If you look down towards the feed mill at the end of my street you’ll see all of the haze we’re dealing with at the moment. That’s smoke from the Canadian wildfires and it’s so bad at the moment that they’ve issued warnings that its unhealthy to even be outside. When I go outside it frankly stinks like a trash fire. Someone on television said that being outdoors right for a day would be the equivalent of smoking a whole pack of cigarettes. Judging from the way it looks, smells and feels out there, I would think that is not an exaggeration.
There’s not much we can do about it. We have the house closed up tight, with three room sized HEPA filters running full out and the furnace fans circulating the air in the house through its filters. I’d love to be outside at the moment. Temperature is around 72 degrees, ideal for things like gardening, riding the bike, etc. But I had a severe case of bronchitis and/or pneumonia (they never did figure out which it was, exactly) some time ago and ever since my lungs were never the same so when things get like this I stay in the house as much as I can.
The EG4 12000XP is working nicely. Mostly. After getting the battery communications situation straightened out I have had a couple of curious issues with it that we’re working to resolve. More about that in a moment. Otherwise it’s been doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. In the photo above it’s hooked to a 2KW solar array. You’ll note that it’s only bringing in a little over 1 KW and that’s because of guess what? Yeah, the smoke. It’s amazing how the haze from the wildfire smoke causes solar production to plummet. Almost all of that power is going into the batteries in the photo up there because the house isn’t switched over to the inverter yet. The 21 W it’s currently showing is what the inverter itself uses.
I really like the display on this unit. It is so much easier to read and understand than the displays on the 6500EX units were. The 12000 shows pretty much everything I need to see right here on the main screen. With the 6500EX I had to scroll through a half dozen different screens to get the same information.
But the issues… Twice now I’ve had the inverter trip out with an “Overload” error message and my son and I are both scratching our heads over that because there was no overload of anything. At the time it tripped out the total load on it from the house was only around 2.5 KW total on both legs and this thing is supposed to be able to handle up to a 12KW load, 6KW on each leg. So what caused it to trip out?
I haven’t been able to do much experimenting with it because we’ve had so much cloudy weather of late. Hopefully I’ll be able to “exercise” it, so to speak, more fully once the weather clears up and we can track down what the problem is.
As you can see we’ve been harvesting onions and picking some of the young carrots. The onions are brought into the garage where they will be laid out on a screen for about two weeks to cure them. The curing process basically allows the outer layers of the onion to dry and harden which protects them from rot and mildew. They’re left to dry in a fairly warm, dry place for a couple of weeks to cure, then we pack them loosely into net bags and hang them from the ceiling in the basement for long term storage. If properly cured and then stored they can last for months.
We also just peel them, dice them up and freeze them for use later in sauces, chili, tacos, etc. The texture does break down and they get soft but the flavor is still there. We do the same thing with cilantro, freezing it in blocks in ice cube trays in either water or olive oil. That works out really well. When we’re making chili or tacos or something we just pull out a cube of cilantro and throw it in the pot with the rest of the ingredients.
My wife and I both love cone flowers. They’re in all their glory right now. They put on a double show for us. First when the come into flower like they are right now, and then in the fall after the flowers have faded and the finches go after the seeds. We’ll get dozens of goldfinches coming to feast on the seeds in the fall. And best of all, it takes us zero work and expense to grow them. enough seed falls to the ground that they re-seed themselves and they don’t require any work at all in the gardens. They’re even quite drought tolerant.
I’m very, very lucky to have a very nicely maintained trail network just a few miles from my house!
Someone asked if I was still going out on the bike and the answer is definitely yes. I just don’t bring it up much here because I figured people were getting bored with it. I try to put on 10 – 15 miles a day, three or four days a week, and about 5 miles the other three or four days.
I have one of those Garmin fitness tracker thingies with built in GPS. I tried one of those fitness tracker aps on my phone but most of them are worthless and the ones that actually worked reasonably well deluged me with non-stop spam trying to sell me subscriptions and I don’t know what all else. All I want is something that records milage, shows my route, and that’s about it.
It’s a Garmin Edge 130. It’s a tiny little thing that clips to the handlebars of the bike. It has a fairly small, black and white LCD screen that displays things like elapsed time, speed, etc. It’s handy little gadget if ridiculously pricy. I think the dopey thing goes for about $200 these days. That’s like twice what I paid for mine a couple of years ago. I’m not sure why the price has damn near doubled since then.
I am not recommending you get one. I honestly don’t think it’s worth $200. It pairs with an app on my iPhone that gives me all sorts of data that I really don’t give a fig about, to be honest. I don’t know why people obsess so much about things like calories burned, cadence, respiratory rates, hydration and all that guff. If I were in training for the tour de France yeah, I might care. But I’m just an old duffer who likes to know how far he’s gone and can show the wife a map of where I went so she doesn’t think I’m cheating and only getting as far as the local pub.
When I’m out in the country on the bike I might bop along at 10 – 14 MPH but it’ll take me two hours to do 10 miles because I’m constantly stopping to take photos. Every time I come across a cluster of flowers or some interesting looking plants or hear an unfamiliar bird call I’m stopping and looking and listening and photographing. When you run into clusters of flowers like those up there in that photo how can you not stop and look?
And I’m still experimenting with the Falcon laser. I’ve been fiddling around experimenting with doing inlay and other things. I was wondering if I could get a sort of stained glass effect by inlaying translucent acrylic into wooden outlines and that seems to actually work in the simple experiments I’ve tried. I’m also going to try combining it with another hobby of mine, making epoxy resin castings to make decorative panels. If anything comes of that I’ll let you know.
Well spring has finally come to Wisconsin. I was wondering for a while if the weather was ever going to get nice. But it’s finally been warm enough and pleasant enough that I’ve been able to get back out on the bike again.
I’m fortunate to live near some wonderful wildlife and nature preserves with miles of hiking trails. Bikes, alas, are not permitted, although I do understand why. Bike tires can be extremely destructive and disruptive inside of nature preserves.
