 With so many variables, it’s hard to decide on an EV. Here’s what we grappled with in our decision to (Spoiler Alert) lease a 2016 Nissan Leaf:
1.Range anxiety (at 110 miles per charge, is that enough for our family?) 2.Understanding federal and state incentives 3.Degradation in battery life over time – how real is this? 4.Drive-ability 5.Room for 5 people comfortably? 6.Newer models coming out (Tesla 3 and Chevy Bolt) 7.Cost of operation vs gas vehicle 8.How do you install a charger (EVSE) in the garage? 9.How much could we use our solar panels to charge it versus off-grid power? 10.Are those HOV stickers still available in California? 11.Lease vs buy 12.Hybrid vs Pure EV And here is what we found out and decided: 1.Range anxiety is real but do-able with planning ahead At 110 miles, that’s 50 miles each way with a 10-mile cushion. Luckily stop-and-go traffic seems to help EVs, since they regenerate some energy during braking, the opposite of gas cars. So the 10-mile cushion seems fairly safe. With the ability to trickle charge at your destination, that can add 5-10 miles per hour, and that’s possible with a standard 110V outlet and the free cable that comes with the car. With a 240V Series 2 charger on the other end, you can add 20 miles per hour to your battery and really extend your range. And if you plan around a DC charger, such as most Nissan dealers have, you can go 80+ miles, get an 80% recharge in 30 minutes and head home. So for us, we have a gas car for long trips and we will use the EV for all around town and mid-range trips of 50 miles or less, 80 miles or less with ability to charge on the other end. 2.Federal and state incentives The dealers were offering $7,500 federal rebates, and $2,500 state rebates in California, although the state money was contingent of renewal of the program, so we couldn’t take that for granted. By leasing, the $7,500 was rolled into the deal, along with other dealer incentives that pushed the capital cost reduction well over $10K. We’ll hope to get the state rebate, too. The government continues to do its best to give EVs a start in the market dominated by internal combustion engines. 3.Degradation of battery life over time The research we made showed we could expect 70% battery life after 5 years or so, and that charging behavior is a key determining factor in this. Just like a cellphone battery, if you charge it often, the battery loses its ability to hold a charge faster. So we’ve been trying to run it down under 50% before recharging. But if we have a possible trip the next day, we’ll have to top it off in the garage. With a lease, this is not a large issue. 4.Drive-ability This is answered by test driving, and your local dealer would love you to do so, because they’re so convinced you’ll be hooked that you’ll probably get one. They really are a joy to drive. The big difference I noticed right away was acceleration. There is no delay between putting the pedal down and the engine responding, so it’s peppy. Acceleration on the freeway onramp is scary easy. And the Leaf handles turns and braking nicely as well. I’ve never been so excited about driving a new car as this one, and I’ve probably driven a dozen new cars over the years. 5.Room for 5 people Because they have to count their pounds like the Weight Watchers of car designers, EVs are not as roomy as their gas cousins. But I found the Leaf had plenty of room for 3 in the back seat 6. Wait for new models or pull the trigger now? We had a career change that made this decision for us. And the 3-year lease gives us a timetable to get to where the new Teslas, Chevys, and Nissans have worked out some bugs and extended range on affordable models to 200+ miles. Then our next EV can be all the car we’d ever need to go between LA and San Francisco with one stop or go to the mountains. But if I had a car with 2 years left in it, I would have run it into the ground and waited for the next generation of EVs. 7.Cost of operation This breaks down into gas vs electricity cost and maintenance and insurance cost differences, if any. Let’s assume we’re getting 3.8 miles/kwh on the Leaf (which we are). At $0.20/kwh, that’s about $0.05/mile. A comparable gas car might get 30 miles per gallon on $3/gallon gas. That’s $0.10/mile (double). Plus, maintenance should be much less for