Being a die-hard Minnesotan, I’ve developed some habits that I need to break. Many of these are stubborn/stupid habits that simply come from getting old and always doing things the old way.
One of them is my insistence on not using seat warmers in cars. Mostly because my first encounter with them was unknowing. I was riding in someones fancy car (Lexus) and it detected that a butt was in the passenger seat. Combined with the outdoor temperature, the climate computer decided it should activate the heated seat. About a minute later I was wondering if I had peed my pants 😳🍑🔥
I decided then and there that it would be the first and last time I used a heated seat… But was it really?
Driving my Chevy Bolt in winter, the range is reduced due to several factors: batteries don’t like the cold, the factory heater is a resistance unit instead of an efficient heat pump like on the newer Teslas. Combined with the fact that my car is currently limited to an 80% charge, the juice gets used up much faster in the winter.
I still love this car, and I’ve come to terms that I won’t be doing any winter road trips in it this year. But even with long-ish drives around town, I want to know my options for energy conservation. My two best friends in this department are the heated seats and the heated steering wheel.
Running both full blast for one person is less than one hundred watts 💯
Compare those numbers to the resistance style heater that is used to heat the cabin – it can use up to 9kW. That’s 9,000 watts y’all – enough power for a small rock concert 🎸 It works well – the cabin heats quickly, especially compared to an internal combustion engine. It’s just sort of a power hog… granted it won’t be using 9kW all of the time, but it will use that much to get up to your desired temperature.
Reducing heater usage
There are a few things you can do to reduce the mega energy sap from the heater:
Pre-heat the car while it’s plugged in
My 240V charger can deliver 40 amps of power to the vehicle, that’s 9kW (240V x 40A = 9600W). The Bolt will use up to 7.6kW of that (32A). If the car is plugged in while pre-conditioning, the Bolt will use as much of the AC power it can. This will pull at most 1-2kW from the battery even if the heater is going full-tilt. Result: pre-heating while plugged in won’t take away any range from your trip, plus your car is toasty warm when you get in.
Use the heated seats and steering wheel
I’ve learned to love the heated seats and steering wheel. You’ll be surprised how much a difference it makes to heat the surfaces your body touches. The wheel is like holding a hot cup of coffee, which has some sort of lizard-brain effect on your perceived comfort.
The climate controls will guess how high to turn the seat warmers on. Despite my earlier protests, I now find myself turning the seat heater up an additional setting so I can turn down the cabin heater a few degrees.
Turn the heater off
I don’t normally do this, but I will if I really need to conserve range or it’s not terribly cold out. The difficult part to manage when the heater is off is window fogging. Face masks help with moisture from our breath – what a strange time we live in. Wet hair from a recent shower certainly won’t help either. Even a cup of coffee can make things worse, but I have to draw the line somewhere! ☕
I really wish there was such thing as a heated foot plate. I think I could go further with heater off longer if my feet had a little heat 🥾🔥Maybe I’ll get some heated socks or boots to see how much it helps.
Looking at several garden railway roadbed installation methods, I wanted to mount my track to boards for smooth operation. We’ll use the crusher fines as a base under the boards, […]
Looking at several garden railway roadbed installation methods, I wanted to mount my track to boards for smooth operation. We’ll use the crusher fines as a base under the boards, and later on the top and sides as ballast.
I started by cutting my 1″x4″ cedar boards to the exact length needed for the straight sections. I did rough cuts for the curves on 1/2″ pressure treated plywood:
Here I started to lay out all of boards where they were going to go in the layout.
Since the straight sections were cut to exact length, I put them in place first. I made sure they were level and added more crusher fines where needed. Wiggling the boards back and forth help the rock settle into place. Once it was good, I fastened the straight track to the wood using a staple gun:
I set out the rough cut curved sections:
To get the curves to exact length I connected the curved tracks for a moment to make sure the straights were exactly in the right spot, then removed the curved tracks. I tucked the curved boards under the straights and marked them for cutting. After cutting I added more crusher fines to the curved plywood sections since those boards are 1/2″ thick (instead of 3/4″ thick like the 1″x4″s). Once it was level I stapled the curves to the board the same way as the straights.