This is the time of year when flowers are popping up all over the place. Like an entirely unexpected cluster of flowering trees just appearing at random alongside the road. I wanted to go get a closer picture but I would have had to scramble down a steep ditch to get over there so I had to settle for taking photos from the road.
Then I ran into this on one of the trails around here and I was able to get in close for some photos.
I suppose a lot of people would have just blown past, but I’m in no hurry. I’d probably irritate a lot of bike riders if I were with a group because I always want to stop and look at something or take photos. People are in such a hurry these days that they miss much of the beauty this world has to offer.
I love my technology, my gadgets, my computers and all that. But I think we pay a steep price if we wander too far away from nature and lose our connection with the world around us.
On the bike trail between Hilbert and Forest Junction. This trail and most of the others around here follow old railroad lines that ran between small towns before they were abandoned.
The calendar may say this is the first day of autumn but it hasn’t felt like it for the last few days. Daytime highs have been pushing 80 and it’s been remarkably pleasant out there. I’ve been out on the bike rather a lot enjoying the nice weather while it’s here.
But it’s dry. Very, very dry. This is what the river north of town usually looks like.
Below is what it looks like now.
I’ve lived in this area since the late 1980s and I’ve never seen the river like this before.
Yeah, completely dry. So dry I could walk across it without getting my shoes muddy.
MrsGF and I have been working on cleaning up some of the gardens. The squash, wax beans and pole beans are all done and we have those all cleaned out and have been working on bringing in some fresh compost.
The beans did not do very well this year. Both the pole and wax beans didn’t seem to thrive. Lots of vegetation and blossoms, but not many beans. I’m not sure why. I think partly that was because of a lack of bees. I saw a lot of bumble bees out there this year but I didn’t see a single honey bee all summer long. And the bumbles seemed to avoid the bean blossoms. Or it could have been the hot, dry weather. We watered the gardens almost every day this summer but it still might have been too dry for the beans.
The squash were fantastic this year, big, beautiful butternut squash, and a lot of them. We ended up with the entire wagon full of them. Excellent quality as well.
We ended up with a lot more than we needed so we gave a lot away to friends and family or traded them for things we didn’t have like pears.
We tried a different variety of tomato this year, something called Amish Gold Slicers, a yellow variety. They had excellent flavor but I was disappointed by the yield. At the moment the plants are still going, still have lots of green fruit, but the fruit seems to have stopped maturing. We’ve had almost no ripe ones at all over the last week or so. No idea what’s going on there. I’m hoping that will change, but the way things are now we aren’t going to get much more off of them. They also had a thick, tough skin making them hard to cut unless we used a freshly sharpened knife. Overall they were a bit disappointing and I don’t think we’ll be using that variety again.
We put in sweet bell peppers, jalapenos and banana peppers this year and they all did well. Are still doing well, especially the jalapenos. They’re producing like crazy still, loaded with young fruit and blossoms.
But even the peppers have been a bit odd this year. The jalapenos heat levels have been strange. One will be so sweet and have so little heat I could eat them like candy, and the one right next to it, from the same plant, would be so hot my eyes would water and I ran to the fridge for some milk to try to quench the fire.
The bell peppers were excellent but we let some ripen to turn red and when we cut them open the entire seed cavity was full of mold. Very strange. I’d never seen that before.
The brussel sprouts are looking excellent. I still think they’re one of the goofiest plants I’ve ever seen, but they’re doing well and we’ve had some of the sprouts for dinner a week or so ago and damn, they taste good!
That being said I’m not sure we’re going to plant them again. They take up a lot of space and don’t really produce enough sprouts to justify the amount of garden space they use. So while they were a success, we aren’t sure if they’re worth the effort.
Of course me being me I can’t do one of these without putting up a picture of a flower, so here you go…
There, I got that out of the way. So let’s move on with this.
E-bike update: I bought the Vado e-bike in mid-July of last year so I’ve had it for 14 months now so let’s take a look at how that’s worked out. In that time I’ve put about 1,300 miles on it and it’s worked flawlessly. I’ve had absolutely no problems at all with it. Mechanically and electronically it’s worked exactly as advertised. I love the thing. Range for a bike this heavy is excellent. Cruising at around 12 – 14 mph in Eco mode it does about 1 mile for a bit more than 1% battery capacity. I did 20 miles the other day and the battery was still at around 75%. It handles well, the hydraulic disc brakes are excellent, the lighting is good. This thing was expensive but IMO it was worth it. If I want to get somewhere fast I can kick it up into “turbo” mode and pedal along at about 20 mph. Generally I’m in no hurry so I just toodle along about 10 enjoying the scenery. And because it has an actual real shifter, not one of those stupid belt drives, it even works as a standard bike with the motor shut off so I don’t have to worry about getting stranded somewhere if something does go wrong.
The solar power system update: It is still working well. As noted before it’s knocked more than a third off my electric bill since I put it in. There have been no glitches or nasty surprises.
Sidenote: Just about all of the electric utility companies in the state are asking for significant increases in rates, one company wants to increase rates by 14% over the next two years. And they’ll probably get it, too. Plus there is talk that they’re going to force everyone to accept rate plans that will drastically increase their rates during peak times of the day. They haven’t put forward that plan yet, but there has been a lot of talk about it behind the scenes. That scheme would double what I pay per kilowatt hour during peak periods, pushing it up to somewhere between 32 cents to 40 cents per kWh.
And that’s about it for now!
Coming up: I’ll probably be babbling about amateur radio again in the near future. I have a new antenna on order that should be here soon so I’ll be talking about that.
I want to do a brief look at the Klein thermal imaging camera I picked up a while back. That’s turned out to be quite handy and a lot of fun to just play with too. I’m sure there will be other things tossed in as well.
I managed to injure my left leg when I was wrestling around with those massive batteries for the solar power system so my physical activity was seriously limited for a couple of weeks. Yesterday was the first day I felt comfortable enough to get out on the bike for an extended ride, and it was a great day to start. Was absolutely beautiful out with temps in the high 70s and a gentle breeze.
