfair to use as an indicator of unsafe driving, since in most cases, it's exactly the opposite. Either you're braking hard to adjust for sudden traffic slowdowns, someone who does something you're not expecting, an obstacle in the road, etc. or you're trying to use regen braking/one pedal driving as much as possible and get caught by the fact that (as I discussed in a previous post) the regen braking level is not consistent and have to apply the friction brakes to slow down faster. This doesn't count when Autopilot is active, so there's another incentive to use Autopilot as much as possible. 
• Aggressive Turning (>0.4g)
• These cars have a low center of gravity, so they handle pretty well. Take advantage of that with even slightly spirited driving, and this metric is toast. So if we resign ourselves to having No Fun in the twisties, the other big trigger for this is when you are using Autopilot on secondary roads and it requires intervention - you're more likely to have to provide an aggressive, last-minute steering input to correct for Autopilot failing to turn aggressively enough on its own to properly follow the lane, or misjudging which lane it's supposed to be in as it crosses an intersection, etc. This would be a lot more fair if it didn't include incidents where autopilot was disengaged by the maneuver, but it's clear from my scores that this isn't what happens. 
• Unsafe Following Distance (appears proportional to speed, but no quantitative metric is given)
• This one is most frequently triggered when you're dealing with multi-lane roads and have to get into another lane because you need to turn or exit or pass, or if someone cuts you off. City traffic means aggressive drivers that will take an appropriate following distance as an opening to get in front of you, and the need to occasionally do the same to other drivers to force your way into a given lane. Consistent use of Autopilot helps, but Autopilot tends to be very conservative when dealing with requested lane changes in heavy traffic and so sometimes you have to override it to get where you need to be in time to make the desired maneuver. 
• Forced Autopilot Disengagements (if you're not holding the wheel for long enough that Autopilot shuts itself off)
• This is the only one I've had a perfect score on the entire time, because to trigger this, you have to have been not been applying sufficient pressure to the steering wheel for the better part of 60 seconds, then ignore both a visual and auditory warning. It's not difficult to stay on top of this one, and arguably this is a really good metric to disqualify people from participating in the beta because they're demonstrably not willing to properly supervise the robotic student driver to keep it from doing something stupid or unsafe. 

I see some things online indicating that there are ways to game the system. I'm not really interested in doing that, because I'm more interested in seeing whether it's actually possible to qualify in an area full of traffic, aggressive drivers and difficult situations if you don't cheat. Also while it's annoying that I still don't have access, this sort of reminds me of the reasons why I always stayed a release behind current when I had a Mac - there is definitely benefit to letting other people rush in on release day to be the unpaid beta testers and find all the broken stuff that shouldn't have escaped internal testing so that the system sucks less by the time I use it. 

Towing with a Tesla

I mentioned in a previous post that I was likely replacing my Husqvarna riding mower that has the ailing and mostly unserviceable hydrostatic transaxle with my dad's Kubota GR2100, which is far more robust and seems generally better suited for the amount of hills I have in my yard. My dad lives down near Martinsville (about a 4 hour drive from here), and we'd been sort of idly talking about how we might make the handoff. 

He has a small trailer that he bought specifically for hauling the aforementioned tractor, and so I had been thinking of maybe borrowing that to save him from having to make the trip. I got the factory towing package when I bought my Model Y, partially because I wanted a receiver hitch for my bike rack but also because it seemed reasonably useful to have another vehicle capable of towing a utility trailer or some similar should the situation call for it. We got as far as checking weights and things and confirming that it was well within the safety margins for the Model Y, but hadn't really planned to make it happen yet. But in the last week, my 100 year old step grandmother was called home, so I found myself in the area on fairly short notice this past Friday. Fortunately my dad had just last week put in an outdoor NEMA 14-30 for me to use for charging, so after the funeral we plugged the car in and set to sorting out the towing situation. Took some digging to find the right combination of receiver hitch/drop, tow ball size, and locking pin, plus the keys to unlock trailer, pins, etc. but we got it all sorted out. 

