Several companies are developing thermo acoustic heatpumps that will have some advantages over regular heatpumps. They should produce less noise, don't use greenhouse gasses and work in a wider range of temperatures.
LBNL had a solid state thermoacoustic resonator the size of a coin, which I read about but never saw it in the market. It was supposed to be able to extract heat from anywhere.
My Toyota hybrid reliably does not start after 4 weeks not driving. The 12 volt (1 year old) battery is drained too much after such a period of inactivity. I was not expecting this from Toyota, pretty disappointing.
This is true of basically every car ever. Lead acid batteries can’t maintain a charge forever. Get a battery tender if you aren’t going to drive for long periods of time. If you only drive once a month do you even need to own a car? Just rent/uber when you occasionally need a car.
Is it the stock battery or after-market? Even if you bought it one year ago, when was it filled with acid? Many auto parts stores sell sealed lead-acid batteries as "new" when they've been sitting on the shelf for a year and the clock starts ticking when the acid goes in. You can get higher quality AGM batteries that will last far longer, but know they are quite expensive. Alternatively, you have a parasitic battery drain going on with your car.
Happened to my wife's ex-Toyota CHR hybrid (not plug-in hybrid) after 5 weeks of vacation. I hooked a CTEK charger to it for 8 to 12 hours and all was good again. I didn't leave the car on the CTEK charger for five weeks because it was parked outside and not at our place.
Otherwise CTEK chargers are really nice. Certain car brands like Porsche while sell you a "Porsche charger" for two or three times the price but it's just a CTEK charger re-branded with the Porsche logo on it.
If you've got a garage with electricity, it's an option. If you don't want to let the car on the charger during 5 weeks, just connect it as soon as you come back and in a few hours the car is ready.
I have a VW bus that doesn't see a lot of use and with a bit of fiddling it was easy enough to run a (fused) connector to just behind the grill with a little rubber lid to make it waterproof. That allows me to plug in a trickle charger without having to open the hood. That little trick has saved me multiple batteries already.
I could have gone that route but it would require the cable to go into the interior from the outside so that's why I hardwired it to the front. It also helps that I park it with its nose to the garage so the wire is very short and I just let it dangle down when it isn't in use.
My Honda Hybrid is the same way, sometimes I go weeks between drives and if I park it for more than a couple weeks, I plug it into a 12V battery charger to keep the 12V battery topped up.
But I blame the car's smart features (that use the cell modem to allow remote start, etc) rather than it being a hybrid. I suspect that the non-hybrid model would be the same.
My 1991 Honda motorcycle does this too. I can promise you that it has no smart features. It doesn’t even have a fuel pump. Lead acid batteries just don’t have long shelf lives.
Well I get that lead acid batteries experience self discharge, my 2003 era car will go for over a month with around 20% discharge (it'll be around 12.4V), but after 2 or 3 weeks, my 2020 Honda will be at 50% discharge (around 12.0V).
I'd like to think that at some point the parasitic drain devices will shut down before they drain the battery completely, but I've never tested it beyond that point, I always plug in the charger if the car's going to be parked for more than a couple weeks. I installed a charger plug that comes out the front grill so I can plug it into the battery maintainer without even opening the hood.
> I always plug in the charger if the car's going to be parked for more than a couple weeks.
To this day, since ~1980, I disconnect the +ve battery lead if the cars not going to be used for a few days or parked up in the bush waiting for when we get back from a walk.
Stops parasitic drains and Heisenbug discharges when thermal expansion during a very hot day causes a hard to track short.
My 2019 vehicle's manual explicitly says not to do this, and that if the battery fully discharges you should make a follow-up service appointment to frobnicate the computers. I miss older cars.
Lead acid gel batteries hold their charge MUCH better than standard lead acid batteries. The difference is gel lead acid often self-discharge around 1% per month but standard lead acid batteries self-discharge on the order of 10% per month. I only use gel batteries on my small engine equipment like snowmobiles, motorcycles, and snowblower.
One thing I never understood is why hybrids have the 12 volt battery at all. Couldn't the entertainment system etc be powered from the 200V EV battery (after stepping it down obviously)?
Everything on the 12V system essentially is powered from the traction battery (the big one that can power the motors), once the car is turned on.
In Toyota, at least, the traction battery is completely disconnected (via a relay) when the car is off. The 12V battery is needed to power anything on the 12V system up until the car starts-- that includes the car's computer, which is what (after doing all its self-checks and whatnot) activates that relay and connects the traction battery to everything else in the car.