Phlox everywhere. They’re pretty but they’re an invasive species that spreads very aggressively in this area.
I injured my left calf pretty seriously back in the 1990s in a farm accident. Took me 6 weeks to recover from that one and ever since I’ve had to be cautious with that leg. Lugging 100 lb batteries down the basement stairs and into the battery cabinet didn’t do the leg any good. Neither did repeatedly kneeling down on the floor to work on wiring.
Out in the gardens the irises are coming into full bloom. They don’t bloom for very long but when they do that whole area is covered with these amazing flowers in brilliant blue, purple and yellow. When the sun hits them the colors are so brilliant they almost glow.
Alas the flowers don’t last long but by the time they fade away others will have blossomed to take their place.
More solar stuff: I really need to do some meaningful testing of the EG4 system to get some basic data about run times and things like that. I can guess how long the batteries will last when running the house off the EG4 system but I don’t have any actual operational data giving me actual run times under particular sets of circumstances and things like that. Two days ago I started it up, took the house off-grid and ran entirely from the EG4 system starting at 7 AM and ending at 3 PM, a total of 8 hours. At the end of that time the batteries were still at about 78% capacity because we had a pretty good day for solar production. While that was interesting I really need to see how long I can run the house just off the batteries, with no solar power at all.
The string of Newpowa panels have been peaking at around 1,000 watts, and the HQST panels at around 600 watts. That’s less their rated peak output which should be around 1,320 and 800 respectively. The HQST panels were putting out close to 700W earlier this year so I know they can do better than what I’m seeing. And the weather was clear with bright sunshine…
Or was it? The sky looked clear when looking straight up, but if you’d look towards the horizon it was a different story. The wind shifted again and we’re back to getting air quality alerts because of the forest fires in Canada. It looks clear and sunny but it really isn’t. There is a significant amount of fine particulate material floating around in the atmosphere that is cutting back on the amount of solar radiation that is reaching the ground. What it boils down to is that I theoretically have enough solar out there to take my batteries from about 50% to near 100% in one day of full sun. In reality, with variable cloud conditions and the smoke from the fires, I’m lucky if I get half of that.
(And I can sure tell there are air quality problems with my allergies, too. I was up at 3 AM this morning with my head so stuffed up I could hardly breathe. I gave up trying to get back to sleep. Since all of this air quality stuff started I’ve been having problems sleeping, stuffed up sinuses, etc. Makes it very hard for me to stay asleep. I’ve generally been waking up around 3 or 4 AM and find it almost impossible to get back to sleep again. Running on four or five hours of sleep is unpleasant. Sigh…)
This thing started out at around $500 but is currently selling for $399 over at Signature Solar. In the interest of full disclosure I should point out that I got this thing free from Signature Solar.
Speaking of battery charging I got one of these in earlier this week from Signature Solar, the EG4 Chargeverter, a 48V battery charger that plugs into a 240V AC power source to rapidly recharge LiFePo batteries. This thing can put out up to 100 Amps which means it could fully recharge my 15 KWh of batteries in just 3 hours. It’s only been on the market for a few months and I’m curious to see how well it works so when I get a chance to check it out I’ll talk about it in the future.
Now why would someone need one of these? After all a lot of modern inverters like my EG4 6500EX already have built in AC battery chargers. I could wire my EG4s directly to the house’s AC power and they would automatically keep the batteries topped up even when there is no solar. But a lot of these systems are sold to people who are entirely off the grid. They have no connection to the grid at all. (And my system has no grid connection.) If they don’t get enough solar power to keep their batteries topped up, they have to resort to using a gasoline powered generator to charge them up. And that’s where the problems come in. These cheap, gasoline generators often produce very dirty power that isn’t even close to a pure sine wave and which can damage electronics. This chargeverter apparently doesn’t care how dirty the AC power coming into it may be. So if you’re living entirely off the grid, or if you’re going through an extended blackout and there isn’t enough solar to keep the batteries charged, you could plug this thing into a cheap Harbor Freight generator to charge your batteries and not have to worry about damaging anything.
I have a 7,500W Generac gasoline generator sitting out in the garage and this thing should plug right into it so I’ll be testing this out in the near future. If it works as advertised it will probably be kept permanently wired up to the bus bars in the battery cabinet. I doubt if it will get much use but it could come in very handy if we have an extended power outage.
What I’ll probably do is run my batteries down to about 25% and then try charging them with the chargeverter connected to the Generac and see what happens.
Finally some temporary mounts for the solar panels after a couple of months of sitting in the snow and mud alongside the garage.
Let’s catch up with what’s been going on.
The weather finally got nice enough to let me get some chores done outside. First thing I had to do was get the solar panels up off the mud. I threw together some temporary frames and supports out of pressure treated lumber. I’m not putting in anything even semi-permanent yet because it’s all going to get changed around and more panels purchased in the near future to feed the new solar system we’re going to be installing. More about that a bit later.
The new setup seems to have made a huge difference in power production. I didn’t get this set up until early afternoon and at that time we were seeing high clouds that were cutting power production, but even with the clouds I was getting 500 watts or more. When the sky did clear momentarily they were peeking at around 750W for a time. At 4:30 PM after the skies had cleared I was still getting about 450W. For most of the afternoon I was running the entire basement, my radio equipment, the grow lights for our seedlings and the heating pad for the little greenhouse we have set up in the basement, the chest freezer and the living room, all running off the Bluetti with more than enough power coming in to run all of that and keep the batteries topped off. Of course there isn’t a heck of a lot of power being used for any of that. I think that peaks at around 600W of load. Still, that’s 600 watts of power we aren’t paying the utility company for.
Today is supposed to be warm and sunny so I’ll see just how much power those panels produce now that they’re more properly oriented. I am really pleased with those HQST panels. They’ve been doing much, much better than i anticipated.