an EV, with fewer moving parts under the hood. And insurance on the Leaf was less than our other cars. So we stand to save $750/yr on gas alone at 15,000 miles/yr. 8.Chargers 101 You don’t call it a charger, first of all! The EV community seems pretty stubborn about calling them EVSE’s. So we’ll have to go with that until a TV show character gives one a cooler name. For now, I’ll call it a charger. I found some for $300, but ended up getting a Clipper Creek one for $600 that everyone swore by. I had a 30 amp RV plug at 240V already on the back of the garage, and planned to use that. But that could only handle the 24 amp charger. The 32 amp charger would make a big difference in charging speed, so I had my electrician upgrade the breaker to 40 amps and ran a new line in the garage. It is charging from nothing to full in about 5 hours. The brains of the whole charging thing is in the car. The car knows when to turn off the charger. The car can set a timer to turn on and off at a certain time to take advantage of off-peak electric rates. All you need that EVSE to do then is safely move the current. You might spend your first year’s gas savings on an EVSE and installation. 9.Using solar power to charge the car We have an excess of solar PV capacity on the roof of about 1,000 kwh/year, or 3,800 miles per year worth. The utility pays us $0.04/kwh for that power, as part of our net metering agreement, so that’s a bum deal. We might as well use it for an EV. That means the first 3,800 miles per year are at $0.01/mile. Then we start paying Tier I rates from the utility. But, even in the middle of summer in the middle of the day, when our PV panels are maxed out, they only produce 4 kw, and the charger uses 6.6 kw, so we can’t charge at full blast without help from the grid. All that comes out in the end-of-year wash, when the utility calculates what we took versus what we returned to the grid, regardless of what time of day it was. Net metering is a good deal for the consumer, who gets to use the grid whenever their panels can’t power them as a virtual battery, and just clear up their account at the end of the year, like those general store owners used to do in all the Westerns when the farmers sold their crops for the year and bought their wives and daughters fabric to make dresses. 10.HOV stickers in California We wanted one of those mud flap stickers like on those Priuses when they first started strutting their environmental superiority over our gas cars 15 years ago. But we also heard those stickers aren’t available any more. Well it seems that’s true, for hybrid EVs (check your specific model at the DMV website). But for our ZEV (zero emission vehicle), they have a shiny white HOV lane sticker available by mail for $22, once you get your registration in the mail. And until then, you can drive the carpool lane with impunity since you have no plates; just watch for the highway patrolman. 11.Lease vs buy We bought our solar panels when leasing them would have been easier, so we’re not lease lovers. But with the longer range models coming online in the next year or two, and the dealers’ willingness to take all the uncertainty and paperwork out of the federal rebate process for us, and a sub-$300/month lease on offer with a reasonable downpayment, we decided on the 15,000/mile a year lease. 12.Hybrid vs Pure EV A plug-in hybrid seems like the perfect compromise … the economy of an EV driving around town near home with the range of a regular gas car. But we just wanted to make more of a statement than that … that we can plan around limited range and charging stations to make an electric vehicle with no emissions work. And why spend an extra $2,000 or so to have a redundant engine under the hood – that’s not a no-cost compromise. My wife and I just have come to believe through our research that the natural gas plant down the street can burn gas and make electricity and get it to our house to charge our car more efficiently than the oil companies can get gasoline to the gas station by way of the refinery by way of the ship from the Middle East for my gas engine to burn. And if 30-50% of the power comes from my rooftop solar panels or solar panels in the Mojave Desert or hydropower, then I think that makes a pure EV make good sense now and, even more so, in future.