I cut a few turnout sections out of plywood as well and followed the same process.
When it was done, I took a locomotive for a spin to make sure no tracks were coupled incorrectly.
With my area leveled, I laid the track out to make sure everything would fit. This was when I discovered I had to make a few minor changes to my design.
You can’t have a left turnout switch immediately following a right turnout switch. This is because the manual switch mechanism on the left-hand switch will interfere with the track coming off the right turnout. You have to put one straight section in-between the switches. You can see the first left-hand turnout operation switch between the tracks here:
You can also probably spot my SCX24 Subaru brat up there. I wanted to make sure there was room for a small fire road between the tracks and the garden edge.
In garden railroad modeling books I’ve read, people will lay tracks and then cover them with white sand to mark where the tracks go on the ground. I needed to paint a base coat of primer to the tracks for UV protection. I just used spray paint primer on them in place and used the over spray on the ground as the indicator of where the tracks would be.
I used a silvery-gray since this color will be the color of the rails. Later I’ll add brown to the ties.
Then my son and I removed the tracks in sections and dug a 2″x6″ trench where the over spray was. I bought a 4′ wide roll of landscape fabric and cut a 12-foot length into four 12″ strips. These strips would go into the trench and have an inch of crusher fines added to fill the bottom of the trench.
The idea is that the fabric will contain the roadbed and keep out weeds. The crusher fines have sharp edges and will interlock to provide a nice level surface which will also drain well.
Later, on top of the 1″ bed of crusher fines, we’ll add a 1″x4″ cedar board that the tracks will be mounted to for smooth operation. For the curves, 1/2″ treated plywood will be used on top of a slightly thicker layer of crusher fines. Later, we’ll top the tracks and wood off with more crusher fines as ballast.
Side note about crusher fines: think about how much you’ll need and where you’re going to put it.
With my 2″x6″ trench and roughly 80ft. of track, I estimated I’d need about .25 cubic yards of material. My local landscape supply store sells them in 1/3 cubic yard amounts. I opted for 2/3 yard so I could have some extra, in retrospect 1/3 would have been more than enough (and less work).
Think about where you’ll put it because the delivery driver will likely have to put it in your driveway. For me, this blocked one side of our garage from being accessible. To move the rock to the backyard takes work and time – and I was rushing to move it to beat the snow.
After choosing a suitable layout and location for the crawler course and garden railway, it was time to lay the foundation. I called 811 to make sure I wasn’t going […]
I called 811 to make sure I wasn’t going to run into any buried pipes or wires, it was time to start digging The issue I needed to solve is that the selected area for my garden railway and crawler course is sloped.
The goal was to put the part of the wall that’s at the highest point flush with the ground so the lowest point only needs to be raised a little to make it all level. To do this I started digging out the perimeter of the area where the walls would go.
To give the Vita walls an anchor, I followed the suggestion in the instructions by adding a 2-foot stake to the center of the connector sections. At my local hardware store I found these aluminum “U” channels.
They fit perfectly into the center of the connecting section.
I used a small square with a bubble level to make sure it’s going straight down and not at an angle. Then I used a rubber mallet and a chunk of wood to drive it into the ground.
Here it is with the back side leveled, but not the front:
Leveling all sides is tricky. To make sure I was level across long distances, I zip-tied a level to a looong 16′ 1″x4″ cedar board (which I’ll use for track work later). This allowed me to make sure the sides were level across the 12-foot width and almost all the way down the 20-foot length.
I did have to cut 2 roots from the maple tree. They weren’t huge, so I’m sure the tree will be fine. I liken it to trimming two sucker branches from the bottom of the tree. It’s not going to affect it long term.
Leveling the center
With all sides level, it was time to level the center. This started with a lot of shoveling from the high side of the slope to the low side. Once it was somewhat close I used a rake to loosen the dirt. I used a 10-foot 2×4 with a level to act as a screed tool. I drug it across the entire area, bit by bit – leveling the dirt along the way.
Costs
This step didn’t cost a lot in materials, but it took quite a bit of time and effort.
Along with cost of the materials from the design ($430), we’re up to $506. That cost has been spread out over time because it took me a long time to work the ground to get it to this point.