The weather was so nice yesterday that I finally got the bike out of storage, checked over and out on the road again. After about 5+ months of a woefully sedentary lifestyle I was pretty stiff and after about five miles my legs were complaining already. The Vado up there may be an e-bike but it doesn’t do all the work for me. I still have to pedal it and I run it in “eco” mode so it only does about 25% of the work for me. Although I admit I will kick the assistance level when I’m going up a steep hill. Hey, what can I say? I’m old. I’ll be hitting 70 this year.
It was nice to get out on the road again on the bike but there isn’t much to see this time of year. The countryside around here is still mostly, well, looking like this…
Not very appealing but give it a few weeks.
The weather has been, as usual, odd. We went from rainy, cloudy, cold weather with daytime highs of around 40, to 70+ degrees literally overnight. It’s supposed to hit 80 degrees this week before the temps plunge back down into the low 40s again by the weekend.
And now the OMG part…
We made the decision to go ahead and make a significant investment in equipment for a rather large solar power system. I’ll go into all of the details later but we’re sinking a significant amount of money and effort into this and I hope it isn’t going to turn into a fiasco. We’ll see.
I thought I was going to have some time to prep for this. The company I’m buying the stuff from said it would probably take 2 – 3 weeks to put the order together, get it on a truck and ship it here. So no big rush in preparing. I need to clear space out in the basement, a difficult job because our basement is packed with stuff, a lot of which belongs to eldest son, and a lot of it is electronics so it just can’t be shoved down into the storage unit. And because of the condition of our basement there are limited places where a large electrical system can be installed. It’s going to take a long time to clear out space for it. And then I need to get miscellaneous parts like fuses, electrical cable of different types. a new transfer switch or lockout system for the main breaker panel… The list goes on and on.
So I thought I had at least two weeks to get ready for this. I don’t. It’s coming Monday. Something like 500 pounds of stuff on two pallets is going to get dumped off in my driveway sometime on Monday, I’m told. Or at least that’s the projected delivery date according to the shipping company.
It’s the second week of November as I write this. The weather is starting to get colder and it looks like the bicycling season here is pretty much over so this is a good time to look at how my new Vado bike has been doing. I’ve been using this bike just about every day since July and I’ve put about 1,000 miles on it. So I thought this would be a good time to take a look at how well it holds up under long term, real world use.
The Vado has exceeded my expectations in every way. It is heavy, yes, it scales at a bit over 60 lbs. That might be a problem for someone who has to lug a bike in and out of an apartment building or up stairs, but it isn’t a problem for me. When actually riding the bike I never even notice the weight, even when riding it with the motor turned off. The Vado works just fine as a standard bicycle without motor assistance, by the way, thanks to it’s 10 speed derailleur shifter. Having that 10 speed shifting capability, IMO, makes the Vado much, much easier to ride out in the real world when compared to e-bikes that are single speed.
I won’t go into a lot of details here and just hit the high points, looking at it from a rider’s point of view.
The lights, both front and rear, are excellent. The headlight is very bright, more than bright enough to be genuinely useful at night. The taillight wraps around the cargo carrier and is also highly visible even in daylight.
The cargo carrier, a sort of flat pallet rack kind of thing, comes installed on the bike, and a sort of “A” frame extends down bolting directly to the rear axle. Vado claims you can lug 50 pounds of junk on this bike if you need to and I have no reason to doubt that claim. I have a hard sided bag strapped to mine with a tool kit and other stuff tucked in there. I’m thinking of throwing together a complete amateur radio system that will fit in there, with ny Yaesu FT-818, a battery and antenna, etc but that’s I’ll talk about that later if it ever happens.
The squeaky duck with the propeller hat is an extra cost option.
From the front the bike looks, well, busy, to be honest, with cables for the shifter, the electronics, etc, plus the hoses for the hydraulic brakes looking like, frankly, a tangled mess. But when I’m riding I’m not looking at the front of the bike so I don’t care.
Speaking of hydraulic brakes, this is the first bike I’ve had which has hydraulic disc brakes and I am very, very pleased with them. They are so much better than the old caliper style brakes that clamp on the rim, or even the cable actuated disc brakes that I’ve had on other bikes, that I don’t think I’d ever want to go back to the old style brakes. I didn’t really think they would make that much of a difference but they really do.
The computer display is excellent as well. It’s full color, small but easily readable even in bright sunlight. It shows all sorts of interesting statistics that I’m sure will be of interest to somebody. But not to me. I’ve had that Garmin thingie up there on the left side of the handlebars for more than a year. It has built in GPS, mapping functions and other goodies, talks to my cellphone, and does everything I want, so I just transferred that over to the Vado. The Vado’s computer does what it needs to do, and there is an app for it that I have on my phone that does all sorts of nice things. Never used that, either. I’m a bit perplexed by the emphasis some bike makers and reviewers put on these computers because ultimately they do little or nothing to make a bike any better as a bike. There’s one bike out there that includes a video game on the computer for heaven’s sake. The computer needs to have a few basic function, speedometer, odometer, battery health and state of charge indicators, and, if possible, ways to adjust things like the levels of motor assistance. That’s really all this class of bike really needs because people who are interested in a bike in this price range are almost certainly already going to have something like the Garmin or an Apple watch or similar fitness tracker device independent of the equipment it’s used with.
Let’s talk about battery life. Vado’s documentation indicates the bike has about 40 miles of range on a charge, which is considerably underestimating the results I’ve been getting in the real world. I did a 22 mile ride the other day and when I got home the battery indicator said I had 74% battery capacity left. 74%. Now I’m not an aggressive rider. I keep the assistance level in “Eco” mode, the lowest, and I don’t have a lot of lengthy, steep hills to climb around here, so I’m probably easier on battery life than a lot of other people, but even so that’s pretty damned good. Considering what my riding style is like I suspect I could get 80 – 90 miles useable range out of this bike. And I should also remind you that unlike some e-bikes, the Vado works perfectly well as a standard, unpowered bicycle.
