Our washing machine offers various programs between 30 minutes and 2 hours and 40 minutes.
Yes, it's not hard to set an alarm, except the timing on the washing machine is unreliable (I've lost count of how many times I've set an alarn with a few minutes extra and still had to wait longer.) It would just be nice to have a little notification - making that chore 1% pleasanter. :)
My worry would be that you'd have to do some diagnostics on the audio to determine the actual sound. The loudest noise my washer makes is the spin/rinse cycle, which is right before the sound it makes when it's done. You can't just key off of "loud noise" and I don't know how hard setting up to listen to specific frequencies for alerting is.
> You can't just key off of "loud noise" and I don't know how hard setting up to listen to specific frequencies for alerting is.
Fast fourier transform on the audio would give you volume for each frequency range. That probably requires some DIY hardware & programming.
But a power metering plug would be a cheap off-the-shelf solution. Find the ones pre-flashed with ESPhome for ~$15-20, find thresholds for ON/OFF with a bit of trial and error, and you're done.
Even easier than that: Amazon's Echo devices can be set up to detect beeps.
I have one in my kitchen, near the laundry room, and one in my home office. When things beep in that area, the one in the office says "Beep, beep." (I could have it do other stuff, but this was simple.)
It works for laundry. And the dishwasher. And the Instant Pot. And any other beepin' thing. It's just a remote beep detector.
(And if it detects beeping for 2 or more minutes, it notifies my phone, since that presumably means that my house is on fire.)
Not where I live. A Five Guys little cheeseburger is maybe 20% more than a quarter pounder with cheese. It's true that Five Guys serves mostly exclusively the suburban markets that support higher prices, and doesn't compete with the cheapest McDonalds. But where they overlap, they're very comparable in price.
I recently rented a car from Hertz. I knew I wouldn’t need more than a single full tank of gas for my trip (and if I underestimated I could just stop at a gas station). I wasn’t sure what might happen with the (cheaper!) Tesla. So I opted for the ICE vehicle.
(Where could I charge it? The hotel? Do I need to find a super charger? Etc. Just more headache than I wanted on a vacation).
Literally made the same decision last night for a rental. I had no idea how to charge an electric car and did not want to have to deal with figuring it out on top of everything else.
They charge you $25 if you return it not fully charged, which is bananas, because why couldn’t they just plug it in while they’re cleaning the car? It’s not like gas where they have to drive the car to a gas station.
Is that a $25 recharging fee, or $25 for the electricity? A full tank of electrons is around $25 equivalent in the UK. (I realise it's cheaper in most of the US.)
Their webpage suggests you have to return it at the same level of charge as you got it at, or pay a $25/$35 (depending on membership level) convenience fee to return it at any charge level.
I recall a similar rule the last time I hired a gas car, but feels like for EVs it could use a tweak or two.
You're likely going to spend more than $25 to put gasoline in your rental before returning it, and $25 is the approximate cost for a supercharger, so that charge seems very reasonable. You could have just taken the electric car and returned it empty.
That may well be the case. But I’m not driving far, it’s just while my car is in shop. Gas is $2.90 here, and the rentals was a Chevy bolt — so not a Supercharger right, some non Tesla connector I have to track down?
I think it was $25 flat if not as same level, so I can fill it to the level I received it and hope they kept accurate records (ie knew it wasn’t full).
I think if I had ample time during all this an EV would be interesting but I just don’t want to make a mistake and make this repair even more expensive.
The last time I rented a car (2 months ago?) if you returned it less than whatever you receive it at, you get charged for an entire tank of gas with the $3-4/gal markup. So receive it full and return it at 15/16ths and you're looking at a $80-100 bill easily on the larger vehicles.
It's likely similar where if you receive it at 100% and return it at 98% you're getting charged the full $25. It's just another revenue source for the company.
The refill charge is nuts anyway even for ICE vehicles. Put an 1 m³ construction site tank+pump for diesel and one for regular gas on the site and that's it - these things cost about 1000€ [1].
From the start, refill charges have been an utter scam.