The Model Y's factory hitch has a 7-pin harness including wiring for an add-on trailer brake controller, and a Class III receiver. The Class III is kind of overkill, because the Model Y actually only has a 3500 lb towing capacity, with a 350 lb max tongue weight, which is technically within the limits of a Class II hitch. This does assume 3 passengers, so I suspect you could probably push it beyond that and not exceed the GVWR/GAWR, but I probably wouldn't go north of 4000 lbs even with a trailer with brakes, mostly because I'd be concerned about the rear end squat. As it was, because this doesn't ride particularly high (it's really more of a tall wagon than something with any pretention of being an SUV), I had to use a hitch with basically zero drop, and I was careful to get the meat of the load's weight over the trailer axle to avoid too much on the tongue. 

The trailer in question weighs about 1000 lbs, and the tractor is listed at 940, though I suspect that's dry weight, so it's probably around 1000 too, meaning we're at a nice even ton, plus just me in the car, meaning a total rig weight of around 6800 lbs. This trailer doesn't have brakes, but that really wasn't a big deal, because between the regenerative braking and the fact that the Model Y has pretty strong friction brakes, I was never concerned about the stopping ability for the whole rig. I'd want at least some surge brakes if I were hauling another 1000 lbs though. 

Prepping for towing

Accessing the hitch involves prying off a plastic cover on the rear fascia with a flat blade screwdriver. My Jeep had a cover, and it had thumb screws. This has plastic friction clips, and let's just say I suspect they probably only survive one or two removals no matter how careful you are. It's not a great design. Once you have the cover off, hopefully with all of the clips intact, you discover that the amount that the hitch is recessed, combined with the relatively small opening means that you're sort of fumbling around to get the hitch pin in place, and probably some longer ones might not fit at all, especially depending on the orientation of the lock. Additionally, the chain ears are way up inside the recess. Smaller hands probably make that easier to manage. Again, this is a case where the people who designed this probably didn't do a lot of towing. The rear camera does make it super simple to line up the ball and tongue. That's not unique to Tesla, but it is really nice to be able to turn on the camera when you're underway to check that part of the trailer. My trailer was fairly short, and about the same width as the car, so the regular mirrors were adequate once I adjusted them a bit, but a longer or wider rig would require towing mirrors, which would add drag and affect range. 

Plugging in the trailer harness activates Tow mode, which according to Tesla disables Autopilot, increases the following distance for the adaptive cruise control, and supposedly uses some different logic on the stability control to help manage trailer sway, something I thankfully did not have to test. I understand why they'd disable auto lane change, but I've grown very accustomed to using Autopilot's lane keeping, especially on long trips, and would have liked to be able to use that, especially since there are some times that you really do need to be able to look at the screen for a minute, and having something handle keeping you literally between the ditches is a great help. 

Actual Towing

Tow mode has a major thing missing, in that it doesn't adapt the car's baseline range estimates or trip planning algorithm at all. I get that every trailer is different, and the weight, aerodynamics, etc. all affect range differently, but at the very least, they could characterize a generic impact on range from towing and use that. This is an area where it's better to be a little conservative and end up with more range than you thought than dealing with constant range anxiety or worse, actually being stranded because you didn't stay ahead of the aggressive burn rate. Even if there was some way to manually tell the car to assume a certain percentage drop in range when planning the trip and determining needed charging stops, that'd be an improvement. But the car's default range displays were still claiming what is effectively ideal (aka only achievable on the EPA test cycle) range, and calculating charge stops according to Tesla's standard usage projections (which are more real-world accurate than EPA). What you end up having to do is put in your destination, drive for 30+ miles, which is long enough for the energy usage screen to get an average usage with you towing such that it can project your range based on the past 30 miles of historical burn rate, and then you have to compare that with how far the Nav system says you're supposed to be going. When it almost definitely is longer than your available range, you have to find a Supercharger on your route and add it manually. To make matters worse, because you have basically no sense for how much more range you're going to burn, you have to keep checking this periodically to make sure that you still have enough range to make it to the charger you chose, and then once you're at the charger, you have no guidance on how long to charge. I erred on the side of caution and charged back up to almost full, which meant that instead of the normal 15-20 minute stop to gain back 100-150 miles of range, I was looking at closer to 50 minutes, because the charge rate tapers off dramatically as the battery gets above about 80% charge. 

