Category: General

So the Rav4 EV uses an obsolete charging standard. J1773 – or Magne Charge is a nifty contactless inductive charging standard, where you stick a paddle into a slot on the car and lo, charging doth occur. It’s actually nicer in use, I think, than J1772. Certainly, it’s less fiddly.

However, the charger is approximately the size of Spain. And weighs about the same.

At nearly 2ft tall and 18 inches or so across, it’s massive. Which I’d be fine with, actually, were it not for the tiny fact that this is a house we’re borrowing. So I spent today making a wall on wheels.

Well, this morning and some of the afternoon.

A trip to Habitat for Humanity furnished me with an inordinate number of bookshelf brackets, then a trip to Home Depot furnished me with a chunk of 2′ x 4′ MDF which they cut into one 18 inch section and ‘the rest’ (I really am struggling to deal with all this imperial nonsense).

I already had a bunch of casters – which came of a plastic pallet someone dumped outside our old garage in the UK. Having grumped about it, I then retrieved it, and just before we moved concluded that the only really useful bit was the casters, so pilfered them and sent the rest to be recycled.

Handily, they were near the top of one of the boxes, so the whole thing cost about $30. The most expensive bit is the orange household totally inappropriate cable which is trailing out of the bottom of the shot. It’s the correct current carrying capacity, but it really shouldn’t be used in a role where it’ll have to move. But I’m hoping to zip-tie the cable out of the way in the garage, so it shouldn’t need to do more than a gentle roll of a foot-or-so, which shouldn’t mean too much flexing.

I pootled around 55 miles today and yesterday on 3/5ths of a charge, which puts our car’s range at a theoretical (and battery murdering) 91 miles. You don’t really want to use that last fifth of a charge if you want the batteries to last – which means it’s got a working range of around 70 miles. Which *should* be enough to take me to work and back without hurting the batteries. It should be dandy once we move to our new bit of land, if we buy it, because then it’s only 40 miles total.

Today’s news, I think we can afford a power connection to the land. So that’ll be nice.

We’ve asked about getting the tests done to decide what kind of septic is required (answer: the most expensive). The soil is apparently pretty crappy – perhaps we should budget for 800 tons of manure, too… Anyhow, the crappyness of the soil means that it can’t deal with, well, crappyness. So you have to build a septic with specially constructed pretend soil for it to drain and filter through.

Anyhow, we have asked permission to go do those tests :)

We’re also hoping to go look at an RV… which we might live in while we build…getting around the whole no accessories without a(d)dress* first. Living in an RV… that’ll encourage us to get on with it, eh? :)

* Well, a residential building