I suppose I should talk about speed, too. This is a Class 3 bike which means it can hit 28 MPH (that is limited by law apparently?) And it will. In 10th gear and pedalling my little legs off I can hit 28. I generally cruise at around 13 – 15 mph though. That’s a nice, comfortable pace for me in “eco” mode, the lowest boost level for the motor. And I should add that doing 28 mph on a bicycle is, frankly, a bit scary. If you hit a stone or a hole or just about anything at that speed on a bicycle chances are good you’re going to end up with a nasty crash.
If the bike has one potential problem, it’s that derailleur and shifter. It has a more or less standard 10 speed derailleur. First of all it is, oh, fiddly, let’s say. It will occasionally not shift properly when moving the shift lever and I have to fiddle with it to get it to engage the proper gear. Trying to get it into 10th gear doesn’t work at all unless I jam the lever all the way over and then pedal backwards for a turn or two. But this has been such a minor problem for me that I’ve never bothered to take it back to the dealer to get it adjusted, which I suspect would take care of the problem. The shifting problems have also gotten much better with time.
Another problem that went away by itself after a couple of weeks was that when in a high gear, let’s say 8th or higher, and in Turbo mode, the highest boost mode, getting up on the pedals and really pushing hard would occasionally cause the chain to jump on the sprocket. Considering the amount of force being exerted on that chain by my effort plus the torque of the motor, this is actually understandable. There is a hell of a lot of stress on that chain so it jumping on a gear isn’t all that surprising. And as noted, that problem went away after the first couple of weeks. As noted, I have 1,000 miles on it and if I was going to have serious issues with the derailleur I’d think they would have shown up by now.
There is one significant issue with this bike and that’s the price. If you want this model bike yourself it’s going to set you back about $4,000. That’s a hell of a lot of money. Is it worth it? That’s going to depend on what you’re going to use the bike for and how often you’re going to use it. To me, it is. When the weather is decent enough to ride, this is the vehicle I use. From everything to just toodling around the neighborhood, to running up to the local store to get snacks, to riding over to Brillion or Forest Junction for lunch, or packing up my camera and drone and running around the countryside taking photos, this is what I drive. It’s handled everything from gravel trails to broken up country roads to city streets without a problem. It’s been 100% reliable transportation for me. And meanwhile my Buick has been sitting in the garage most of the summer gathering dust. I’ve only had to buy gas for the Buick once since July when I got this bike. That’s how much I’ve used it. So for me, the Vado has been well worth the price.
The weather here in NE Wisconsin was absolutely beautiful for a few days and I took advantage of that and got out on the bike for a while. But that’s changing fast. They’re now talking about a possibility of snow for us by next week. Sigh…
Jalapeno peppers still growing outside in mid October? Yep. Actually they’re doing better now than they did all summer. I didn’t get more than a dozen or so peppers of both plants during the summer but now the dopey things are covered with flowers and baby fruits. Go figure…
But that being said we have no right to complain. The fall weather has been pretty darned nice. We still haven’t had a hard freeze. We’ve had a few mornings when there was frost on the ground but not enough to really cause any damage. We still have flowers growing around the house and I have two jalapeno pepper plants that are still in flower for heaven’s sake.
Some of the flowers that have survived this fall so far are a bit surprising, like the alyssum. This little cluster of flowers popped up in the spring all by themselves, which surprised me a great deal. But I was very pleased to see them because I love those tiny little flowers, not just because they’re beautiful but because some types of alyssum are amazingly fragrant.
Getting out on the backroads and trails on the bike this fall has been great fun. I’m really going to miss being out there every day once winter hits. It’s been especially interesting out there because I’ve been seeing a lot of reptiles and amphibians out there, far more than usual. I’ve seen dozens of snakes, usually grass snakes and the like. We have two of those little beauties living in the backyard. Unfortunately they’re fast little buggers and my attempts to get them on camera haven’t been very successful. I’ve seen quite a few of them out in the wild as well. Unfortunately I’ve also seen quite a few of them flattened on the roads as well because some of them have a habit of sunning themselves on the roadway.
I’ve seen quite a few turtles out there too, including Fred, who is a regular sight down near the stone bridge that goes over the river.
Almost any sunny day I’d find Fred sunning himself on his favorite spot. He’s a cute little guy, maybe about six inches across with beautiful markings. I’ve managed to get about six or seven fairly decent photos of him.
Most of the migrating birds are gone now. I’ve seen a few cranes still hanging around but those will be gone soon. Ducks and geese are mostly gone. I’ve seen very few birds coming to the feeder in the yard as well. I haven’t had to refill in it some time now. But this time of year the seed eating birds are finding more than enough to eat out there in the wild.
Let’s see, what else? MrsGF and I are sketching out plans for major changes to the gardens now that those big trees are down. Now that the area back there is getting full sun it opens up a lot of options. We want to move two of the raised vegetable beds over to that area because they’re now getting shaded out by a fast growing maple where they are now. The area where the beds are now may become occupied by a garden shed because we need the storage space. We want to put a large decorative raised bed where the stump from the ash tree is located, one that matches the existing bed we have now that surrounds the little maple.
That’s not going to be a cheap project, though. If we do everything we’ve been thinking of it’s probably going to end up costing us in the neighborhood of $5K when it’s all said and done.
We’re still waiting for the garage door company to get the new doors in so they can replace the 30+ year old garage doors and openers. They’re in pretty rough shape and I don’t think they’ll last the winter.
Let’s wrap this up with a siamese cat because why not?
Meg, we’re not sure how old she is but she’s at least 16, maybe 17, and an absolute sweetheart. This foot rubbing thing is fairly new with her but I’m told it isn’t uncommon with kitties. She’s turned into quite the lap cat. If there is a lap anywhere in the house, she will find it and sit on it. She has this thing now where when she’s on my lap she likes to climb up on my chest and rub her face in my beard which is cute but that cat’s claws are like little razors and when she gets relaxed she starts doing this kneading thing it gets a bit interesting.
