I can’t believe Gordon allowed them to leave the original transverse hanging engine mounting block on the engine! It sticks uselessly out the front of the engine in this longitudinal installation and looks like a wart in an otherwise perfectly clean and minimalist engine bay!

yes, it’s part of the front cover on a std duratec but they could have easily CNC’d up a part without the extra now useless mount on it!

I’m currently crunching the numbers on a low grade heat augmented heat pump for our house heating to replace the gas boiler.

A heat pump has the highest CoP (Coefficient of Performance) at the lowest deltaT, ie it can move the most heat when it is “pumping” against the lowest thermal gradient. This means for an air sourced pump, on cold winter days when air temps are low, your heat pump is less efficient. However, on cold winter days, you can get some decent solar energy recovery (cold air temps are often also clear skys).

So the plan is to bury something like 2,000 litres of water in insulated IBCs in the garden, and use day time solar energy to slightly warm them up during the day, (or use cheap off peak ‘lecy when tomorrow has a poor solar forecast). That slight warming is possible due to the large specific heat capacity of water (2000 litres stores 8,400 kJ/k, so small 10 degC deltaT to ambient stores 84MJ or justover 23 kWh) and the low deltaT and rules surface area to volume ratio (volume goes up by cube, but surface area only goes up by square). This “hot” water can them be used to drive a much better deltaT for the heat pump, maximising CoP. By storing low grade heat in water, the storage medium is about as cheap as it can be!

The other half joking asked if i could make that energy store in the form of a swimming pool……. ;-)

BTW: the one thing i say to these misguideds is “ok, lets say you are right and Man didn’t walk on the moon/elvis isn’t dead/the earth is flat” (*delete as appropriate) what are YOU going to do about it?

The painful answer is nothing, nothing what so ever because tomorrow the sun will come up, you’ll still go to work in your dead end job, your “friends” will still not ask you to join them in the pub for a pint, your ex wife will remain firmly ex, and your pathetic, inconsiquential existance on this planet of 8 Billion equally un-unique people (or lizards if you prefer) will simply be one day longer.

It’s no accident that conspiracy theories and “easyliving” go hand in hand.

America is the home of Conspiracy because it’s the home of easy living, ie its population has more time to come up with stupid stuff in an attempt to add some form of interest and meaning to their lives!

Back in the day, you spent 18 hours a day foraging for nuts and trying not to get chomped on by an angry Tiger or Wolf, and the other 6 hours you spent asleep. Today, your food comes in quick and easy to eat packets, your house provides everything you need at a push of a button, and your job is increasingly automated and mindless. No suprise then that idle minds have time to come up with this rubbish to fill its voids!

People now get into this stuff because it gives them something to do. As religion falls by the wayside, alternative beliefs take its place, and people love to think they know something others don’t. You can’t debunk a conspiracy theorist because they are not listening and because they themselves cannot allow themselves to be debunked, because then what would they fill their days with? Add in the ability of modern global social media to add a commercial aspect, ie to monitise through advertising etc and its clear to see why today Conspiracy Theories are so popular.

Smaller wheels with taller sidewalls certianly help with ride comfort, but in my experience, the extra weight overwhelms the standard dampers and causes a certain amount of “shake n’ shimy” on certain road (or off road) surfaces.

here’s my T32 LWB 4motion on it’s “let’s orrfff road” rubber:

245/65/R17 BF’s TO2’s on Twin Monotube Projekt AT’s, no rubbing on std springs / ride height, not too much noisier on the road (a little bit, but a T6 is not exactly a quiet van anyway) but the fuel economy has taken a dive. Lovely off road (esp with the 4motion + diff lock) and, imo, looks the dogs (lol)

The tall tough sidewall and small wheel certainly never gives me cause to worry on either unmade roads or tall kerbs. Primary ride is better than on the original sport line 18’s, although theres a bit more lean in the bends (not too bad, and againa T6 isn’t any kind of sports car) but secondary ride is certainly worse over high frequency corrigations etc. Plan is to move to a better damper package to control the additional tyre mass (they are VERY heavy!) and idealy to height adjustable air springs to get a lower on-road height, a taller off road height, and the ability to self level when parked up on sloped terrain

I love our little 6 wheeled friends!