The traction battery isn't always connected probably mostly for safety reasons (having 400-someodd volts energized across the whole car even when it doesn't need it isn't great), but that also keeps it from getting excessively drained if something in the car malfunctions. It's pretty cheap to replace a 12V lead-acid battery if it's overdischarged after you left the lights on... the big hybrid battery, not so much.
Some EVs will monitor the 12V battery and periodically connect the traction battery to the DC-DC converter to maintain the 12V battery when the car is parked for an extended period of time. (On the older Smart EVs, this doesn’t have a limit, so the traction battery will kill itself trying to maintain a weak 12V battery. There’s a firmware patch for it.)
My Kia EV6 does that, and when the 800V battery pack is charging the 12V battery while parked, an orange light on top of the dashboard goes on.
This had me worried the first few times it happened. Then I found out it is a warning to mechanics/tow truck drivers/first responders that the high voltage system is energized.
The light is on top of the dashboard, right in the middle. It's intended to be very visible, especially from outside the car.
It is only on if the car is turned off and parked and the high voltage system has turned on to charge the 12V battery. When you're driving or just have turned on the car while parked, the light goes off.
So the only occasion the light might be annoying is if you're taking a nap in the car at night. And then you could just throw a towel on top of it.
You expect to have the high voltage system energized when driving, otherwise the car wouldn't go anywhere. There would be no purpose for this light to go on.
The light is specifically to indicate that the high voltage system is on when the car is parked. It's a safety warning for that situation.
There's a lot of Tier 3 supplier…stuff…in a car that was architected for 1978 and has never had a thorough re-think, because the profit margin is like nothing.
12v is such a common top-rail voltage for electronics of all kinds, I think its a bit more that than "car makers are too greedy to manufacture 400v headlights."
No. Or, at least, not easily. The high voltage battery isn't generally connected until "the computers are happy" with the state of things, for various hybrids/EVs/etc.
There's also a legal requirement that "marker lights and such" still work (presumably, also power locks and such) after a prime mover failure. Basically, if the engine quits, you should still be able to signal, get over, turn your 4-ways on, etc.
The easiest solution is to just put a lead acid 12V battery in the car for that. Lithium, in particular, is a problem below freezing because you can't safely charge it, whereas lead doesn't have that problem.
Because they want to completely disconnected the big battery when not in use to prevent phantom drain, and you need a little power to run passive systems that need to be on still (like remote keys etc).
Some EVs like Tesla now use a separate lithium ion 12v battery that should last forever, instead of a lead acid 12v battery with a limited life span.
Even if they don’t have a 12v battery they still have to have a 12v system for reasons others mentioned and because it’s a requirement to sell cars in the USA. My Porsche Taycan has jump start lugs for the benefit of other cars and so I can have my low voltage systems operate with some help from another car.
My mild hybrid Audi is the same way. Gas engine, 48v accessory belt run battery, and that 48v battery works in tandem with a small 12v battery for the low voltage system.
I own 3 Kia’s and they all have various problems, including really big problems, but this is an area they got right. On my daily driver, the Kia Niro, it has a battery button that instantly charges the 12v from the HEV battery. I’ve only needed it once, when I left a light on camping, but it was like magic.
Edit: A friend of mine just got a free engine swap for her... 2012-ish Optima. It threw a CEL on the highway, had the appropriate trouble code, and bam, new engine from the dealership when she told them the code.
I did some analysis of the Tesla 12V system back in 2016, and I'm amazed the batteries lasted as long as they did with how badly they abused the lead acid battery!
Welcome to the motorcycling world! Today's cars continually start the engine - that's a huge draw. If you're going to leave your car sit more than a couple weeks then you should put your battery on a tender. Motorcyclists have been doing that for decades.
Yeah, I (not really) joke that everything on the hill gets plugged in. It makes life a lot easier.
Even with no idle draw, lead acid batteries self discharge over time. Life got way easier when I just accepted it, and now I've got a pile of 6V/12V battery tenders that go into just about everything (I have no shortage of 6V vehicles out here too). That and block heaters. The tractor and truck both appreciate them.
Wow, this brings back memories from more than 3 decades ago. I created a routine on the C64 to copy memory and calculated the performance then around 25KB/sec.
The first version contained a memory corrupting bug that took some time to figure out. Depending on the locations of the source and destination you have to start copying forwards from the beginning of the source, or backwards from the end. If there's an overlap you risk overwriting the source before it is copied to the destination.
