Despite the use of “standard” in the name of the North America Charging Standard (NACS), aka Tesla plug; NACS isn’t actually a standard. There are procedures around how standards get made, and Tesla didn’t do that. That’s not always important, Apple’s Lightning Connector isn’t a standard either, and it does just fine – well, until recently. What really matters is […]
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Ford has been hella coy about the price for their Blue Cruise Level 2 hands-free driving feature. When I bought my 2021 Mustang Mach-E, the hardware was optional (shown above), and Ford pinkie-promised that it would be $200/year to re-up the Blue Cruise. The ability to opt-out of the hardware went away with the 2022 models, and Ford went silent […]
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While I wouldn’t want to rely on a bidirectional EVSE as a complete home backup, it is a great solution for load shifting, and would be an excellent supplemental option when combined with a small permanent battery installation for home backup. As is the case with many of these things, California seems to be driving progress here, with the potential […]
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The time has come, UDM/UDM-Pro are good to go with the 3.x release.
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UDM move to 2.x firmware has brought major changes to the system architecture, but very little tangible benefit to users. Yet.
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One of the things I wonder, and worry, about as a content-creator (ugh, I hate that term) is how much responsibility is there to set and communicate the limitations/considerations/disclaimers around the things we create. Is there a duty to set guardrails? If so, what are those limits and is the value in the effort or the durability?
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Vehicle-to-Load (V2L), as demonstrated in the video below, is seriously cool. If you have an EV that does it, there will be scenarios where it could be awesome; like saving your food during a power outage. I wanted to start with that, so that it doesn’t get lost in what I’m going to say next. As cool as V2L is, […]
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Smart panels are cool. I firmly believe this, but I also believe that they probably aren’t the right way to solve the limited electricity supply problem, at least not yet. The problem is cost. If a smart panel is $4,500+ just to buy it, ignoring installation costs, and moving from 100A to 200A service is around $2,500… We don’t need […]
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Hubitat just released what looks to be a solid upgrade from the previous (C-7) version of the Elevation home automation controller. Key changes are the Zigbee radio update (which should enable Matter/Thread compatibility later this year), inclusion of Wi-Fi (no word on what standard), and external antennas. External antennas might be the biggest improvement, at least IMO. Hopefully, it will […]
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Baby steps towards a meaningful feature update.
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