Oh, almost forgot, the new vacuum thingie. It’s a Shark self emptying robotic vacuum. Normally I wouldn’t have bought one of these but I got the dopey thing on some kind of sale on Amazon for less than half the normal retail price. It was marked down to $200 or so from $500, and I admit that it was sort of an impulse buy.
Now we had a robot vacuum before, one of the early Roomba machines, and it was utterly horrible in every single way. It was incredibly noisy. It couldn’t deal with even 1/4″ tall thresholds between rooms, couldn’t deal with, well, it couldn’t deal with anything, really. It fell down the basement stairs twice. It would just stop dead in its tracks for no apparent reason. And even worse it was damn near worthless at actually cleaning anything.
This one is actually surprisingly good. It maps the rooms as it cleans so it can develop a more efficient pattern of movement. It doesn’t just scurry around at random. It’s been able to negotiate even the rather steep threshold between the dining room and living room. It wanders back to its dock and recharges itself when it needs to and when the battery is topped off it picks up where it left off. And best of all it empties itself! The bin on the dock has to be dumped every couple of weeks or so but that’s no big deal. It hasn’t fallen down the basement stairs yet. And best of all it does a pretty darned nice job cleaning the floors.
I’m not quite sure what in the world it’s doing under the sofa, though. It seems to spend an inordinate amount of time under there when it’s cleaning. Since it has wifi I suspect it’s looking at porn while it’s under there.
Anyway we’ve had this thing for a couple of weeks now and we’ll see how it goes. So far we like it. Even the cat doesn’t mind it.
I’ve had the Specialized Vado ebike for about three weeks now and I love the thing. By the time I get around to finishing this article and posting it I’ll have around 300 miles on it. But I suppose before I get started I should define the term ebike because it’s gotten a bit confusing since there are actually two types of bikes that now fall under the term. One is an actual ebike and the other, if one wishes to be pedantic about it, isn’t.
The first type has a motor and battery but it is still an actual, real bicycle that you have to pedal to make it move. It will not move on its own. This type of ebike uses the motor system to to provide assistance to the rider. It does some of the work for you. How much work the motor does is generally adjustable. I can switch mine from giving no support at all, all the way up to nearly 100% where the motor does almost all the work while I pedal along.
The second type isn’t really what I would call a bicycle. It looks like a bicycle, probably has usable pedals, but it is really more of an electric moped or small motorcycle. With these bikes the motor can be used to do all of the work. You don’t have to pedal at all. There is a throttle on the handlebars to allow you to control the speed. All you have to do is just ride.
There are some issues with this second type. There are potential legal issues for one thing. In a lot of jurisdictions these types of bikes aren’t technically bicycles, they probably should be classified as mopeds or even small motorcycles, and if one were to be strict about it, in those jurisdictions they should be registered and licensed as such and the riders required to have at least a driver’s license and perhaps even a motorcycle license, and they should be insured as such. But fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your point of view) no one seems to be paying much attention to that.
They also, legally speaking, should be required to meet the same equipment and safety requirements as mopeds or small motorcycles. They should have turn signals, proper brakes, headlight, tail light, brake light, properly rated tires and wheels, etc. And because a lot of these are basically just bicycles that someone strapped a motor and battery to, a lot of them have none of those things.
(Sidenote: A word about speed. Most people toodle along at about 5 – 10 mph on a bicycle. Someone who is in relatively good physical shape can cruise along considerably faster than that. With my 24 speed (no motor) a comfortable speed for me on level ground on a nice paved road is about 10 according to my gps thingie, and if I work really, really hard I can hit 19 mph on a level road for short periods of time. I used to work for a bicycle race and those guys cruise along at 24 to 30 mph all day long, and they can max out at about 45 mph. I usually average about 8-10 mph on the bike though because I’m in no real hurry to get anywhere. I’m just out there to enjoy being outside. With the ebike I find myself now cruising easily at about 13 – 15 mph, even going up hills. If I kick up the boost I can run at 20 mph all day long and I max out at around 28 mph.)
Prices on ebikes of both types are all over the place. They range from a low of about $700 up to, well, up to whatever your bank account can withstand. There is a Porsche branded ebike out that that supposedly sells for $10,000.
Sidenote: Yes, Porsche, the maker of supercars and sports cars with eye watering prices, is in the ebike business. They’ve been selling a Porsche branded ebike for a few years now, and have been investing in ebike companies for some time. They’re staring up two new companies specifically to develop, build and sell their own in-house created ebikes. Why would a company known for it’s overpriced, gas sucking, tire squealing sports cars that no one except influencers and trust fund kiddies can afford be getting into the ebike business? Money, of course. Ebikes make a lot of sense in Europe. The population density is high, towns are generally very close together, commutes to work or to do shopping are generally much shorter than they are in the US, traffic in cities is generally horrific with the average speeds for motor vehicles down to just a few miles per hour because of congestion. In most European cities you can get around a hell of a lot faster on a bike than you can in a car. So for a lot of people in the EU ebikes make a lot of sense. Porsche figures it can take a $4,000 ebike, slap some Porsche stickers on it and sell it for $10,000 to the same status hungry influencers and pretend millionaires it sells its cars to.
Now if you go online and start looking around at ebikes you’ll notice a couple of things. First, if you’re at all familiar with the bicycle market you’ll know that if you want to buy a good non-electric bicycle it’ll cost you around $600 and for anything really good the prices go up fast. So how can these companies be selling ebikes for the same price? It makes one wonder about the quality of those inexpensive models.
The second thing you’ll notice is that when it comes to a lot of those cheap ebikes, no matter what the brand name may be, they all look suspiciously alike. That’s because they are. Very few of the companies selling ebikes at the low end of the market actually manufacture them themselves. They all buy the bikes from the same factories and the only differences between them are a few plastic stick on bits and the company logos.