Charging while towing a trailer, in addition to being something you'll be doing repeatedly and often, is also a bit challenging, and again seems to be mostly an afterthought rather than something that Tesla tested or consulted with people experienced with towing to work through the logistics. Tesla charge ports are near the driver's side taillight, and because of the large cables involved in carrying 250kW @ hundreds of volts DC, Tesla makes them short and expects you to back into the space to charge. They have started putting at least one pull-in space in, but that's not universal, and it's not always that helpful, i.e. it's not longer than an average space, and it's not pull through, it's just nose-in parking. Only one of the two Supercharger stations I used even had one, and in order to use it, I still had to pull in with my nose well into the adjacent space (blocking a  second charger from being used), and my trailer was hanging out into the parking lot, only narrowly avoiding blocking the air compressor, to the annoyance of at least two Sheetz patrons while I was there. Someone pulled into the space in front of me and then left the parking lot, so I couldn't ask them to move, and so in order to get out, I had to back up with the trailer already halfway to jack-knifed. I managed to do it, but it took a good 10 minutes of back and forth. The second charging station had no good options, so I had to drop the trailer elsewhere in the parking lot, charge, then go retrieve it and reattach. 

Driving dynamics are fine, and it's a solid tow rig from that perspective. It was stable and predictable as far as handling went. Electric cars have stupid amounts of torque, and Teslas are overpowered, so the car barely noticed that the trailer was back there in terms of moving itself along at typical speed. It just used more juice. The trip is mostly highway, the majority at 60mph posted limit, with a few sections of 55, 65, and one 70, along with drops to 45 at traffic lights. I ran a bit above whatever the limit was, and even on the hills, there was no issue maintaining speed. One thing I did notice is that I didn't get as much regen braking as I would have expected going down hills, because the trailer's weight wasn't enough to overcome the increased drag. The only time I got any significant regen was when I was slowing down, rather than just maintaining speed on a downhill. The adaptive cruise control was surprisingly quick to adapt to the extra weight in terms of slowing the car down when needed. 

As I noted, this comes with a harness for an external brake controller, but I'm somewhat curious if you'd get enough control to really take advantage of the dual braking. Specifically - Teslas do regen braking as soon as you take your foot off of the accelerator. The brake pedal actuates the friction brakes directly, without any attempt to try to simulate braking with regen for the first bit of pedal travel before actually applying the friction brakes like many other hybrids and electrics do. Because the regen braking is so aggressive, the brake lights come on as soon as you lift off of the pedal. Assuming that the brake controller keys off of the brake pedal being actuated, the trailer brakes wouldn't be activated unless you need more than regen alone can provide, but you'd have to tweak the sensitivity carefully to ensure that you still are getting as much regen as possible. Seems to me that there's an opportunity to have integrated the trailer brake controller to make the entire system smarter and more efficient, but at this point I don't think Tesla is that invested in making this a full-time tow rig. I'll be curious to see how they do it differently on the Cybertruck, since that has to compete with actual trucks, most of whose manufacturers have spent a lot of time sweating details to make towing easier. 

By the Numbers

Here are the details of the trip, in terms of miles traveled, power used, etc. 

The trip down was effectively a control, because I didn't have the trailer. That leg, plus a bit of other driving around, was 269.5 miles, used 75 kWh, at an efficiency of 277 Wh/mi. Using standard conversion, this works out to 132 MPGe. The actual trip MPGe was probably a bit higher than that, because that figure included probably 40 minutes of me sitting with the AC on before the funeral, and a couple of "check out how fast this thing accelerates" starts for my dad. I used a combination of home charging and supercharging, so the fuel cost would be somewhere between $9 and $25. (I'm still using the last of my free supercharging, so I have to estimate based on what the going rate is rather than telling you what I actually paid.)