I even have a little bit of wood batton left in the gutter to help them up the high kerb just to the right of my front door as otherwise they struggle a bit with some impressive wheel lifts and wheel spin.

Occasionally i do get in a standoff with one on a junction in my electric car, when we just sit there in some sort of silent standoff, each waiting for the other to go first. Some how, it’s impossible to get annoyed by them, which these days is something of a result as most tech is ****** annoying :-)

If you consider water to be pollution then yes, that’s pollution…

Contrails form when the water vaour created as fuel in burnt in the engines freezes into small ice crystals and reflects the sun, forming the distinctive trails we see

(Actually it is pollution, because the jet engine obviously emits various hydrocarbon gases and oxides of nitrogen for example, which only exist as trace elements in the high atmosphere usually)

After years of trying to “beat” the various climbs in the peaks, i bought an ebike….. :-)

Terrific pics folks!

I can’t believe just how small, short and narrow these bikes look now! How did it take us all 25 years to work out that a big mountain bike is a better mountain bike eh. Probably also explains why looking back i spent soooo much time falling off mine…………

So now instead of just driving EVs we now need to ban rubber tyres too?

This is the same claptrap as the “EVs make more brake dust” rubbish regularily spouted by people who have never driven an EV and don’t realise you just about never engage the friction brakes because you can regen.

If tyre wear in town is an issue, then it can be reduced for all means of transport by

1) introducing maximium acceleration rate ie no more booting away from the lights
2) introducing maximum corner speeds – no more rocketing round corners

the future sounds like fun doesn’t it……

Buy an eBike and stop worrying about hills…….. ;-)

Weekend in the Peaks for me, with good buddies and some obligitory “vanlife” stuff too :-)

I’ve not been up that way for a fair old while, and last time i was riding a 26″ 120mm hardtail with 1.8″ concrete tyres and 680mm bars. A modern 180mm ebike really makes almost everything now rideable……..

Lovely, warm, feel good video! Just people having fun on bikes and the editting is absolutely on point too.

The important question is actually

“What Van can i afford”……

;-)

Ebike quandry:

Will the bridge be strong enough?? :-)

I run one of each in each caliper to deal with Cold & Wet and Hot & Dry!

This doesn’t give as much ultimate stopping power at very high temps as running two sintered pads, nor as much inital bite as running two organics when it’s wet, but it seems to give a really wide, consistent useable range of retardation vs lever force.

I’m not a big heavy chap, so if you really are on it downhill and are a bit more built than skinny old me, in the alps you might find you need two sintered pads?

Lets be honest, the vast majority if riders, myself included won’t notice any objective differences. yes, a bike might feel different but us humans simply adapt to those an “different” then just feels “normal”

if you are a pro, racing where everything counts, then sure, test and work out what’s actually fastest, but in all honesty i don’t think i’ve ever seen a test, even from the big money teams, where the results would pass any scientific rigour, ie be statistically valid, for the simple reason that even the pro’s get bored riding the same track enough times to get to a suitable degree of confidence (statistically speaking) in the results and off road tracks change as you ride them, so even lots of runs doesn’t really help.

My personal wheel size sugegstion is:

1) if you are tall, get a 29er as there really is no defict these days
2) if you are short, get a 650b, as there is rally no defict these days
3) if you are somewhere in between, buy the one you best like the colour of….. ;-)

Glad i could help lol!

Get an eBike and never have to push again!

(best start lifting weights in the gym though to get it over locked gates and the like….. :-)

I’m running a simulation on a UK install of a solar boosted HP system right now!

Basically 2,000 liters of low temperature water buried in the garden and heated by solar electric immersion (to maximise scavanging during the less sunny days). Because the heating really only needs to run for a few hours each day mostly in the evenings when it is dark and colder, having a 4.2MJ/K storage buffer is looking to make a huge diffence to installed CoP ;-)

@jimmy748 that route looks fun, any chance of a Komoot link or similar as i’m going to down that way in a few weeks time?

