Cheery's path to fulfilment - finishing the DIY, looking after myself, appreciating the garden 🌻

Jellytotts

Yes the battery recharges to 100% every time. I’m not sure on the overall “shelf life” of the battery, I’d assume that again will vary on use/manufacturer.

Obviously the “range” a full battery gets you is based on driving style/speed/lights/aircon/heating etc so it tends to warn you at a certain point that you need to recharge (ours is at 30 miles left). We mostly plan to have around 50 miles left before a charge on longer journeys. The high speed chargers slow down when they get you to 80% so as to not overload the battery but it’s still fast enough for us. We did over 300 miles yesterday, stopped at a supermarket car park to charge, popped in for a wee and grabbed the bits we needed for our stay away and the car was almost at full charge by the time we got back.

The service station chargers are more expensive to use but where we can we divert off to a supermarket one, saved us around £5 in charge yesterday and we could just ping it onto our account with the octopods - our monthly DD covers our daily charging (with solar panels) and then when we do a big trip it uses up any credit we’ve built up or we just send an extra one off payment over to cover it. (If you use a credit or debit card at the chargers they put a temp hold on your account if between £20/60 depending on the supplier which I find annoying)

When we first got an ev (around 7 years ago) charging was few and far between and it was such a worry to turn up at a charging point to find it in use and not know if you had enough power to get to the next one but now there are so many banks of chargers everywhere it’s not a problem.

cheesymouse

I don’t think there is a problem with this at all. I tend to charge up to about 80% after it gets down to around between 30% and 50% when I’m at home. If a longer trip is planned I fully charge to 100% and top up on route when stopping anyway. I’ve had the car 3 years (it’s 5 years old) and not noticed any battery degradation at all. They have very clever battery management systems, unlike phones and other devices.

Cheery_Daff

Thank you all again for chipping in! I will read and digest properly at the weekend 😊

In the meantime, big car has been to the garage today - part of the exhaust was hanging off 🙄 which at least explains the rattle 😂😂 although we hadn't been able to see the problem ourselves. Anyway, it's fixed now, for £205.

Managed to block my own pin getting it wrong too many times in the garage 🙄 paid by bank transfer, then fortunately remembered it at the cash machine so it's unblocked now. What a faff!

Union has just announced a raft of strikes 😬 quite a few days are when I'd pencilled in for a holiday (still got 6 weeks of annual leave to take before the end of August 😬). Not booked yet, but I'm running out of time when other stuff isn't slotted in 😬

Baileys_Babe

Get your annual leave booked in, you don't want to loose i.t

Cheery_Daff

Oh I won't lose it don't worry - I just might end up taking 6 weeks off in one go 🙈😂

Another late night working today, didn't finish til 10.30 😱 another deadline, not til Saturday (!!!!!!, but it's because it was xx days after I did the last thing - I'd miscalculated and thought it was due Monday, but yesterday realised it was actually due Saturday, and I didn't want to work tomorrow... 🙄

Anyway, it's done now.

Tried to pay the car tax, but it doesn't start til after the MOT is due so it wouldn't let me 🙄 don't think I've ever fallen foul of that before! I must usually get the MOT done earlier, or leave the tax later 😂 MOT will be done on Tuesday, would have been this week if the other car hadn't had to go first!

Tired now…

Cheery_Daff

Urgh. A busy night a dreams, culminating in a friend bring kidnapped and held in the basement of a castle that was also a school, Mr C unexpectedly buying a large weapon, and whoever he bought it off trying to con him by giving him his change in paper notes just printed on a home printer.

I'm worn out and it's only 7.30am! 😱😂

Hey ho. Today we were meant to be having a day wandering about on the way to stay with our friends tonight. Mr C has since things to finish though so I'm going get some stuff done myself (could have finished off that work if we'd realised but no matter, this is probably better).

Yoga, then because I'm missing my slimming world group tomorrow I'm going to go to an alternative this morning. It's somewhere I don't usually go, so I might stick around for a while and try to find a cafe 😃

Thenmaybe the usual round of flute, garden, budgeting, blog posts, tidying etc, although by that point I'll only have about 3 hours so it won't be all of them, especially as I've not packed an overnight bag yet either 😂

Staffordia

Did he buy the weapon to rescue the friend? Dreams are so weird.

Cheery_Daff

Ha, no idea! I think it was a distraction - I was trying to get info off the computer while he was working out change in the fake bank notes which were all really weird denominations (£37, £83, although not even pounds either 😂)

Ended up being more rushed than planned yesterday - had a nice leisurely morning but by the time I got back I literally had time to pack, nothing else 😂

Nice evening walking the dog with one friend while Mr C did musical things with the other, and we have been sleeping in the living room on sofa and airbed - I've had sofa and it was extremely comfy, although there are a lot of windows in this small room and I'm now boiling 😂

The others, including Mr C, are late risers so I've been entertaining myself looking at the cost of a weekend in Copenhagen 😂 won't be doing that any time soon, although I do miss the days when we had a decent wodge of disposable cash 🙄😂

Hey ho.

Going to have to shift soon, I'm very warm 😂 Only yoga option here is the kitchen, also tiny, so I might leave it til later in the day... although I think there's probably a standing practice i could do! Might do that then sit out in the garden with a cuppa while I wait for everyone else to emerge 😊

teapot2

On the subject of EVs, I was on a ferry between 2 islands in the Outer Hebrides recently and was interested to see a Tesl@ parked next to us. No idea if a local or visitor but presume that means even more far flung places might have the infrastructure?

themadvix

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82001775#Comment_82001775

Scotland has long had very good EV infrastructure, partly funded by the Scottish government to support uptake (plenty of (slow, destination) chargers on Skye back in 2021). But if you have a Tesla you have a 200+ mile range, and there’s a decent network of superchargers (see photo, from T3sla app) on top of that, so it’s really not that surprising. When we went to Northern Ireland last year we were out in the sticks a bit and did have to plan slightly more, but more regarding whether we had the right app in case there wasn’t signal to download it when we were there and needed to charge. In Britain, that’s less of an issue as the 🐙 app covers the vast majority of non-T charging points.