The return trip was more direct. I started at 100% charge. The Model Y has a 75 kWh battery, and I charged to about 95% at both stops, though I didn't actually need that long of a charge at the second stop. I traveled 242.1 miles, which used 141 kWh, at an efficiency of 583 Wh/Mi, or 62.9 MPGe. That would cost between $15.50 and $48 depending on how much was Supercharging. 

That was comprised of the following legs: 

• Ridgeway to Lynchburg: 82.7 mi, 51 kWh, 613 Wh/mi, 59.8 MPGe
• Arrived at 24% charge 
• Indicated range was 70mi, estimated range (based on last 30 miles' average) was 29.
• Lynchburg to Madison: 96.1 mi, 57 kWh, 591 Wh/mi, 62 MPGe
• Arrived at 17% charge 
• Indicated range was 84 mi, estimated range was 27.
• Madison to Manassas: 63 mi, 34 kWh, 532 Wh/mi, 68.9 MPGe

So the short answer is that you lose about 50% of your rated range, which is probably pretty equivalent to the haircut a petrol-powered vehicle takes to its range while towing, but on account of the reduced capacity, it is both impressive in terms of its efficiency, but also barely adequate in terms of being able to comfortably make it between Superchargers without careful planning. For me, it's nice to know I can do it if I need to, but clearly the sweet spot is short trips where the 100-ish mile max range isn't much of a concern. 

Road Trips with a Tesla

I took a 900+ mile road trip in the first month I had my Tesla Model Y, and I've managed to put 9,000 miles on it despite being in a pandemic lockdown and working almost exclusively from home in the 10 months I've owned the car, so this is by no means the first road trip I've taken, but the last couple I did (Eastern Shore of VA and Johnstown, PA) revealed a couple of things that I hadn't noticed before that I thought I'd discuss. 

Road trips in an electric car, even one with nominally 300+ miles of range, still require more planning than their fossil-powered brethren. I knew that going in, and TBH it sorta appeals to my inner tech nerd, but it's definitely not for everyone yet. Highway speeds, especially when the speed limit is 70 like many of the interstates around here, eat into that range, and since Tesla seems to have done a lot of work gaming the EPA test cycle for maximum claimable range, a safe estimate is more like 75% of claimed range, with additional modifiers if it's in a temperature extreme or there are a lot of hills. This isn't inherently a problem, but since you're dependent on chargers that even with some 2700 Supercharger stations and lots of other non-Tesla chargers available, are nowhere near as ubiquitous or convenient as ye olde petrol station. 

The car does a fair amount of the work for you, in that you put a destination into the SatNav and if it predicts that you don't have the range to make it to your destination, it automatically chooses a Supercharger on your route, and even tells you how much time you should spend charging to gain enough range to make it to either your destination or the next Supercharger on your route if it's a multi-charge trip. The prediction seems to know something about topography, speed limits, and the like, because I can see obvious kinks on the car's projected energy graph line that correspond to mountain passes and things, and if you run into construction or traffic that slows you down, you often end up with a slight gain in actual range vs projected. Its trip range indicator is pretty accurate on the highway even if the car's primary range indicator on the dash isn't (it uses either ideal conditions or a much less aware average to project range based on percentage of charge remaining). The car will even warn you to stay below a certain speed if it thinks you're at risk of running out of megableems before your destination. 

So they're doing a lot to help you manage range anxiety, and my experience overall has been that a restroom and snack/meal stop is plenty long enough to gain back the required charge such that I've rarely felt like I was wasting time compared with my previous road trips. It's especially nice that a lot of Supercharger stations near the highways are collocated with either a Sheetz or a Wawa, rather than a random mall, as that enables the same sort of relatively quick food/bathroom stop as one would make while refueling.

