Dark
I tried taking a few pictures in the dark. It was easy with the camera… but the drone didn’t work great. At long exposures the wind moves it around too much.
Truck
I ended up replacing 2 cars in the fleet this week. I got a new 2021 Suburban Z71 to replace my Yukon Denali XL, and Kristin got a new 2021 X5 45e plug in hybrid to replace her 2016 Volvo XC90.
The Z71 was a replacement for my Yukon which I use for the typical people and stuff transport as well as to tow both of my trailers. I really like to idea of a diesel suburban so I’l probably trade this one once they new 3.0 diesel version is out and working well. I really really like Suburbans and have had one in my fleet for over 20 years.
Kristin’s car was a choice between this X5 45e and all of the other electric cars we could find. The 45e is an interesting car.. it has a 3.0L turbo inline six (289hp), plus a 111hp electric motor combined with a 24kWh battery. That gives is a range of 35-40 miles on all electric.
So far we have driven 216 of the 230 miles on all electric, and most of that gas driving was me being a jackass in Sport mode. 😉 It has been actually quite usable in all electric mode, especially for the use cases Kristin sees most. (small trips that are 10-30 miles in total distance). I suspect she will go months without using gasoline. Everything else is typical BMW – Good drive feel, excellent interior materials, typical German over engineering..
Kristin did consider the Tesla Model Y, but the ride quality just isn’t there compared to the BMW… and that follows with pretty much all of the interior features. ( remember I also have a Model 3 Performance ). We also looked at the Jag, the Merc, and Audi eTron, and the Volvo.
Certainly I’ll have more to report as we accumulate some experience.
Cores
I put the second set of cheap Xeon 2690v2s in my desktop.
20 cores, 40 Hyperthreads, 3.3 Ghz. I think the openCL score was just a tad higher than the i7-10700.
PC
Time for the second build of the night.
Xeon
One thing I like about these old Xeon chassis… it is easy to get used Xeons for super cheap to upgrade them. I got a pair of Xeon 2690v2 for $100 each. 10 cores/20 HTs each, 3.6 Ghz boost, and 40 PCIe 3x channels each.
Air
Now this is progress.
Stress
I had a chance to do a little stress test of the electrical system tonight. I have all of the current clamps installed with data logging into influx and then outputting with Grafana.
I got a peak draw of just a tad over 40kW with all of the lights, servers, the rear deck heaters, a Tesla charging, a few math jobs on the servers and my office computer, the lights in the shop and garage (which are 2kw themselves), and the kettle going. That isn’t that much power given the 600 amps of available service. That 40kW represents a continuous power bill of about $3500/ month.
I probably could have eeked out another 5kw.. and of course If I get Eric Rosenberry over here with a few more teslas we might be able to hit 120kw.
I measured voltage at the panel closest to the feed as well as the one the farthest away. The closest one dipped down to 114.75v from an average of about 116.5v ( it is already near the lowest voltage of the day).
The farthest panel dipped down to 113.7 volts, and that panel had about 80 amps on it (125v subpanel).
It also appears my idle load is about 7kW.