So far, and it’s early days still, the Ovano seems really good!

I didn’t want to fit anything into my van that was not either easily removable nor prevented me from using the van as an, er, van to move big stuff. The Ovano simply bolts down in just four places to the original loadbed tie down points, so is easy to remove if required. The top deck offers un-interupted full width space right up the back of the front seats, which in my LWB is a very decent amount of space. In fact, because the top deck plate now folds down over the mid row of seats, there is potentially more useable flat space than before. if you have a SWB this could be a really big gain in carriage capability for bulky items.

I went for the full width drawer option and it’s brilliant for causually throwing in my bike when i just want to nip out for a quick ride somewhere. With the drawer sides and a soft grippy base mat, i just slide open the drawer, chuck in bike with just front wheel off (my XC bike goes in with both wheels on, my XXL Mondraker needs front wheel off to make it easy), slide it shut and drive off. Bike doesn’t rattle, and can’t really go anywhere.

The drawer is also really good when used as a day van, for example all my scuba stuff simply loads easily ie no reaching / leaning over with heavy kit, and you can get to everything, even the stuff that went in first at the back, without having to take everything out first! Compared to diving out of my old estate car, this is a godsend :-)

It also seems to make the van a little less boomy on the m/way (i have large AT tyres on mine which whir along a bit…..) especially with the bulkhead in the fully up position

We are off for a few days riding / camping to the Peaks next week, so will report back on how it works as a weekend van, sleeping on the top deck. We have bought a nice new self inflating matress that is a good fit, and should be able to keep everything camping wise in the drawer although we also have the full length Front Runner roof rack for really grand days out, but i haven’t sorted out proper ladder access yet (the rear sportline spoiler prevents easy ladder on tailgate solution). Not sure if our bikes will simply go across the back on my towbar rack, or if we don’t take the middle row of seats, bikes can actually go across inside instead.

I guess we do need to mention the cost, and no, the Ovano system is not cheap, but i think you get what you pay for when it comes to Transporter accessories, with the really nice stuff costing decent money, but also being worth decent money secondhand. It certainly doesn’t feel in anyway like a product designed down to a cost, and whilst no, some marine ply isn’t a very expensive base material i know there has been a lot of design,test and redesign that has gone into it to make it as useable and durable possible. Yes, you could make something similar yourself for less money, but by the time you consider your time, you’d probably not save much, nor have as good a system.

I also really like the people at Ovano, its a very small company, run by people who really seem to care about their product and making it as good as possible. They made us very welcome when we had the unit fitted into my van at their Portishead HQ, which thanks to my vans unique build spec gave them a couple of headaches for the fitting (They needed to make a couple of feat spacers due to the non standard additional seat fixing points in the rear load bed). We even found time to discuss some future product ideas around demountable camper units for cooking etc :-)

So if you have a T5/T6 and are looking for rear load bed options then definately give them a call

Home

https://www.instagram.com/ovanouk/

Crashing is part of mountain biking! Just try not to do it ALL the time :-)

IME, the one thing i see more often than not from newbies, is people “getting right back” because they are scared of a feature, and as a result ending up with arms rigid, locked out forwards to the bars. The danger here is that ANY drop of the front has to pull on the rider, and once their weight has started to move forwards, and little front wheel hang up or further drop WILL pull them over the bars.

Yes, there are times when you have to be right off the back, but really they are surprisingly few and far between for most people. Getting low, with bent arms is a much safer body position, allowing you to push the front wheel into and through stuff whilst your main weight simply floats along on top :-)

A typical gas central heating boiler is between 7 and 30 kW of heating power (depending on size)

Lets take a mid sized boiler (15kW) and say it runs for 3 hours in an evening, that is a total energy output of 45 kWh

Water has a specific heat capacity of 4.2kJ/Kg.k ie to raise 1 kg of water by 1k (1 degC) it takes 4,200 jouiles of energy. Assuming you managed to utilise all 300 litres (300kg) of water, each degree of heating is an energy storage of just 0.00035 kWh.