But there are some fundamental flaws in the way this system works right now, or at least bad assumptions that ultimately require you to do a little more planning than just hopping in the car, inputting your destination, and wafting away on a cloud of inconvenienced electrons, confident in both your car's range to never give you up, and the Supercharger network to never let you down. 

1. Tesla assumes that on a trip that stretches your range, you are going to be able to charge at or near your destination, and it doesn't really take into account whether you actually have enough range to make it to an appropriate charger post arrival, especially if it's not a Tesla charger. To complicate matters further, Tesla also appears to have lowered the threshold of acceptable minimum charge at destination both as their range projections improve, and in an attempt to reduce reliance on mid-trip charging (the Supercharger network is getting busier as more Teslas get sold) such that sometimes trips that a year ago would have featured a Supercharger stop now claim to not need it, but you roll into your destination with a projected 13% SOC (which likely translates to actually single-digit%). This is not user-adjustable. This might be ok if the stay is long enough to charge, but depending on where you are, that might mean:
• >24 hours charging @ 120v/15A (4 MPH of range added) - normal house current
• >12 hours charging @240v/30A (20 MPH of range added) - typical J1772 Level 2 charger/dryer plug
• >6 hours charging @240v/60A (41 MPH of range added) - Tesla AC charger (if these are installed at a hotel or somesuch, Tesla refers to these as "destination chargers")
• 30-60 minutes at a Supercharger (depends on whether it's 150 or 250 kW DC fast charging)
• However long you need on the above methods to gain back enough range to reach the closest Supercharger on your return path.
• There is also the rapidly-expanding CCS DC fast charger network that supports all the non-Tesla cars. In addition to often being expensive, bordering on usurious for its charge rates if you don't have some sort of deal through your manufacturer, Tesla owners have to buy a $500 adapter to make their car's proprietary plug interface with CCS. I suspect it will be a long time before the CCS network footprint exceeds the Supercharger network by enough to make that a worthwhile investment.
2. Tesla's in-car SatNav has no ability to do multi-stop trips, or even a toggle to indicate that this will be a round trip. While it shows you projected state of charge for a round trip briefly when you first start the trip, you can't actually get the car to act on that information. The only way to do this is by using Tesla's Trip Planner website and adding the multiple destinations to force it to calculate charge stops without assuming any other charging is happening so that you know what your charge and range situation might actually look like for all of the legs of your planned trip. And then likely you're going to end up manually selecting the appropriate Supercharger along your route as your destination, stopping for whatever amount of time you deem appropriate, then putting in your actual destination once you're done charging. So you lose all of the trip planning aid in the car. And even when the car decides you need a charging stop, it is basically doing the same thing in the background, so what you get is the ETA and remaining distance to your charging stop, with no sense for total trip duration. This seems like a pretty basic set of missing functionality. Maybe they should reallocate a couple of the programmers working on making the car play fart noises and bring the Nav system to parity with Google Maps, circa 5+ years ago?

A couple of other random observations that came from more driving:

I've been able to conclusively prove that even if the Nav system has some idea of speed limits for range projection, Autopilot is deriving the speed limit it uses (you can set it so that it automatically sets the max speed as "speed limit +N MPH", and on some roads it automatically limits Autopilot's set speed to 5 MPH above posted limit)  from "reading" the posted signs. I know this because first it misread a sign with a truck-specific speed limit and assumed that it was applicable to all cars, and then after it dropped the speed limit in a construction zone, it didn't raise it again at the posted end of the construction zone - not until there was another posted speed limit sign.

For a system that is supposed to know things like which lane it needs to be in, where to take exits, and to make very specific routing decisions to make semi-autonomous driving credibly safe, or at least defensibly possible, Tesla is absolutely not updating the map data often enough. According to my car, running the very latest generally available software (i.e. I accept software updates within days of them being offered to me), my map data is 2020.48. This apparently rolled out in November, so given that the data was probably aging before they packaged and released it, I'm guessing it's at least 9 months out of date. This explains why the car continues to insist on stopping for traffic lights that have been gone for months on VA-28 near I-66, and why it believed I had gotten off on an exit (and dropped its max speed accordingly) because of changes to the traffic path during ongoing construction on I-66, why it seems to know nothing about some of the other HOT lanes in the area, etc. It may be that part of getting access to FSD (which I don't have yet) includes much more frequent map updates, but it seems like if they have to do it at all, it would be easier to just package that up for everyone. 