But I wanted to talk about the Vado and let myself get distracted, so let’s get on with this sort of review. I want to talk about ebikes and transportation but I’ll do that in a separate article.
Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way first before I move on to the goodies.
First, it’s heavy and it’s big. It won’t fit into the back of my Buick even with the rear seats folded down. I had to use MrsGF’s Rav4 which has a larger cargo area to pick it up. And it is definitely no light weight. It scales in at around 60 lbs. It definitely is not some kind of sleek road racer. But it has to be big and heavy because it’s designed to not just carry a person around, but also a big battery, a motor, all the electronics, me, and supposedly 50 pounds of cargo as well. And unless you have the motor turned off and you’re using it as a regular pedal bike you won’t even notice the weight.
Second, it’s not exactly cheap. When all was said and done, with taxes and other stuff tacked on, that Vado up there in that photo set me back close to $4,000. That is a hell of a lot of money for a bike, even an ebike. In my opinion the Vado was well worth the money, but that’s me. I put a lot of miles on a bike.
Third, the seat it came with was horrible. It was one of the most uncomfortable saddles I’ve ever had the misfortune to sit on. First thing I did when I got it home was replace the seat with the one from my old 24 speed bike.
Fourth, it comes with pretty much nothing but the bike itself. While the bike is reasonably well equipped and includes a luggage rack on the back, it comes with nothing else. The bag, water bottle bracket and rear view mirror were add ons I put on myself. You’d think they could at least include a water bottle holder on a four grand bike, but that’s the way it goes I guess.
Let’s get on with the good stuff.
The brakes are frankly amazing. No caliper brakes that squeeze on the rim of your wheels. This thing has actual hydraulic disc brakes like you get in a car. Yes, hydraulic, not cable actuated. I’ve never had a bike that stopped this well before. Braking is smooth, predictable, with no unexpected grabbing or fading after repeated stops.
The Vado comes with a 10 speed derailleur gear changer. Anyone who has had a bike with a derailleur system will be familiar with this. It’s the one part of the bike that I think could be a weak point. When I first got the bike it would miss shifts and under hard pedalling it would jump a cog on the gears once in a while. I figured I was going to have to take it back to the dealer and have them take a look at it, but after I’d ridden it for about fifty miles or so the gear changes became smoother and it stopped jumping cogs on the gears. So perhaps it just needed a break in period to work smoothly? I still think this could be a weak point, however. It’s a 10 speed and I think that’s too many gears for a derailleur to handle without some issues. But it’s working fine now so we’ll see.
It comes standard with a very bright LED headlight and a tail light that wraps around the cargo carrier on the back. The tail light isn’t super bright but it will hopefully help make me more visible to car and truck drivers when I’m on the road.
Also note the fenders. I like fenders on a bike. I often ride on gravel trails, run through mud patches, ride right after rains when the roads are wet, etc. Not having fenders on my old bike meant I’d come home with a streak of mud up my back and splatters all over my legs. These fenders work quite well. They are very thin and very flexible but stiff enough to work well.
Front suspension is fantastic. The front forks seems to absorb bumps, railroad tracks and potholes very well. Some people don’t like front suspensions like this for various reasons. I think those people are, frankly, stupid. With the multiple railroad track crossings, gravel trails, potholes, washboard roads, etc. around here, some kind of decent suspension is a requirement around here.
The battery is removable and completely tucked away inside the frame of the bike. It’s relatively easy to get out. Removing it requires using a key in a lock located alongside of the charging socket. Just for the heck of it I looked up what a new battery would cost, thinking that it might not be a bad idea to have a spare. So go ahead, guess what that battery costs. Just take a wild guess.
Try $1,200. Seriously. Twelve hundred bucks for a replacement battery. I find it a bit difficult to believe that the battery alone costs more than a quarter of the value of the bike, but, well, that’s the way it goes I guess.
That’s the charging port in the photo up there, and it is one of the most unnecessarily frustrating things I’ve ever had to fiddle with. It has a kind of magnetic holding system which is neat, but trying to get the blasted plug actually inserted into that socket is infuriating sometimes. It won’t just slide into place and latch on. I’ve spent minutes fiddling with the damned plug, turning it, twisting it, trying to get it to lock in place. And from what I’ve read online I’m not the only one who has problems with the damned thing. There’s no excuse for this on a bike this expensive. Yo, Specialized! Fix the damned plug!
This is an ebike so you need some kind of display and control system. The dashboard, if you want to call it that, defaults to the view you see in the picture above. There are controls on the handlebars that let you flip through various screens that display various bits of information that I suspect I’ll never need to know and will never actually care about, but it’s there if you need it. The left handgrip has a push button control that lets you cycle through various information screens, and a + and – button that cycles through four different levels of ‘boost’, Eco, Sport, Turbo and Off, the latter turns the motor off completely.
There is an app (because of course there is because everything has to have an app on your phone these days whether you want one or not) that does many things, none of which I care about except for the ability to tailor the amount of boost you get from the motor. Eco setting has the motor take up about 30% of the work, Sport is 50% and Turbo is 100%. Basically in Turbo all you’re doing is moving your legs up and down, the motor does almost all of the work. And, of course, Off, which switches the motor off entirely and the only thing powering the bike is your legs. I’m told that I can change the level of boost the motor gives to almost anything I want but the defaults work good for me and probably will for most people.
Yes, you can use this as a normal human powered bike, and it works rather well that way. Despite the bike’s weight it works quite nicely as a normal bicycle.
You’ll have noticed that Garmin thingie on the handlebars up there next to the bike’s control buttons. That’s why I don’t care about the app the bike comes with. That’s a Garmin GPS/fitness tracker/mapping system and displays text messages, emails and other goodies. And, in a feature I hope I never need, will supposedly send an email to my wife if I crash that says something like “Hey, your idiot husband wiped out and he’s laying in a ditch somewhere at these coordinates so you better go sweep him up before you get fined for littering.”
