Author: jamesclay

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Charging at the Q-Park Dickens Yard

When I had stayed in Ealing before I had parked my car in the Q-Park at Dickens Yard. On those visits I had remembered seeing the EV charging spaces as I drove through the car park to park.

So on my most recent visit to Ealing, driving there in the Funky Cat, I needed a place to park, so I decided I would try out the charging points in the Q-Park Dickens Yard Car Park.

Having first parked in a space with a non-functioning charger, I moved my car to a different space and, using my own cable, plugged the Funky Cat into the charger.

The process is different to other chargers I have used, you need to walk towards the pedestrian exit and there is a machine there. To be honest I nearly missed it. You then scan the barcode on your ticket and select the right bay on the screen. Then the charging starts.

The bill for the charging is added to your parking charge. So when you come to pay for your parking, your EV charge is added to the parking charge. This is nice and simple. The charge is 35p/kWh. These are Type 2 (7kW) chargers so won’t be charging your car that rapidly, but useful for adding charge to your car whilst shopping (or as I was eating). I got something like a 25% charge in just under two hours.

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Bluesky on the iPad

The Bluesky app on the iPhone works well for me, but there is no native Bluesky app for the iPad.

I have found the user experience quite poor as using the iPhone app on the iPad. 

Some iPhone apps work fine on the iPad, Instagram is a good example. The Bluesky app doesn’t, well it doesn’t for me. The main issue is that landscape mode shows only a couple of messages in the stream. In portrait mode, it’s okay, but I generally use my iPad in landscape mode.

As a result I have moved to the web app, using bsky.app in the browser.

This is a much better user experience. Does remind me of the Twitter web experience.

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It’s 185 again

I had charged to 100% on Friday, with a resulting 159 mile predicted range.

After a weekend of local driving and a 50% charge left,  I once again charged to 100% and the predicted range rose to 185 miles

Did some driving after charging, and as I write this, I have a 80% charge with a predicted range of 155 miles.

This is an interesting figure as 80% of 185 is 148 miles, so I am driving more economically than predicted. Of course if you inverse 155 miles at 80% to 100% you get 193 miles. This is the published range of the Funky Cat.

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185 yesterday, 159 today

The other day I charged up to 100% and had a predicted range of 168 miles.

Yesterday I charged to 100% and this range went up to 185.

Today I charged again to 100%, but the range dropped to 159 miles.

Despite the driving being quite similar, I still don’t quite get why it varies quite so much.

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Charging in Portishead

Went off out. I originally planned to go to a National Trust property, but decided it was probably a little too far away, so went to Portishead instead.

Parked on the road, but as I walked towards the marina I saw an EV charging station in the Parish Wharf Leisure Centre car park.

It had four spaces and was on the Revive network. The car park it was in was free for three hours. I didn’t need charging (urgently) so didn’t use it. Useful though to know it was there for a future visit to Portishead.

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ACC not activated

I have been using the Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) on the Funky Cat quite a bit. I quite like using ACC when travelling through urban areas with a 20mph speed limit. It keeps me within the speed limit and obviously slows me down when there is traffic.

I did though have an issue with it yesterday when it failed to activate. I don’t know the cause, but with all the rain we’ve been having, I wondered if there was water on the sensors, which would mean that it wouldn’t function properly.

It wasn’t an issue I just had to drive without it.

I checked later on my journey and it was working again.

Maybe one to watch, just in case it happens again.

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No regenerative braking…

As I left the office today I realised that the regenerative braking wasn’t in effect. The Funky was driving along without slowing down when I took my foot off the accelerator. 

I thought there was a problem and I remembered a similar thing happening a couple of weeks ago as well. I was concerned that maybe there was another software issue.

Then it struck me, I had charged the Funky up to 100%, it had a full charge. How could the regenerative braking charge up the battery, when it was already at 100%.

Once I had driven a few miles, and the power had dropped a few percent the regenerative braking started working normally and as expected.

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Not one, not two, but three

I had left my car for a few days at the airport after travelling to Amsterdam.

Got in the car and set it to demist. When this happened in my old petrol car, I would usually wait a bit and drive off, so the engine would heat up quicker. Obviously with an electric car, this doesn’t happen, so I just had to wait.

I then got an error message that the the tyre pressure in one of the tyres was low and needed to be checked. As I was at the airport, and it was only slightly off, so decided to drive home and then sort it out the following morning. There was nowhere at the airport to check air pressure anyhow.

However as I travelled home, I got further warnings. First it was one tyre and by the time I got home it was three out of four.

Next day checked pressure on all four tyres and got them back up to pressure. 

The sudden drop in ambient temperature is probably to blame. Always worthwhile though going to service station and checking air pressure.

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Roaming in Amsterdam

I was off to Amsterdam for a few days for a conference at the RAI conference centre.

Following some issues with roaming in Spain in 2022 I have been a little concerned about travelling abroad and if I would have connectivity issues. After Spain though, I had travelled to Ireland and Germany and both times everything just worked. However the last time I went abroad, in the summer to Portugal, I had a few issues when roaming with excessive data usage on my iPhone.

I have a Three contract with unlimited calls, unlimited texts, and unlimited data. As this is a pre-October 2021 contract I am able to use all those allowances when roaming, but there is a 12GB fair use limit. On all my previous visits abroad, before Portugal, I have never come close to reaching that limit.

In Portugal I reached 80% of my 12GB limit within the first twenty four hours. Back then, I turned off mobile data and then I went into Settings -> Mobile Data and turned off all the apps which could use mobile data. There were a lot of apps.

So when I flew to Amsterdam last week, whilst I was on the plane went into Settings -> Mobile Data and turned off virtually all the apps which could use mobile data. Took me a while as there were a fair few. I turned off mobile data for virtually all my apps and also specifically iCloud Drive and iCloud Backup. I am pretty sure they were the culprits for my excessive data usage whilst in Spain.

I then reset the mobile data usage statistics. So when I came back to the UK I could check how much data I had used.

Schiphol Airport had free WiFi, so I could use that in the airport whilst I had a ninety minute wait to get through passport control.

Now I was lucky that the hotel and conference venue had good WiFi, and even Schiphol Airport’s WiFi was good. So there was less reliance on using my mobile data. 

When I was walking around Amsterdam away from the hotel and the conference venue, I did turn on mobile data for specific apps that I wanted to use, finance and travel apps for example.

After arriving back in the UK I checked the mobile data usage statistics I had used whilst roaming in the Netherlands from Tuesday to Friday.

It was 1.4GB and 1.4GB is a lot less than the 12GB fair use allowance I have.  So was pleased with that. I never felt I was limited in how I used mobile data abroad, as when I did need to use an app, I just turned on mobile data for it. I was lucky in having decent WiFi, so that did make a difference.