I knew having two electric-powered vehicles in the garage would initially present some charging problems. We have a garage fridge and an air compressor that already like to trip the circuit breaker when both are running full-tilt. Charging two vehicles from that same 120V circuit was going to be tricky.
Offset Charging Schedules
Until we could add a dedicated 240V circuit, the first thing I did was set charging schedules for both vehicles. I set the Bolt to charge from Midnight to 4PM. Because I work from home, I tend to drive my car (usually to rehearsal) after work.
Setting the Bolt’s charging schedule is a bit complex. It’s labeled rate scheduling because you can configure it to match your power company’s off-peak, mid-peak, and peak rates for weekdays and weekends, summer and winter. Lots of options!
I set the car to charge on off-peak only when at home and then made the off-peak hours Midnight to 4PM every day, year-round. Done and done.
The Pacifica is easier to set a schedule. It simply has start and stop times for weekdays and weekends. I set it to charge from 4PM to Midnight every day.
Because both vehicles clocks are synced to the cell phone network or GPS, I made them turn on/off at the exact same time. This seemed to work for a while until I tripped the breaker at 4PM one day. Just one second of overlap with one car coming off the charge and the other firing up was enough to trip the 20 amp circuit.
Both vehicles use 15-minute increments in their scheduling software. So I set the Bolt to charge from 12:15AM to 3:45PM to give a buffer. Still, on days when both cars were driven, neither were getting a full charge, so it was time for an upgrade.
240V Outlet & Level 1.5 Charging
To facilitate a Level 2 charger, we had an electrician install a 14-50 50-amp RV-style 240V outlet in the garage. If you have a 240V outlet and don’t yet have a Level 2 charger – don’t worry, you can double your charge rate with the included “portable” charger.
Dual Level 2 Charging
After the electrician installed a 50-amp 240V outlet, it was time to go big or go home at home. I ordered a Clipper Creek 40-amp dual car charger. While it’s true that most charging stations are just “fancy extension cords” – this one has some smarts in it. If two cars are charging at the same time it will split the charge and feed 20-amps to each vehicle. If only one vehicle is charging, it will get the full 40-amps.
At that rate, the van can charge fully in 2 hours and the Chevy could always get to a full charge overnight. Because having a Level 2 charger means we can really blast some power into charging, I set both vehicles charging schedules to 9PM-9AM which is off-peak for my power company.
Charging Extension
While I’m waiting to get my Bolt’s battery replaced because of the recall, I need to keep it outside. To be able to charge in the driveway I purchased a 40-amp J-1772 extension cable. It adds 20 feet to to my garage charger so I can reach it in the driveway. So the charge handle doesn’t just get left on the ground (or in the snow), I mounted a EV holster to the side of the garage.
When I first got the message about the battery recall affecting every model year Bolt, I started parking the car in the driveway (per Chevy’s recommendation). Before I got the extension cord I switched from using the high-amp Clipper Creek charger to the included “portable” charger, but plugged into 240 volts. This worked great for a while because I could use a normal extension cord with the included charger. To work on 240 volts, the extension cord just has to have low-gauge wires (thick) with no extras like LED indicator lights.
It started to become a nuisance as charging both cars meant I’d have to go out and switch the one active charge plug to the other car once the first was done. I could have purchased a 50-amp RV splitter for $100 and used both portable chargers at the same time. The 50 amp outlet would have more than enough overhead as each portable charger maxes out at 12 amps for 24 amps total. This would actually be a great (cheap!) setup for two cars and 240 volts without having to invest in a big charger.
But I already had the big charger and $100 was more than half of the J-1772 extension, so I went that route and it’s been working great.
We had a 1:24 scale Christmas last year, which was fun to set up under the tree. While the SCX24 RC crawler is small, the G-scale trains are decidedly big […]
We had a 1:24 scale Christmas last year, which was fun to set up under the tree. While the SCX24 RC crawler is small, the G-scale trains are decidedly big once you factor in the layout. I’ve always loved model trains and had a layout as a kid, but in my home it would be impossible to dedicate a room to model trains. Why not go outside?
