I have a dumb washing machine and I made a sensor which detects vibrations, and taped a magnet to the door so that I could detect when the door has been opened using a hall sensor.

So if the cycle is complete (not much vibration) and the door hasn't been opened after 15 minutes, it sends an alert to my phone. It then sends an alert once an hour for six hours to nag me. I've had this system in place for about a decade now and it has saved countless extra cycles due to forgotten laundry. If I ever replace the washing machine, I just have to move the sensor over to the new one.

Can't we just move it 30 minutes and be done with it? Split the difference and never look back.

I've contacted my electric company to figure this out. I guess we'll see if they get back to me.

> Because outside of places with large amounts of hydro and/or nuclear, any additional power used in the middle of the night usually comes from burning more coal or natural gas.

I dug into this further, and looked at the grid where I am. From what they say, their baseload generation is natural gas and nuclear. While they still have some coal, coal usage is declining and they have retrofitted a good number of the coal plants to natural gas. Their goal was to eliminate coal completely, but I don't think that is a realistic expectation with where things stand today.

Anyway, I can see how much energy is generated from coal depending on the time of day, and far less coal is used in the middle of the night than it is during daylight hours. This is interesting, so I am going to try to gather a good amount of data to determine the best times to charge -- right now I'm just looking at the last few days. Still, it doesn't appear that I'm powering my car primarily from coal. I'd like to get a few years of data to see how things have changed.

> Yes, but have you? And would those panels not have been used by someone else to replace fossil fuel if you hadn't installed them to charge your EV?

No, not yet, but within the next few years I will. I don't think that solar panels can completely cover my usage while my kids are home, but they will all be off on their own within the next few years. Would it surprise you to know that my water heater uses more electricity per day, on average, than my car? Teenagers will live in the shower if you let them.

> Which is completely irrelevant. The power already being used is already being used. It can't charge your car. The question is what additional power is available when you charge it. The most likely sources on that list are coal and natural gas. Because those other sources are going to be used first. If its coal, then your EV is actually creating more emissions per mile than a 2 gallon per 100 mile vehicle. But that isn't really the issue because someone else is driving your used ICE vehicle that is still putting out emissions. And there is no offset for the up front emissions from manufacturing an EV.

It's not really irrelevant, it's what happened over the last 12 months. I also fully understand that me paying for wind power only means that I am paying to add X kW to the grid. Why are you so confident that coal or NG will be used when I charge? If it matters, I have it charge in the middle of the night, which is off-peak in my area. I can also add solar panels to my house and use that to charge 100% of the time, and I can be confident that the charge source is only the electric that I have generated. The electrical grid can always get better, but an ICE vehicle's emissions can only get worse.

> Would you have been happier if I destroyed the 2008 vehicle so that it was no longer able to be used?

This problem will sort itself out within the next year or two, the engines on those don't usually make it past 200K miles. And in 15 or 20 years I can add a used EV to the pool.

> So it was going to the scrapyard whether you bought a new EV or a used car. There was no reduction at all from you putting a new EV on the road. Just a smaller increase than if you put a new ICE vehicle on the road.

Eh, they were still driving it even though it was unsafe, and said that they had about 6 months until it needed to be inspected again.

> What does that mean in terms of emissions? The "accounts" I have seen that make that claim are propaganda where the model is tweaked to get the desired result. Does burning coal to produce electricity to drive an EV 100 miles really produce fewer emissions than burning 2 gallons of gas? I suspect the answer is no. Does that same power produced with natural gas in a base load power plant produce fewer emissions than burning 5 gallons of gas? Probably.

I looked into what happens if my supplier can't supply wind energy, and here's the breakdown:

42% Natural Gas
31% Nuclear
18% Coal
5% Wind
2% Solar
1% Hydro

If I bought a car which achieved 50MPG, this would equate to about 177.74g of CO2 emissions per mile. At 20,000 miles per year, the vehicle would emit 3,554.8 kilograms per year. Let's say I keep the vehicle for 10 years, this gets us to 35,548 kilograms.