I still have an overwhelmingly positive impression of the car and the system, and I don't feel like I've made an undue number of tradeoffs by switching to an electric car, and this electric car specifically. But I do think it's worth highlighting these areas where things could definitely improve as we look both at Tesla and the broader transition to electric transportation over the next number of years. I don't know if anyone at Tesla looks for this sort of discussion, or if anyone reading this might be better informed as a result, but I enjoy writing about it, so I'll continue doing these sorts of periodic updates and hopefully some will find them insightful.

"Fun" with disposable riding mowers

I have an acre of property, a lot of which is "lawn". I use the air quotes because it's green and needs to be mowed frequently, though admittedly a significant minority of it is green things other than grass, because I can't bring myself to be the stereotypical Suburban Dad that "takes pride in his lawn", i.e. spends real money on a service to spray chemicals on the lawn to make it more grass, and has a whole lawncare "regimen" that is religiously followed each weekend and season. I throw down some grass seed to fill in bare spots and otherwise hope for the best. I just can't be bothered to pretend that's important, and since I chose to live in an area with no HOA, no one else can force me to. Also, I'm on a well, and I'm certainly not interested in wasting my water keeping the grass I've potentially spent good money cultivating alive during a drought, nor am I keen on doing things to increase how frequently I need to mow it, and a large portion of my back yard is heavily shaded during the summer and heavily covered in leaves during a lot of the fall, so consistent, even grass is problematic at best anyway. 

For the first couple of years I owned this house, I managed to convince myself that it was manageable with a self-propelled push mower, out of some mistaken notion of needing the exercise. After a bout with heat stroke, and realizing that I was wasting way too much of my weekend mowing, I decided to get a riding mower. I do not regret this decision, even when considered against the more typical method around here of paying a service to handle it.

My yard is probably 50% hills of varying steepness, some that are something you can mow side-to-side, (though there are some times when you have to shift your weight to the uphill side of the seat) others where you pretty much have to go up and down or diagonally across for fear of rolling the tractor. So I pretty much knew a zero-turn was right out, and I was looking for a traditional riding mower with a locking differential to manage the hills better. About ten-ish years ago, most of the mid-range riding mowers with hydrostatic drive had a pedal for a manual diff lock, but somewhere along the line, that had been replaced with either a lower-end diff that didn't lock (in the really cheap ones), or an auto-locking one in the higher end lawn (not garden) tractors. Pretty much across the board, that auto-locker was a Tuff-Torq K46 hydrostatic transaxle, unless you were stepping up to a garden tractor intended to pull ground-contacting implements. The right combination of price, features, availability, and not being an MTD with a nicer-sounding licensed brand name like 90% of the Cub Cadet, Craftsman, etc. available at the big boxes, plus no-interest financing led me to a Husqvarna YT42DXLS, which Husqvarna specifically claimed was well-suited for hilly applications, and given that it was roughly half again the price of the Lowes Depot variants, I figured more robust and reliable.

Worked great for the first 2.5 years I owned it, until a combination of some still-undetermined issue with a full fuel tank and the fuel/vapor system puking raw fuel into the air cleaner, hot exhaust, and dry leaves led to an engine stall followed by a fire that due to the distance from an available fire extinguisher led to a very melted front end and a total replacement of the engine. Fortunately for me, Husqvarna and Kohler stood by their product and covered what was probably half the cost of the tractor in parts and labor repair work under warranty. I've used it for another 3 years since then, though I do have a fire extinguisher mounted on the fender now. That brings us to last week, where a new problem presented itself. I sometimes mow only a section or two of my yard based on where the grass is long, but this time I did the entire yard at once. Toward the end of my mow, which hits the steepest part right at the end, it got slower and slower and more moan-y going up the hills until finally it would barely move itself under its own power on anything other than flat ground. No slipping belt noise, just the moaning that sounds like a bad power steering pump, which unfortunately means a transaxle issue.