Large scale trains are popular for garden railways, and I had a section of yard that was completely unused. But it won’t be for just trains – I want it to be a multi-modal play area: trains, crawlers, maybe even a landing pad for an RC helicopter
This site isn’t transforming into a model railroad blog (at least not permanently), but the next few posts will be about the train setup as groundwork before the crawler course is installed. Hopefully you can enjoy it all under the guise of RC and Trail & Scale
Garden Bed & Trains
For the area, I purchased some Vita 4’x4’x11″ vinyl garden beds from Costco. They came as a 2-pack that you can combine to make a 8’x8′ area. I bought two of those packs which let me combine them to make a 12’x20′ area.
Before I did any digging, I loosely fit the vinyl bed parts together in the yard to make sure I knew that the space would be appropriate
For the trains, I decided to stick with Lionel Ready-To-Play (RTP) sets. They’re basically the same size as Lionel’s G-scale lineup but they run on a slightly wider (proprietary) track system as Lionel does They are powered by batteries instead of power through the track, and have individual RC remotes. They’re more toy grade than true model trains – cemented by the fact that you can’t order additional rolling stock for these sets. But there are opportunities for modding them and other G-scale trains through 3D printing – something that interests me more than just wasting investing my money in endless train cars.
One look at the cost of “real” G-scale locomotives made me realize that for $100 I can buy another RTP set that will include a locomotive, remote control, rolling stock and track.
Make the manual RTP switches easy to access (near one edge)
Leave plenty of space in the center for a suitable 1:24 off-road vehicle recreation area.
I started with some books at the library on layouts – there are plenty available and you don’t always need to concern yourself with scale & gauge to get good ideas. The book 45 Original Track Plans had a lumber railroad that struck me because even with the switching yard out front, it was at an angle to the perimeter of the layout, which added some interest.
Doing something similar I’d be able to make psuedo tri-oval to fit inside my oddly-shaped area. To make sure everything would fit, I downloaded SCARM to create some layouts. It didn’t have any Lionel RTP tracks in the library, so I submitted the standard measurements to the software author and they’re now included in version 1.8.0 and above.
I settled on this layout:
You can see I in the lower left of this schematic (and the picture above) that there’s a maple tree that prevents me from making a regular 12’x20′ rectangle – so I inverted that corner and included it in my layout design for reference. I used that constraint to make the layout like a right-triangle, with a switching yard in the extra space.
The tracks don’t fully connect in this schematic – because I’m using several 3D printed track sections to fill the gaps which aren’t (yet) part of the SCARM library.
I kept the entire center area open to build a scale off-highway vehicle recreation area. The plan will be to keep that area flexible (not permanent), and have it be mostly rocks and hills to traverse up and down.
Costs
I want to be clear about the costs along the way with this project. Garden railroads are never cheap, and mine is likely no exception, but I’d like to think it will be cheap and cheerful compared to the many others out there. I’ll be sure to include the cost of materials at the end of every post that is part of this project.
(2) Vita 4’x4’x11″ Vinyl Garden Beds from Costco – $150
I took a road trip earlier this year in my new Chevy Bolt. While it’s not a study, I hope you’ll find my personal story and anecdotal evidence compelling.
TL;DR? I drove from Minneapolis to Chicago and back, and it cost me $45.90 in energy for the whole trip.
Before I went on my first EV road trip, I needed to know where to stop, as there aren’t fast charging stations on every corner like gas stations. The best resource for finding charging stations across all of the different networks is plugshare.com.
All of the other fast charging stations we used were Electrify America. I don’t want to make this an Electrify America commercial – but they seem to have a pretty darn good DC fast charging network:
EA Network May 2021
Probably second only to the Tesla Supercharger network:
Tesla Supercharger Network May 2021
An aside about Electrify America – it’s a Volkswagen company created in the wake of their diesel scandal.
Charge Speed
I’ve seen some complaints that the only reason they’re not buying a Chevy Bolt specifically is because of the charge rate. I could see this argument as valid if you’re consistently doing cross-country road trips. But for a 400-mile (each way) road trip, this car is great.
The Bolt will fast charge at around 53kw – a far cry from the hundreds of kilowatts the Teslas will slurp up, but it’s no slouch. On our trip we left in the morning and our first charge was at lunch time. After an hour lunch it charged from 25% to over 90% – good to go for another 200+ miles.