But back to the Vado. I’ve put 300 miles on it now in the three or four weeks I’ve had it and so far I love the thing. It rides well, stops well, handles well. The motor works seamlessly with the bike. The electronics make its presence entirely unobtrusive. The only way i can tell it’s even working is because I can feel that I’m using less effort pedaling up hills or when starting out from a dead stop, which is exactly how it’s supposed to work. It’s very well made. The frame is extremely robust, the welds are just about perfect.
Normally I drive in Eco mode which is the least amount of boost, which is more than enough for me to deal with things like long uphill climbs. If I’m out on a long ride in hot weather and I’m getting tired out I might kick the boost level up to Sport. I’ve tried it in Turbo mode several times. I still have to pedal, but in that mode I’m not doing any work at all, just moving my legs up and down.
Range is always something one needs to be concerned with when it comes to electric vehicles. The manual says I can expect about 40 miles range under normal usage, but I suspect in real life it would be much, much more than that. I went out for a 20 mile ride one day, running mostly in Eco mode, and when I got back home I still had 70% battery life left according to the monitor.
I really, really like the Vado so far. It meets or exceeds all of my expectations. If I didn’t live in a rural area where it’s at least 15 miles to get anywhere I need to go I could easily see using it as my primary means of transportation when the weather was reasonably nice.
The only thing I hate about it is that damned charging port. It’s keyed, so it will only fit into the socket when you have the plug oriented at exactly the right angle. But the port is recessed into the frame, and down near the bottom of the frame, so you can’t actually see how you’re supposed to orient the plug unless you literally get down on your hands and knees. I thought maybe it was just me. I’m not exactly the most graceful person in the world, after all. But it isn’t just me. I’ve read other reviews of the Vado that expressed similar frustrations with the charging plug, so this is a common problem. And there is absolutely no excuse for this. Not on a bike that costs this much money.
To wrap this up, overall I really, really like the Vado. As I said earlier I have over 300 miles on it now and it has worked pretty much flawlessly. It’s great fun to ride, the motor and electronics work beautifully. It’s robustly made and has handled all of the railroad tracks, potholes, expansion joints and other garbage we have to contend with on the roads around here. Brakes are simply excellent. It’s expensive, yes, but I think it’s worth the money if you put as many miles on a bike as I do.
I want to talk about biking, ebikes and transportation in general but I’m not going to do that here. This is already getting on the long side so I’m going to end this right now. 🙂
That’s my Giant 24 speed. That turned out to be a heck of a good bike. Aside from a few broken spokes and replacing the tires when necessary it’s worked perfectly for thousands of miles.
The new bike first: When I started bicycling when I retired it surprised the family a lot. They all figured the bike I bought would end up gathering dust in the garage. Here we are several thousand miles later and I’m still at it, and it was time to replace my old bike with something a bit better, and that’s it up in the first photo. It’s a Specialized Vado and it is very, very nice. Hydraulic disc brakes, built in lights, great front suspension, a fancy built in computer system, a cargo carrier on the back I can strap stuff to. And best of all, a motor.
Yes, it’s an ebike. I still have to pedal, I still get my heart and respiration rates up, I still get back from a long ride with my legs pleasantly tired. I have the thing set up so I do most of the work but when I get to a steep hill the motor gives me a boost to help me get up the hill, or gives me an extra burst of speed to get away from dogs that want to eat me. I’m no spring chicken. I’m sixty-eight this year and while I’m in pretty good shape I’ve been getting twinges in my knees trying to power up hills and I’ve been having to drop down a gear or two to get up ’em.
The Vado is, frankly, amazing. And it is well suited to the type of riding I do which is, I must admit, pretty leisurely. I make a lot of stops to take photos and I’m out there not so much to get exercise but to enjoy nature. I watch birds and animal life, look at the vegetation, watch the sun coming up, stop to take pictures and that kind of thing. The Vado is perfect for me. I’ve had it for about a week and I have over a hundred miles on it now and I love it. I did a twenty mile ride the other day that would have left me exhausted on the other bike. I’ll take a closer look at the Vado later after I’ve lived with it a while long.
When I’m out on the road on the bike I’m constantly stopping to take photos of stuff I find interesting, things that you don’t see when you’re zooming past at sixty mph, so here are a few.
I live about a 4 mile ride away from an extensive trail system. It runs more than 20 miles north all the way to Green Bay, and from a little town called Forest Junction it also branches off to the east to the town of Brillion. This is the trail that runs to Brillion.These grow wild in the ditches all over around here and I suspect most people don’t even see how beautiful they are because they’re zooming past at 80 mph or too busy trying to text, talk on the phone and eat a cheeseburger at the same time.I found this stunning flower growing along the side of one of the trails. I took about a dozen photos of it from different angles.This is another “weed” that grows all over around here. But up close it has one of the prettiest flowers I’ve ever seen.I’d stopped at a small parking area for a nature reserve to get a drink and found this lonely little guy hiding in the tall grass. I thought it was one of the loveliest things I’d seen. There’s something about the symmetry of those petals surrounding that central pod that I found very striking.And of course I had to include queen anne’s lace. The stuff grows everywhere in the ditches along the roads around here. Those intricate little flowers that make up that lace like structure are amazing.Another “weed” you’ll find growing along the roads around here.A thistle, one of several varieties that grow around here. They’re considered a “noxious weed” around here but the flowers are this rich purple-lavender color and so beautifully delicate that I find myself photographing them a lot.This is, I think a verbascum or mullein. Maybe. My father called it wild tobacco which seems to be a fairly common name for it. When I was a kid I’d see this stuff all over the place. On the farm it would grow along the makeshift roads we had around the farm to access the fields and sometimes along cattle trails. It can be a spectacular plant, growing up to three or four feet tall.This is the river down by the old stone bridge and that white thing you see out there is a pelican. I watched this guy swimming around feeding for several minutes.
And that’s it for this time. Hope you enjoyed the photos.
BTW: You’re more than welcome to leave comments in the comments section. Or you can reach me at old.grouchyfarmer@gmail.com.
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