This seems to be an extension of the biggest problem with EVs: The edge cases.
Even if the edge case is only 1% of your travel, do you want to buy a car that can't do it?
It can be anything. You're living in Minnesota and your dad in Chicago had a heart attack. An ICE can get you there in about ~7 hours. An EV... you're going to need 1 supercharging station at a minimum, probably 2. Or, you just decide you want a road trip from Minnesota to Texas. You pull over to the nearest supercharger in Arkansas to discover you're forced to hang out in a town where you really don't feel safe for an hour or two. That's great.
EVs make far more sense in Europe than America, with the current range they can offer, combined with general proximity of relatives. I'm not saying they don't have a future in America, I just won't be surprised if we are the slowest adopters.
As an European, no they don't. Europeans often use their cars for long travels cross borders for work, vacation or visiting relatives where public trasnportation doesn't serve them, and the lack or underdevelopment of charging infrastructre makes them viable only for people with their own house, garage and charger at home or for businesses which do short trips around town like deliveries or realtors. Everyone else has ICEs.
I consider my probable edge case, driving to the capital for example airport there, 160km+something nearly all of it motorway so slightly worse range if I drive at legal limit. So I would like to get there in one go as being 2 hours early anyway is big time sink. And then when I'm coming back I just want to get to home not stop in middle to charge...
Or I might want to do same with some client or relative there.
Train station is very near, but not that near... And it still means connection to get to actual airport...
And new EVs are pretty expensive, compared already paid car...
> And new EVs are pretty expensive, compared already paid car...
My family has neighbors that just buy and repair older cars and sell them pretty low cost. The quality of their work has been considered very good by third-party mechanics. My parents recently bought a 2005 Pontiac with a V6 from them for about ~$4K with 135K miles. One accident (deer sideswipe), only body.
Do you know what a 2013 Tesla Model S with 135K miles goes for around here? About $17K. If we're lucky, we could maybe negotiate it to $15K-$14K; but that's still almost four times the cost. And sure, the Tesla is eight years newer, but I make a similar comparison because it was very much a 1st-gen product... My money is on the Pontiac lasting longer.
Sounds like a transformation issue. In the beginning (I assume) before widespread filling station networks getting gas was an issue. Now it's not. That's not a quality of gas vs EV, it's a quality of ubiquity.
It is a transformation issue. However EV's are being promoted as a viable alternative to ICE vehicles generally speaking. The reality is that this is far from true.
For many people/families, an EV could be viable. For an even larger percentage of people or families with 2+ vehicles an EV could be very viable. Still, in most scenarios the ICE vehicle is the safe choice, with the pros and cons well understood.
IMO some of the EV pushback is from people (like me) who have nothing against EVs, but feel they are still a solid decade away from being a no-brainer choice, with much of the holdup being infrastructure related.
I'm all for saving the planet (note: I don't believe that EVs overall are as net environmentally positive as they are portrayed), but I'm not going to do it while stranded at a charging station.
True, and this is why sales for EVs basically automatically increase as infrastructure is built out in a particular area. Once consumers understand the capability and what is their, their buying patterns are fairly rational.
In my experience, most people outside of the EV bubble underestimate how much infrastructure is already there.
At least for Tesla. For CCS cars in the US, it isn't so great.
You might be if you need to return the car at 100%, the last few percent of battery takes forever to charge due to chemistry. I don't know what Hertz requires, but returning it at 100% is stupid. It's hard on the battery and takes forever. Charging to 80% takes a lot less time and is easier on the battery, so hopefully that's all that Hertz requires.
Edit: a different commenter says you need to return at 75%. That's reasonable.
Yeah, and tbh, I'm hearing that their return fees are actually pretty reasonable. If you can return at less than 75% for only $25, just do that. Supercharging isn't particularly cheap anyway, so you can't save that much money with a long wait.
That still wouldn't be true for a used Tesla. Most used sales are Model 3 or Y. Both charge really well. Even older used Model S or X are more like 30 minutes than 2 hours, especially if the location is bad and you'd rather get to the next one.