It’s sort of topsy turvy to think about charging in terms of miles per hour – the charger is stationary 🤓 But Level 1 & 2 and DC fast chargers can all pump X amount of miles back into your EV in an hour.
At 53kw when you’re at the bottom of the tank it will fill about 28 miles every 10 minutes. That comes out to 168MPH, but that’s not the full story. Charging will slow in all EVs as they approach the top of the tank so to speak. Full charge rate usually starts dropping off somewhere between 66-80% charge level. Around 66% when the charge rate is between 30-40kwh, the Bolt added 18 miles in 10 minutes (108MPH).
At our second stop we just needed to “top up” to get to the final destination. Topping up is a bit of a misnomer. EV lithium batteries take the fastest charge when they’re below 50%. So it’s best to use the middle range of the battery and not get hung up on getting it to 100%. The very end of the charge takes longer because all of the battery cells need to reach their maximum voltage together without going over 🔋🔥
Hotel & Return Trip
I found a hotel on plugshare.com that had a level 2 (240 volt) charger. The $5 was a single-use fee that the hotel charged to activate the charger. You could probably find a hotel that includes it for free, but it wasn’t a big deal. I paid the $5 and charged up to 100% which covered all my in-town trips, plus enough power leftover to get to Madison on the way out of town.
On our way home during the last charge, the Bolt went from %18 to 60% in 35 minutes. It brought the range back up to 160 miles – more than enough to get home from Eau Claire to Minneapolis with energy to spare.
What do you do while you’re waiting?
One thing I didn’t expect to do was talk to curious people noticing me plugging the monster cable into a little hatchback. One guy who just bought an EV chatted me up while he was going around town to get familiar with his neighborhood charging stations.
Another guy wanted to know what we did while it charged. Well, I had a conversation with him – how meta. We told him about the new Ford F-150 Lightning as he needs a truck for his farm.
If no one else is around and it’s not mealtime, we both brought books. I honestly didn’t get more than a chapter in between the bathroom breaks, the conversations, and snack time 📕🍫
Then it happened again, and again, and again. I found myself having to use my phone to record the remainder of the ride. That is, if I even noticed that my fitbit had conked out.
I could be riding outside in perfectly clear weather and then BAM, I’d get the dreaded “Cannot establish a GPS Connection. Turning GPS off” message 😡 WTF? No option to retry or anything. My fitbit would say “we’re done here” and give up. Very frustrating.
I opened a support chat with Fitbit to see what’s up. They had me go through the usual paces of making sure it had a full charge, disabling/removing unnecessary apps, make sure the firmware was updated, double-checking the GPS settings. Then they put a “watch” on my account to see what the tracker was logging.
Charge 4 RMA
They saw the same problems I was having, and then they told me to send my unit in for a replacement. Curiously they didn’t tell me what they were doing – presumably they knew what the problem was and they had a newer hardware version of the Charge 4 that would remedy the problem. But I can’t tell what has changed since there’s no indication of hardware version without opening it up to look at the circuit board.
I did some testing and noticed a new behavior when doing activities that use GPS. When you go into a building, or tunnel, or someplace where GPS signal is lost, it doesn’t turn the GPS off, it starts looking for a signal – indicated by a dim arrow icon in the upper left.
To confirm that it’s truly fixed, I went to my piano lesson (which is in a basement) and left the GPS running the whole time – 30 minutes indoors. It never turned the GPS off and I was able to record my full ride home.
I wouldn’t recommend doing this normally – searching for GPS signal is likely a very power hungry operation. If you’re stopping somewhere, best to hit the pause button and then resume when you leave.
Get it replaced
I’m not the only one having this issue, as indicated by this thread in the Fitbit community forum. If you have one of these, you should contact support to get it replaced. With the issue fixed, it’s great and I no longer worry about losing my riding log.
The issue I needed to solve is that the selected area for my garden railway and crawler course is sloped.
They are powered by batteries instead of power through the track, and have individual RC remotes. They’re more toy grade than true model trains – cemented by the fact that you can’t order additional rolling stock for these sets. But there are opportunities for modding them and other G-scale trains through 