With a realistic deltaT. say starting at 65 degC and falling to 45 degC, you’d need 2,000 tonnes of water to replace your boiler!!

The best option, is to use a solar boosted water thermal store as a heat pump argumentator, keeping the heat pump at a lower deltaT and so leveraging a signifiantly better CoP. You’d need around 3 tonnes (3,000 litres) of water to do this for a typical property (which is 3 IBC’s buried in the ground in the garden)

maxtorque

BTW, i’ve been wating to buy a van for about 18 months now, since we sold our derv estate and have gone EV only. Unfortunately that co-incided with van prices going mental, so we have help off to try and avoid getting burnt…….

Posted 3 months ago

Piggy bank well and truely broken:

I’ve recently swapped our hot water to electrical heating only (240v immersion heater) because we are due to refurbish the kitchen where the current, old, gas boiler lives, and we are looking at moving to some form of heat pump type system, where high temperature (>50 degC) means poor CoP.

I’ve put the immersion heater on a seperate ‘lecy meter, so i can see exactly how much energy we are using for just the hot water. It looks like a good option will be to install some very cheap, probably second hand, solar PV panels to drive a second immersion heater. The beauty of this is that the hot water tank acts as the thermal store, so mostly you don’t care about precisely when the tank heats.

Using a cheap ebay MPPT controller also allows the PV panels to harvest energy, and turn that into “High temperature” heat even at very low absolute power values. Because a resistive heating element is 100% efficient, you can put a small amount of energy into it, and get that energy into your hot water, unlike for direct solar hot water system. This is important, because mostly our days are overcast, so a typical 300W PV panel might only put out 50 to 100w. But, over the course of a day, that 50w adds up.

I’ve got space on my workshop roof to put 3 or perhaps 4 300w PV panels, so plan to temporarily install some cheap second hand ones and see how much energy we can harvest. It’s certianly not suddenly going to slash our ‘lecy bills, but with a diy / s/h home built system i think i can get a return on my cash in a reasonably short time frame :-)

BTW, i’ve been wating to buy a van for about 18 months now, since we sold our derv estate and have gone EV only. Unfortunately that co-incided with van prices going mental, so we have help off to try and avoid getting burnt…….

Sell the Van whilst it’s worth a fortune, you can always buy another one, and is suspect they will be significantly cheaper in a years time when the market crashes!

Buy a cheap large estate, perhaps even one with a big petrol engine that does just 25mpg, because mpg is irrelevant if you only do a few miles, and means you get a big, well spec’d car for your money

The best advice is to learn to read the road better!

Most drivers i sit with have no idea how to read the road, in fact,few even look at it, or far enough into the distance. Really, you should never be surprised by a loss of grip, as all the signs are there, you just need to read them! I can’t emphasise enough how doing some advanced driver training will totally change how you drive and give you a level of safety that is, imo, impossible to get any other way.

I’m biased, but this guy is one of the best:

Driver & Rider Coaching

He also has a good you-tube channel and has published a couple of books that are worth a read.

I actually contributed to his “how not to crash” book, in the chapter detailing how to drive a modern car with ESP, and its best to get that book at read the chapter (blantant plug!), but broadly, should you start to loose grip, these are, on average (ie they can’t possibly suit every situation perfectly!), the best actions:

1) If you are at “High” throttle openings, immediately reduce your throttle by at least 50% of your currently held level. This is good rule, and it tries to balance what happens when a tyre slips due to a high torque input from the engine, against what happens when the tyre slips because it is unable to carry the lateral load asked of it (ie a momentum driven slip). You almost certainly never want to completely come off the throttle if possible.

2) If you are at a large handwheel input (note: handwheel means what most people call the steering wheel, ie the round thing you hold as a driver, but used to be clear that we are not talking about the “steering wheels” ie the wheels / tyres at the front of the car), again, either hold the same angle (understeer) or reduce it quickly by about 50% (oversteer)

3) If you then feel that the slip is not reducing but increasing, nail the brake pedal hard. The ABS will help you control the yaw of the car (under/oversteer ie rotation) and should you run out of road and talent, you’ll be going both slower, and most likely forwards (rather than sideways) when you hit something. This is really important because side impacts are still the no 1 killer of car occupants, where as frontal impacts are now extremely well mitigated against

IME, after doing lots of advanced driver training as both student, observer and instructor, most drivers CANNOT accurately enough control a modern car at high slip ratios in the exact instant they need too and without warning (see poor observation / anticpation section…) and in most cases, will make things worst when they try too.

