It’s enough to make any electric-vehicle advocate cry. That’s Joulee the Free Salvage Tesla being charged by a 10kw gasoline-fired generator. What a horror! How did it come to this?
The big solar power station is due to be installed next week. In the mean time, I have to get the car to a couple of body shops to get repair estimates for the damage Matson did shipping her. Since Matson also kept leaving the car door open, the charge got really depleted. I had to spend about 3 hours in a big-box store parking lot just to get enough charge to get home from the port.
The nearest EV charger (of any kind) is over 25 mountainous miles from here. Something had to be done to get the car charged enough to get to the body shops. I decided to burn 5 gallons of gasoline in my big backup generator and see what kind of range I got. So I turned my car into a gasoline-powered one, even if it still wasn’t an internal-combustion engine (ICE) car.
The generator isn’t the one we use to back up our temporary solar (and is currently our primary source of house electricity). That one’s a 3kw inverter generator and you can barely hear it running. The big backup generator is a 10kw dual-fuel monster and we could barely hear ourselves think for the four hours it took to burn the gas. That bought us 125 miles of range, or 25mpg, which isn’t too bad considering the multiple inefficiencies involved.
—2p