Welcome to the May 24th BikeNite! Thanks for joining, and I hope we all enjoy chatting about cycle stuff! Feel free to answer whenever at your convenience. Anyone can join, now or later. Reply to what you like, and boost for visibility.
We'll start out with our introduction (with help from @jfparis)
Q1. Where are you posting from today? Where we are, Spring semester is over or almost over for many students. How does this affect your riding?
@kevinschaper@graham_freeman@ascentale@jfparis how much are you modulating the throttle? I'm assuming the Bosch drive is your main motor and this is just full throttle when you need the boost but maybe partway for long climbs? Braking seems harder to control by the throttle (I'm using lever switch + throttle signal on mine), gets more forceful as the speed drops. Like I would rather have a speed limiting algorithm that the controller modulates torque with.
There's plenty of research out there showing that when you add a protected bike lane, a street becomes safer for ALL road users.
However, I'm not convinced that the traffic calming effect that made it safer actually continues to work if you don't bother to maintain the "protection". I fear it's actually the opposite; without the protection, drivers see just a clear lane and drive faster than they did before (where parked cars used to slow down cars, prior to PBL installation). #SafeStreets
This question is kind of a continuation of a discussion last week. @esnyder@MylesRyden asks about what good cycle infrastructure looks like on rural roads.
Q8. As someone living rurally in OR, I am not sure what exactly I want changed on most of the rural roads. I would love to hear more about / see some links to / etc. really good examples of what it could/should look like.
@ascentale@esnyder on low-volume roads, #AdvisoryBikeLanes make a lot of sense, given low enough speeds (and many more roads could have much lower volumes if not everyone has to drive everywhere) #BikeNite A8 -- it's just a single lane for cars between painted dashes for people walking or biking on the side, in the same width of asphalt where in the US they would stripe a double yellow centerline and post it 55mph. See also advisorybikelanes.com
I'm thinking air-to-air heat pumps are not actually a great answer to the heating problem. Blowing around warm air isn't terribly comfortable to start with, and even if you have an inverter, you can't lower the outlet temperature so much or it feels chilly, so it has to run hotter in cycles, which means short-cycling, which means not running when you have free power from solar & also needing higher currents (for the hotter cycles) while running when you don't have solar, and the source is cold
so if you want to use your sun and that nice warm daytime source air, you need a thermal battery, like a water tank. That could be overheated (far above the circulation target temp) and tempered into the circulating loop, keeping the floors at 80°F or whatever while also storing heat for later. That's more complicated than what fits into a duct system retrofit or single-room window AC type format, though maybe just valve the refrigerant differently, it's a room water coil + air coil minisplit.
maybe with the water/coolant tank as a piece of furniture and lines running through a rug-like deal, or piped in and tied to the coil (would you pipe it down the outside wall and back in to the ceiling below?)
@Karstan on the back of some envelope, that's about 100°F range that the water could be heated (from 100 circulating to 200 in storage) and one Btu per pound, 96lb ~12gal ~ 9000Btu ~ 2.6kWh, which you might be able to charge with 1kWh when the sun is out, or 5hr x 200W. Seems like that would cover the swing season heating, maybe do okay even in the colder PNW winter when a heat pump can't work so well at night, better use of both sun and outdoor warmth by shifting the load vs collection.
@Karstan at ~50gal, it's just a heat pump water heater, and maybe separate devices is simpler than trying to switch your air-air heat pump to work on water.
@ascentale@bikescape@bikestuffpdx to clarify that distance, the flat blue building in the background here is across the river from me, but you have to go down the ridge and across a bridge and then another ways still to get to the SE tool library.
I've been running ubuntu with the default gnome desktop for a week on one computer, and the clock in the top middle of the screen... cannot be moved? I cannot ever find it without looking at the bottom right, top right, and top left corner first. 😒
@benlk there are enough other things I don't like about gnome, that I'm just not going to use it. The UI decision to put the clock in the top center is just disqualifying IMO, why should anyone have to put effort into figuring out how to change that?
I mean, besides being in the last place I look, the desktop has this useless extra toolbar-ish thing at the top that I can't move or consolidate into the dock/taskbar. The top row of the screen is where I want window titles, tabs and such to be, not some vast empty space with a clock and some battery/wifi/etc status icons in it.
In 2023, word was it would be the last production season of the Surly Big Dummy (non-electric) cargo bike. It's still for sale today. https://surlybikes.com/bikes/big_dummy But they have made some changes that not everyone is happy with, including using a single chain ring up front and removing the mount points for a centerstand like the one that Xtracycle made for it originally.
@markstos bought without motors or electric frames. The bafang ultra or some others might fit the motorized frame mounts but I'm just using standard bottom brackets for crank drive retrofits, and now adding hub motors for regen+boost.
@markstos well, my xtracycle edgerunner was purpose-built with a bafang (before they even had a frame with the motor mounting) with parts that were intended for that. It still had lower gearing, bigger tires than the xtracycle one when they started building the frame around the motor. It all needs to actually be a little heavier-duty than even off-the-shelf eBikes, though some of the brakes have stepped it up a notch, the lack of motor cutouts in hydraulic levers, &c is still just amateur-hour