Featured The Car Care Nut's review of the Tesla Model Y; the good, the bad and the ugly

The car care nut did a little better, but I've never seen someone that excited about a common heat pump. I have one in my garage that cost me $310 and is able to provide 8,000 BTU of cooling while using only 990 watts of 110 volt power. I get a 25 degree delta between intake output.

That's my emergency AC for cooling the house when the power grid goes down for days at a time. It's not expensive nor is it rocket science. They've been making heat pumps for a long, long time. The refrigerator in the travel trailers of the 1950s used a small flame to power the ammonia refrigerant cycle that kept the food cold.

That 8 way gang valve sounds like he's describing the control lines for one of the CAT earth moving bulldozers. The CAT valve body was being discussed on an engineering forum, where the common failure mode was said to be leakage of the seals on one way valves when under pressure and high heat. It never occurred to me that mechanical engineers might also be into farming and off grid living.

One of the Tesla forums was discussing the role of the thermal control systems in a car that can not charge the battery when the battery temperature falls below freezing. Somewhere around that same point it can't provide electricity to run the heat pump either. The tesla solution is to run the heat pump any time that the temperature might drop below freezing, even if it will not be driven soon. The energy used to do this pre conditioning is almost never counted as part of the carbon footprint associated with driving the car. When your car uses 330 watt-hours to travel a mile the energy that first heats the battery and then cools it becomes significant.

 

super manifold octo valve got nothing on back to the future

"soon, this thing will be a thing of the past, and other companies will make an electric car better"

how long have i been hearing that mantra? as if tesla is going to sit on their hands while others improve.

 

'horrendous fit and finish'. it's funny, this made me stop and look at my neighbors few years old m3 which was parked in the street the other day.
to my eye, yould could hardly make out any difference between it and my prius, but i didn't have my micrometer with me