I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes or LADA in my early forties and two things helped me deal with it. The hospital put me in a room in the oncology department. Seeing the other patients I was sort of glad I was there with 'just' diabetes and not cancer. This made it easier to accept.
After a couple of months of living with diabetes I created a simple app to enter the numbers, glucose level and insulin units, involved in managing diabetes. Among other things the app showed percentage scores of how much the glucose measurements were on target. That little bit of gamification was exactly right for me. Nowadays it's more like autopilot though.
Still it feels a bit awkward when I'm out having dinner with people that don't know I have this. In the first year or so after the diagnosis I would go to the bathroom to take the glucose measurement and insulin shot. Nowadays I explain the situation and take my shot sitting at the table. So far people have been cool about it.
When I scrolled through the page and saw 'TV personalized for you' my brain instantly appended 'ads' after 'personalized'. I had to read that sentence twice. Personalized is such a red flag.
For day to day usage you need at least a Premium account which is 8 Euro a month. I loved the user experience for doing iDEAL payments but that's all I used it for so I stopped my subscription.
As a type 1 diabetic I'm always a bit disappointed when diabetes is mentioned in an article without specifying the sub type. It makes me wonder if they only encountered type 2 diabetics, or other types as well.
4 years ago I got diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in my early forties. The hospital staff showed me how to manage my glucose with long acting and fast acting insuline.
As a programmer I'm good with numbers so everything was pretty much under control but I started noticing that I needed less and less insuline up to the point that I needed no insuline at all. This was about a year ago. At that same time I had some new physical health problems and it turned out I had celiac disease as well. Bummer :(
One side-effect of 'untreated' celiac is that carbohydrates are less well converted to glucose and so my glucose levels stayed normal without using insuline. Unfortunately it meant I was not cured from type 1 diabetes.
Now that I am on a gluten free diet my insuline usage is back to normal and I stopped farting as a bonus :)
Generally people are diagnosed with Type 1 at a very young age, since it is caused by your own immune system destroying beta cells in the pancreas, which if untreated results in eventual death.
Type 2 is more often associated with age and diet. It is the most common type in particular at later ages, but some people get it younger due to genetic predisposition.
That's a bit of an oversimplification. T1 is auto-immune -- the body loses the ability to produce insulin, and you can detect autoantibodies in the blood. T2 is insulin resistance, and generally has no autoimmune component and no autoantibodies present.
Typically T1D comes on all at once; the autoantibodies destroy the insulin producing beta cells and the patient needs exogenous insulin starting immediately. A subset of adult onset T1D displays a much slower progression of the destruction of beta cells. This is called LADA (latent autoimmune diabetes of adults”) or slow-progressing T1D and more recently T1.5D.
Similarly, some T2D patients also show evidence of autoantibodies however their beta cells are still largely functioning.
So now we further split into groups; Type 1–LADA, Type 1.5 or “double” diabetes, and Type 2 diabetes with autoantibodies.
The folks at the hospital were not sure at first. I'm neither young, nor old and overweight so there were different opinions before some specific blood test was done.
I think you misunderstand.... Certainly congrats to bluemax for successfully managing concurrent celiac and T1D but nothing has been "beaten" here.
T1D is an autoimmune disease which destroys the pancreas' ability to produce insulin. Your body needs insulin to process sugar in the blood into energy, a large part of that sugar comes from carbs.
Celiac is an autoimmune disease which is a reaction in the gut to gluten. Exposure to gluten causes inflammation in the gut and ultimately damages the lining of the intestine to the point where your body cannot absorb nutrients (including the carbs) from the food you eat.
What bluemax observed is the damage from celiac was restricting his carb absorption which reduces the amount of insulin required to keep blood sugar in range.
It takes ~6 months abstaining from gluten for the intestine to heal and for carb absorption to return to normal, over which time insulin requirements would also return to normal. Going gluten free allows the intestine to heal (and you have to stay gluten free -- the celiac doesn't go away).
My daughter is T1D+Celiac so I'm quite familiar with it as well.
Interesting. Thank you for taking the time to fill a large hole in my understanding :)
Sorry to hear about your daughter's health issues too. It must be very difficult to have that anxiety on top of the usual anxieties that come with parenthood. I have 2 young girls and I can only imagine what it would be like if either of them had a lifelong health problem, never mind 2.
>+A +B
It is annoying but it works.