Tag Archives: Energy

…we just got a Level 2 EV charger installed.

We bought a Bolt last year. It’s awesome. Good time to buy a used one, too, since there’s a free battery upgrade forthcoming.

Love the car. We’ve been fine for a year with the stock Level 1 charger that it came with, but I won’t lie. It can be tedious. At that rate it takes more than a day to recover from any drive more than 30 miles away. Fortunately I telecommute 4 days a week, but there’s still that nagging feeling.

So having the faster charger gives some real peace of mind. Looking forward to plugging in at night and knowing for sure we’ll have a full battery by morning.

The takeaway from this, by the way, should be that even with the worst possible charger at home for a year, I had a totally doable and positive experience with an electric car. So if you’re on the fence, hop off onto this side of it. Buy an EV already. I’ll evangelize the shit out of this, I don’t care how obnoxious I sound.

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…the air fryer turned out to be pretty useful.

We bought it last July during peak Pandemic. The original plan was to fill in the fast food sized hole in our hearts, as we hadn’t been anywhere to get french fries for months on end at that point.

And while we did make fries with it a few times and loved the results, I had feared it was gonna be one of those fad buys that would just take up space after we burned out on it. Lord knows we have too much shit in our kitchen already.

More than a year on, we do actually still use it at least a couple times a week. Just not really for fries. Unless I have the energy to chop and prep them. Which I don’t, on account of being alive.

Turns out the real selling point of the fryer is that it’s just a really efficient oven for short-turn heating. Like whenever the kids want chicken nuggets. The microwave makes them soggy, and the oven takes like 40 goddamn minutes including preheat time, and all that energy is just wasted because you’re not cooking anything else with all that heat.

So we just dump that shit in the air fryer and it’s done in half the time. It has a high power draw, but it does its job fast and then stops, so it uses less electricity overall.

All this time I let the marketing to my inner gourmand lead me, but really it was my inner cheapskate that wanted this relationship.

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…we can open all the windows instead of using the air conditioner.

Getting a nice breeze in the house is one of the greatest things about having a house. You get shade and fresh air without any bugs. It’s literally the best of both worlds.

Just too goddamn bad this only lasts for a few weeks out of the year nowadays.

Remember when fall and spring actually lasted for months? And you’d have temperate days for literally an entire season? Now it’s just these little fakes. Now we have ‘snot Spring and Faux Fall before we have to settle in for either “blizzard” or “too fucking hot,” and the whole goddamn time a bunch of useless fucks in suits tell us it’s always been this way and there’s no reason to try to fix it.

I guess if all you know how to do is ruin life for everyone else, then you actually can’t recognize how shit climate change has made things. That’s the trick with evil. Progress is so hard and often undefinable that you don’t even know if you’ve made any or if you should keep going. But shitting everywhere and fucking things up? You can do it all day long. There’s no bottom.

Not that I’m giving up. Fuck the GOP. We’ll take this on without you. And for the next couple glorious weeks, I’ll enjoy what little pleasant weather is left.

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