Only one EV charger at home?!

[John Larkin]

Along the west coast of the USA, people are crazy on both ends. And a spot or two in the middle, I admit.

[John Larkin]

Not a massive leak. The pump will shut off and there's just a little liquid that would drool out of the hose.

But your scenario rarely happens.

[rbowman]

At least in this valley we haven't had a lot of depth but the shit started in early November and just won't stop. I'd like to get some grass seed down if the soil temperature ever gets about 50 F.

[Scott Lurndal]

[John Larkin]

The snow is crazy in the Sierras too.

There's a small river running down the street in front of our cabin, as the snow melts, and it's eating a pothole in our driveway. One of maybe a million potholes in the county. I'm on a waiting list to get it patched, but the water needs to stop flowing first, I guess. I could fill it with found rocks, but I can't find any rocks; they are under 10 feet of snow.

Houses and garages are collapsing from tons of snow.

Why do people build houses with flat roofs in snow country?

[Cindy Hamilton]

["Followup-To:" header set to alt.home.repair.]

Bah. The citizens of Michigan manage to pump their own gas, and most of them are as dumb as a bag of hair. You should see some of the professors at the University of Michigan.

[John Larkin]

Yikes, one more thing to factor into driving. Park for an hour and open the windows and run the heater full blast? Hey, a new roadside business could be DISCHARGE YOUR BATTERY HERE.

In my gas powered Audi, I just downshift to spare the brakes.

The issue could be severe for big electric semis. Even diesels with engine braking tend to smoke their brakes on a long downhill. We have "runaway truck ramps" they can crash into when the brakes go out.

[John Larkin]

And not allow any side trips or changes. The Tesla is in control of everything.

I just jump into my car and drive... don't need permission from Elon.

[John Larkin]

where's that?

My wife and kid threatened to divorce me if I got one more manual-transmission car. They couldn't drive a manual on the hills here.

I got an Audi with the 6-speed automatic, but it's the Borg Warner dual-clutch transmission without a torque converter. It has two gear trains, odd and even, and switches between them. I grudgingly admit that they were right. But it does have good engine braking on long downhills, and I can manually select any of the 6 gears if I want to. It's incremental, like a motorcycle.

It also has the gadget that locks the brakes if you stop on a steep uphill, so it doesn't roll back and crash the car behind you.

[NY]

When did petrol pumps in the UK disable the trigger-lock which allowed you to take you hand off the holster and let the pump switch itself off? remember when I was little in the 1970s, one attendant would fill several cars concurrently, flitting between pumps to turn each pump off just before the fuel overflowed - I don't think auto-shutoff was as common in those days.

Was the trigger-lock phased out around the time that serve-yourself petrol/diesel pumps became available and attended service ceased to exist?

I've only seen one attended-service pump in the last decade or so, and it's in the next village to me. There are big notices on it "Attended service only". They've just had new pumps installed, so it's not as if they are using ancient equipment and have never upgraded.

They tend to be a bit more expensive than supermarket diesel and other (serve-yourself) garages, so they only time I use them is to buy a jerry-can of unleaded for the mower, because they are the closest garage to me.

Since I'm only buying 15 litres at a time, the attendant always keeps hold of the trigger, so I don't know whether those pumps have the trigger-lock enabled since only trained staff (and not the punters) will be using the pumps.

4 minutes to fill your tank. I tend to run my tank fairly low, so I'm often buying close to the maximum of 60 litres, and I've had some pumps that have taken that sort of time. I don't think I've found a pump that does it in as little as a minute. Are diesel pumps generally faster or slower than unleaded pumps? Is one type of fuel more likely than the other to foam up if the fuel is pumped too quickly?

[NY]

My nephews have taken their tests fairly recently (within the last 10 years) and they said that changing down just before going down a long hill is no longer taught and is actually deprecated. The current advice is to use the brakes to do *all* the retardation.

There are a few of those long steep hills when I live, with escape lanes (sand drags) for runaway trucks. Sadly there wasn't one (until afterwards) on the hill where a coach's brakes failed and it ran into the side of a car at the traffic lights at the bottom of the hill. Sadly the occupants of the car were killed. Intriguingly, it was the driver of the coach who was prosecuted for the coach having defective brakes, and the company owner (who was responsible for scheduling maintenance and attending to "the brakes don't feel right") who escaped punishment.

The worst runaway coach accident I remember was Dibble's Bridge between Pateley Bridge and Grassington (in North Yorkshire) in the 1970s. A coach got out of control because its brakes failed and the driver muffed his emergency gearchange to a lower gear (*) so the coach had *no* engine braking. There were a lot of deaths when the coach hit the bridge parapet (the bridge is on a bend in the road) and fell onto the bank of the river/stream below.

(*) Maybe the coach had a non-synchromesh gearbox so it wasn't just a case of "ram it into gear and let the clutch take the strain" but instead the engine needed to be rev-matched to the new gear to allow it to be engaged. Hard to do when there's no pressure on you; bloody impossible when you're panicking. In the 1970s, some older coaches probably still had manual gearboxes. They probably didn't have Voith electric retarders either.

[Scott Lurndal]

[retired1]

<snip>

Near Hartford CT a runaway truck with bad brakes killed the driver and 3 others, and the owner was jailed. Total of 19 vehicles involved. Bottom of the downhill is a traffic light and was red.

ramp is new.

[John Larkin]

Fortunately for us, it snows nice clean white stuff here. You can even eat it.

[Commander Kinsey]

Less than a minute and you call that a long time? If you walked away from the pump, got in your car, closed the door, then immediately opened the door and got out again and walked back to the pump, it probably would already have finished.

And ours are 50 litres per minute (that's my full tank). You have bigger cars with slower petrol....

[Commander Kinsey]

I love snow and want some. How much including shipping and taxes?

[Commander Kinsey]

Seems popular.

[Commander Kinsey]

Only America is stupid enough to leave it on.

[Commander Kinsey]

I encountered one when on holiday in England last summer. I asked him why and he said it's incase he can sell more stuff. All he amanged to "sell" me was advice on where to get a replacement tyre, as he had none that peculiar size in stock.

I'm now dealing with a peculiar sized driveshaft. Renault Scenic driveshaft? Not that easy. Mk 1, 2, 3, 4. Times 3 petrol engine sizes and a diesel in each. And even then, they changed it half way through each Mk. So 32 possibilities. Then for some reason left and right are different?! Maybe one side needs a left hand screw to stop it coming off the wheel. So the shops are stocking 64 driveshafts just for Renault Scenics.

Somebody once told me supermarket stuff has less additives and less mileage. I didn't believe them.

Does he pedal it?

I didn't notice a difference when I've had petrol and diesel cars. Or LPG.

[Rod Speed]

Irrelevant to that claim about which catch fire.