Husqvarna maintains that this transaxle is maintenance-free, i.e. there is no fluid level to maintain, and no standard interval to change the fluid. Tuff-Torq equivocates a bit, as they do sell replacement fluid, and some variants of it do list a maintenance schedule, but after some research, I understand why - this is basically a sealed transmission. It has no drain plug or accessible fill cap, nor a filter. There is a fill cap with a magnet to collect spare bits of transmission out of the fluid, but because the transaxle is typically under the under-seat fuel tank, the only way to drain the fluid is to remove the transaxle completely from the frame, pry off the cap that is now exposed from the top of the case, and turn the transmission upside down to dump out the old fluid, which is usually traditional 10W30 motor oil. You might be able to use a vacuum fluid change system, but access is still going to be an issue, and you're unlikely to get all of the fluid that way. So they're right, it's not exactly consumer serviceable in the way that one might expect a homeowner to change the oil, air filter, spark plugs, etc. Seems too good to be true, but service intervals on lots of stuff have been getting extended and simplified because of higher quality lubricants, better designs etc. so I guess it could be plausible, right?

No, dear reader, our instincts are correct, it is basically too good to be true. The internet is pretty full of sad stories about this transaxle failing exactly like this after a low triple digit number of hours of what should be typical use in a variety of brands and models of riding mower like this. Some get repaired or even replaced under warranty, but I'm well outside my warranty period. Turns out that this transaxle has a bit of a design flaw that a cynical person might look at as a very clever way to make these things cheaper to build, and ultimately more disposable when they fail after some number years of use that is >= the warranty period. Since things expand when they get hot, this transaxle has a breather that will allow fluid to escape instead of pressurizing and blowing out a seal or the fill cap. The act of using it to carry my considerable avoirdupois plus a full tank of fuel up a 25+ degree incline, or across a slightly less severe (15-18 degree) incline for long periods of time, especially in the heat of summer, means that it's probably burping out fluid pretty consistently, that then collects along with the grass and leaf dust as greasy schmutz all over the cooling fins, making the overheating problem worse, which causes more fluid foaming and venting, and basically cooks the transaxle. Those same forums and YouTube videos have hopeful stories about people managing to resuscitate them by swapping the fluid for synthetic 5W-50 (which is what TT sells on their site as replacement fluid) after draining considerably less than the factory fill out of them, cleaning the fins, maybe swapping the drive belt, but also those who did that, had no improvement, and had to crack the case to replace the internal parts that had worn prematurely due to overheat and lack of lubrication. The rebuild kit, if you can find it, appears to be almost $500. The replacement transaxle is closer to $1K. So despite the fact that I have an engine with less than 60 hours on it and a perfectly functional mower deck, I am somewhere between maybe being able to do major surgery to get it functional enough to sell to someone with a flat yard, and selling it as-is to someone who's looking for a donor engine and/or mower deck for a project. I figure that even if I fix it, my yard means that the same problem exists, and I'm basically signing up to tear the thing apart every season or two to change the fluid, plus the existing accelerated wear likely means that the next time this starts happening, it'll be necessary to start throwing expensive parts at it.

I am still waiting to see if I can limp it along to use it for short periods of time before it overheats, or if it is far enough gone that I am going to be back to push mower for a few weeks or what, but the long-term fix is that since my dad has hired a service to tend to his several acres, he is going to sell me his now-idle Kubota GR2100, which is a small (I think 4WD) diesel lawn and garden tractor that is probably much better suited to my terrain and one or two notches up in terms of the heavy-duty vs medium/light duty and prosumer vs residential spectrum compared with my current problem child.