Charging your car at home.

[charles]

My Mazda 6 won't - only by 0.3 inches

[Tricky Dicky]

Round here the council has recently approved a new development where it was stated in the planning application that the attached garages would be too small to house a car in effect like most other garages they will simply be storerooms yet the stupid thing is they are going to fit a garage door?

Back end of 2018 I had a garage erected 40sq. mts. with a 4.8m frontage with a 9? wide door. I can easily get in and out of the Kuga either side despite putting in 0.8m wide benching down one side and 0.7m racking down the other side. When I finally get my kitchen out of the back end the last 2.4m of the length will be partitioned off to become my man cave. There is not a single bloke who has come to our property that has not wanted to a have a look round or expressed their envy. When the groundwork?s were being done there were quite a few mutterings as to whether we were putting up another house without planning permission, so out of badness I put it about that I was getting a pile of bunk beds and putting up asylum seekers. When the racking and benching arrived some people were developing swan necks trying to see what I was up to?

Richard

[NY]

That's *evil* - but very funny.

[Vir Campestris]

I have a laugh the other day. There are these "speed cushions" in the next village, and a guy in an Austin 7 came along.

Straight down the gap between them :)

Andy

[Vir Campestris]

Ergo the range is much less than claimed.

You can't get the range without running the battery down.

Andy

[harry]

Idiot.

99% of journeys are only a few miles. Nobody runs the battery to anywhere near depletion because if that happened, it's a tow job, not just a can of petrol.

Most battery charging is just daily top ups of a couple of hours.

[ARW]

That will make a change from setting fire to wheelie bins.

[Chris Hogg]

And that's a big disadvantage of battery vehicles. People do run out of petrol - either the gauge is faulty and misreading, or they're just not paying attention or whatever. It will happen with electric vehicles for much the same reasons. With a petrol or diesel vehicle, you can get out and walk to a filling station, might be a few miles but you can do it, you can buy a can of fuel, walk back to the car and you're back in business. But you can't do that with an electric car. Buying the filling station's entire stock of AA batteries isn't going to work!

[Tim Lamb]

:-) A childhood friend's parents had one. Parked up in the village high street one day and watched a rear wheel roll past and on down the street! 3 stud fixing?

[Tufnell Park]

Street lights are not normally metered for billing purposes. The councils pay a fixed fee based on the lamp type, wattage and hours run.

Photocells are the normal method of lamp switching on/off but recent trends in switching off streetlights from approx 11pm to 5am ish has brought back timeswitches for that purpose.

[Roland Perry]

In message <r57ckm$mfe$ [e-mail], at 09:54:22 on Sun, 22 Mar

2020, Tufnell Park [e-mail]> remarked:

It's nothing to do with metering, rather than the size of cable used.

Round here they've been replaced over the last 10rs with lights on some kind of wireless network. So they can turn them on and off remotely.

[Roland Perry]

In message [e-mail], at 10:32:01 on Sun, 22 Mar 2020, Roland Perry [e-mail]> remarked:

The Cambridge scheme uses higher efficiency (not LED) lamps, reducing the consumption from 50 to 30 watts per streetlight (apart from big ones on trunk roads).

Here we are, nodes on the IoT (Insecurity of Things).

(That's about Glos, not Cambs, it's the company that's confusing based in Cambridge).

[Chris Hogg]

Yes, happened to a friend of mine's father. He was overtaken by his own rear wheel! A 1930's Austin Seven IIRC. The wheels had elongated holes for the bolts IYSWIM, and all you had to do was slacken the nuts slightly without undoing them fully (possibly even just wing nuts) and turn the wheel a few degrees and lift it off. The trouble was, the nuts slackened over time and when you braked, the wheel moved under the nuts and just came off!

[Roland Perry]

In message [e-mail], at 11:06:35 on Sun, 22 Mar 2020, Chris Hogg [e-mail] remarked:

The wheels used to come off Morris Minors too (I actually saw it happen on the M4 in the late 70's). But I think that was corrosion in the suspension rather than loose nuts.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Not sure how our relatively new LED ones are switched. But they dim at about midnight.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

I had an old Bentley once. Nearside wheels had left hand thread nuts. 5 stud fixing.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

That wasn't the wheel coming off. The wheel, hub and stub axle assembly broke off the suspension.

[Roland Perry]

In message [e-mail]>, at 13:13:59 on Sun, 22 Mar

2020, "Dave Plowman (News)" [e-mail]> remarked:

Whatever it was, it managed to roll along the hard shoulder, somewhat faster than the car it had become detached from!

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Ah - don't remember ever seeing one become detached totally. Usually just folded up inside the wheel arch.