This usually involves FAR too large a handwheel input, usually about 180deg out of phase with the yaw, ie making things worse not better (fishtailling). Again, IME, to instincitively catch and control a modern car when it slides, which they do at high speed thanks to there massively wide grippy tyres and huge lateral stifness, takes a lot of skill, and critically experience and practice, which most drivers simply don’t possess.

I do urge anyone to do a real skid pan session, but not to try to teach you how to correct a slide, but more importantly to help you:

1) Recognise the onset and likely hood of a slid developing BEFORE it does. To learn to feel for the onset of a loss of grip

2) Understand just how hard it is to accurately catch such a slide at any speed above about 7 mph (watch youtube for reference, as people stick no end of nice cars into the scenery, having watched too many episodes of Top Gear and thought “how hard can it be”…. :-)

It’s also worth noting that most people who get into slides are only in a slide because of poor road positioning for the speed at which they are travelling. Learning to position your car properly, enabling you to drive FASTER and SMOOTHER is the real key to driving. The very best drivers (like Reg) will astonish you by the speed you see on the speedo, but the calmness and smoothness at with which they apply that speed (and often, with the lack of speed they choose to carry in a lot of situations)

I’ve got a good friend has a house in Pollença and i’ve visited a few times to do some cycling, however, so far it’s been road with a bit of gravel stuff. There are quite a lot of (mostly hard, sharp and rocky) trails up in the mountains, but they are poorly marked and it’s difficult to find the legal status of most of them.

I’ll ask him the best option for finding off road trails in the area!

Cranks are std ISIS splines so pretty much any crank tool should do the job

2017/2018 powerfly is Gen 2 CX line, so you need the park LRT-1 or equivalent tool for the sprocket retainer.

Make sure you fit the correct replacement sprocket, with the offset spacer and a new O ring too. Fit the wrong sprocket and it can spin and wreck the spines on the motor output shaft (ive just rebuild a gen2 with this exact problem. The SRAM X-SYNC E-MTB sprockets are ime the best ones, but a bit pricey, although they come with the correct spacer. Std will probably be a 15 tooth sprocket, a 16 tooth wil lfit with any of the covers, larger ones will need plastic removing from the covers to fit.

Also, seriously consider fitting a mudstop kit to help keep mud and water out. Many a gen2 has died because of the poor environmental sealing around the crankshaft…..

Have we re-wound to 2005?

In 2022, you have nothing to worry about on any mainstream carbon frame!

And remember, the onyl way to actually know which is stronger in any given circumstance is to crash both a carbon and an ally frame in an identical way, which never happens. Anyone posting, “oh, but i broke my …..” is i’m afraid to say, irrelevant, because they are a sample size of one. So yes, perhaps your ally or carbon frame did, or did not break, but unless you repeat it with the other material frame and see what happens, that’s not actually useful info!

Buy the bike you like, and get out and ride it, and that’s er, it, really :-)

I deffinately want to be subtle and the tread lightly! Luckily, being self-employed means i can get out in the week for the more, er, contentious trails, which ime, pretty much means having them to yourself :-)

I need to kinda learn where my battery will and won’t take me, and i’ll need to get a car charger / 240v inverter i guess to enable a bit of cheeky away from home charging etc?