My vehicle achieves 4mi/kWh (this is a realistic number under real world conditions). I don't believe that nuclear generation actually has zero emissions, but I am going to treat it as such for the moment.

NG produces ~ 490g CO2 / kWh and coal is ~ 820g CO2 / kWh. Multiplying it out by the percentages, I end up with ~357 g CO2 / kWh. Divide that by 4 mi/kWh and I end up with ~89.28 g CO2/mi. Remember, this is _only_ if wind generated power is unavailable. Use the same 20,000 miles per year and I will emit 1785.6 kilograms. After ten years, this is 17,856 kilograms. Of course, that is assuming that the blend of energy sources remains the same. It could get worse, but historically they have been reduced the amount of fossil fuels used. Comparatively, a vehicle which achieves 50MPG will not achieve that number by the end of its life.

Would you have been happier if I destroyed the 2008 vehicle so that it was no longer able to be used? I kept good care of it, but, statistically, the engine it has won't last another 10 years.

> If their clunker still ran someone else is driving it. People don't drive cars to the junkyard. And if it didn't run, then it made no difference whether you bought an EV or not.

Since the frame rusted out and it would not pass the state safety inspection, it was absolutely scrapped.

> So you only charge your car when the wind is blowing so hard there is excess win power available to charge it? I think that is fantasy. You charge when you need to and your power comes from whatever source of additional power is available and least expensive. Solar and wind are often the least expensive, but, as a result, they are used first when available and rarely have excess available as an additional source of power when you need to charge your EV.

You are making perfect the enemy of good again, and battery storage systems exist to handle the situation you are describing. Additionally, by all accounts, power plants are more efficient than ICE when it comes to emissions.

> But the world won't. Certainly you can claim not buying an ICE vehicle reduced emissions compared to your buying one. But adding another vehicle, even an EV, to the planet adds emissions even if fewer than that worst alternative.

Precisely how old must a vehicle be before you deem it as worthy here? Again, you are making perfect the enemy of good.

> What happened to your 2008 car? If someone is still driving it, then it wasn't replaced in terms of emissions. Someone who otherwise would have had to walk, bike, take the bus or skip the trip is driving it instead of you.

It replaced a far less efficient vehicle that someone else had. Their clunker was scrapped / parted / recycled.

> How many gallons of gas per 100 miles do you figure the alternative would be burning? Because the comparison isn't to some generic ICE car, its to the available ICE/Hybrid car with the fewest emissions. Or at least the best alternative available to you. That would include buying a used ICE car that is now being used by someone else.
> What was the source of the added energy needed to charge it and how many emissions does that create. And, no, that doesn't include solar unless you live somewhere available solar is going unused at the time you charge the EV.

Clearly I have no way to prove this, but I have choice in my energy supplier where I live and it comes from a wind farm. If I add solar panels to my house I can feed them directly into the EVSE and charge the car directly from them. During the day, obviously.

Over the course of 15 or 20 years I will come out ahead in terms of emissions, no matter how you slice it.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

Yes, surely my two flights over the span of almost a quarter century is definitely part of the problem.

Hey, I'll bite!

I keep cars for 15 to 20 years, and I recently replaced a 2008 ICE vehicle with a 2025 EV. From what I have read, I have already passed the hurdle of the manufacturing emissions and I will have less emissions from here on out than I would if I had purchased an ICE vehicle.

I visited Aruba in 1999 and spent a good amount of time snorkeling. The corals were beautiful and there was so much life. I went there again in 2023 and a good portion of the corals were dead. There was still a lot of life, but also a lot of lionfish, an invasive species. I'm glad that my kids got to see the small amount of living coral before it is gone.

No refund, and I doubt that they'd give me one years later.

Since I didn't buy the web player, I'm not grandfathered into anything and had ads in an app that I paid for. I deleted it and moved to AntennaPod.

I got mine in 2013.. for $75. There are so many features that I use where I didn't even realize that they were limited to plex pass.