I like the idea of doing something like Snowdon, which i’ve done many times on a neeb, but adding in another loop, something i’d always be a bit wary of without the adding leg boosting of an eeb ;-)

Fancy a Cadair / Dolgellau back country loop out, as this was hard work on my neeb a few years ago but fun

Never really saw the point, a website where everyone is a contributor or expert just means massive amounts of really boring and not well thought out content that swamps any actually decent stuff

5 months is actually pretty good for me! ;-)

The problem with top gear raising “valid” quesions about EVs is that they are, er, not very valid:

1) Caravan sites, where you legally can er, caravan, have electrical hook ups. Those nice high current sockets are perfect for, er, charging EV’s. Have a go at driving to the top of a random hill and parking your caravan, you’ll get arrested/shoot/dissed on social media (delete as appropriate) before you’ve even got your jockey wheel down.

2) In reality you’d plan your trip around available chargers, not just set off randomly and hope

2) Probably best not to spend your holiday racing around hill tops ripping up the grass. Not good for the environment and not good for your battery / state of charge

3) They mentioned that going up the big hill was bad for the range of an EV, but conviently forgot to mention that unlike an ICE, you get most of the PE back when you go down the otherside, ie your range goes back up again. Without gears, practically zero parasitics and of course truely bi-directional powertrains, EVs really don’t mind hills as such. if the road load goes up by “X” percent going up the hill, then go down it at the same average speed as you went up it, and the road load goes down my “X” percent.

And of course, literally no one who can afford a £65k to £100k EV is going to hook a tiny caravan to the back of it at any point………..

BTW, one thing i did run the calc’s on was using solar pv to transfer low grade heat to a bulk water store, that a heat pump then uses to drive that heat store into the house.
This works because in the UK, our heating loads are mostly during the hours of no or low sun, and often we are not at home during the middle hours of the day. So 2,000 litres of water in an insulated hole in the ground, simple immersion elements from solar PV panels for 100% energy capture (resistive elements convert ‘lecy to heat at 100% efficiency) and that store heats up a bit during the day, which means your heat pump system can operate at a better CoP when it heats the house in the evening, and is much less susceptable to low air temps driving down CoP.
The beauty of the system is that you store heat at a very low temperature above ambient if you have lots of water, so you don’t lose much of it. And of course, the surface are to volume ratio scaling laws make it better and better as you use a larger volume of water

It also works because we tend to want a relatively fixed, short period energy source for our heating, ie we get home at 6pm, turn the heating on for say 3 hours, and pump say 12kWh into our house, but then the system turns off and we go to bed. The bulk thermal store means that whilst it runs the heat pump can leverage a short term artificially low deltaT, and hence run at an artificially high CoP

1,000 litres of water holds roughly 12 kWh when it’s temperature is changed by just 10 degC

The real reason no-one does low voltage domestic power distribution is simply that our houses haven’t got that wiring in to do it. Get a quote to rip down ceilings, rip up floors, channel into walls and blockwork to install new power networks in your house and get back to me :-)

My house is a typical late 1980’s build and originally just had a single socket in the living room! Persumably for your CRT B&W telly and that was that…… lol

IMO, the root cause of this collision is buried deep in the system of driving that we consider “acceptable”.

The fundamental reason the driver “failed to see” the two men he killed is actually simply because he failed to look properly. Unfortunately the incredibly low standard of driving tuition and skills we currrent consider acceptable in order to gain a licence to drive a device that can kill is, imo, far too low, and as a result, drivers “fail to look” and “fail to see” and then kill other people.

This is a technically easy problem to pretty much fix. So called “advanced” driving systems already have fixed this problem simply by teaching drivers to look properly using a system of driving specifically designed to allow for, and to minimise issues as a result of poor observation.

The social problem is that no politician could ever champion any law that would increase the difficulty of gaining a driving licence, because killing people with your car is such a minority event.

GET A DROPPER!

That is all.

Not for jumps and drops, but simply to allow you to corner properly, and once you can corner properly, you will find suddenly the trails flow much better :-)

Same ride, different weather!

On friday i nipped out for my local “over the river and up the hill” ride, and thanks to poor timing, got absolutely soaked. In fact, it’s honestly been a long time since i’ve been that wet on a bike (probably Cadair Idris back in 2018….):

Then today, my timing was perfect, and i dodged the torrential rain and rode in perfect sun and blue sky, all be it with a fair old gale blowing against me:

A man for all seasons as it were :-)