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In 2010, we wrote: "The updated California energy code is changing the insulation and plaster systems being used throughout the state." We said it then and we have to now say it again, and this time the impact of the 2013 California Energy Code standards will be much more significant than the last cycle. This is because the new code requires significant upgrades in the insulation of wall systems. For the past few years, residential standards for wall systems in much of the most populated areas of the State were status-quo, and commercial standards were done by measuring the effective insulation value of the entire wall system, taking into account thermal transfer through framing and windows. This overall approach to wall insulation now comes to residential construction with the start of the 2013 standards in July, 2014. This represents a paradigm shift in how exterior walls of residential structures will be built in the State Climate Zones Climate Zones played a big role in the residential wall requirements in the past edition of the energy code; not so now. All climate zones now require an overall wall U-factor of 0.065. That translates into an effective R-value of about 15, taking into account the leakage through studs called thermal bridging. To comply, many new homes will be built with continuous insulation, a method in which foam board is installed outside of the framing in a continuous sheet, with the exterior cladding installed over it. It is important to understand that tradeoffs between systems are allowed. As long as the house will use the same amount of energy as the specified designs, you can trade off insulation against windows, HVAC systems, etc. How Are Builders Complying? In order to comply with some of the stricter requirements under Title 24, continuous foam insulation (CI) is becoming more common. The use of foam panels applied outside of the studs necessitates the use of a plaster system specifically designed for use with foam panels. Commonly known as “one coat stucco systems” or EIFS, these plaster systems can achieve insulation in the wall system that is equivalent to Title 24 requirements or better. For instance, a home in Palm Springs could choose to use R-21 insulation between 2x6 wood studs, spaced 24 inches on center, OR R-13 batts between 2x4 wood studs with 1-1/2 inches of foam board and an insulated plaster system. See Table 1 for more details on residential CI systems.  In commercial buildings using metal framing, the reasons to use CI systems are even more compelling. Because metal studs permit the transfer of more energy out of the building, their performance is improved more than wood-framed buildings by the use of foam insulation outside the studs. It would be difficult to comply with Title 24 building with metal studs without foam insulation in many climate zones, unless other significant energy upgrades were made in other parts of the building. For instance, building with a CI plaster system in San Francisco, Los Angeles, or San Diego, a builder can achieve Title 24 compliance with 1-1/2” of CI foam over 4” metal studs and R-11 batt insulation. See Table 2 for details on code-compliant CI systems for commercial structures.
Metal-framed hotels and high-rise residential have the same standards throughout the state. A U-factor of 0.105 is required, which can be met with 1 inch of CI foam over 4” metal studs with R-13 batts. Over wood framing, half the state allows a U-factor of 0.059, which can be met with 2x6 studs, R-19 batts, and R-4 CI. The most extreme zones of the state require U=0.042, which requires 2x8 studs. See Table 3 for details for use with hotels and high-rise residential projects. If you’re like us, you barely noticed the installation of a Smart Meter at your house in 2012. Our utility, Southern California Edison, installed them systematically across Long Beach with the stated goals of:
We thought we might take Edison up on the offer to access our usage data and see how useful it is. We logged into our account and downloaded the hourly kWh used for the last 12 months – over 8,000 data points in all. It helped us see the times of year and times of day that we use most electricity in our house, and showed exactly how large our spikes can be. Add our spike to our neighbors’ around Southern California, and you see how hard it must be to manage the grid in Summer without outages.  Some of our takeaways were:
  The data made us face some hard facts about our lifestyle. First, what are we doing at 9:00 at night in Summer? Watching TV, running the dishwasher, and cooling off the house with the air conditioner. Why don’t we open the windows? I don’t know. How much electricity does our TV use anyway?
So we got out a gadget still in its wrapper that I gave my wife for Christmas – a Kill a Watt. It plugs into the wall socket and accepts the plug from another electric appliance and measures the electricity usage. Here’s some of what we’ve found so far:
We have yet to measure the usage of our A/C unit on the roof, or any of our major appliances, but they’re next! And if you’re considering putting solar panels on the roof and generating all your own electricity, your Smart Meter data will tell you what size array you need. In our case, a 3kW array would cover our daytime needs most of the year, but on the hottest days in Summer, we sometimes would need twice that to power the house. It will be interesting to see how the Smart Meters will be used in future. Perhaps they will communicate with our appliances to run when rates are low on off-peak times. I’m hoping that the utilities use the data to help homeowners discover if they are about average or using more than their neighbors, as this information is nowhere to be found today. I’m not interested in guilt-tripping anyone, but if it wakes a few households up that there are savings to be made, well that would be a good thing. Aggregate that over Southern California, and that could add up to power-plant-size savings. So far, I'm high on Smart Meters. Long Beach Encourages Homeowners to Go Native With the Innovative Lawn-To-Garden Program The Long Beach Water Department has an easy, affordable way to convert your gluttonous grass front yard and parkway into a water-wise wonderland. Long Beach will pay you $3.00 per square foot to rip out your lawn and replace it with native, low water landscaping. My husband Nick and I accepted the challenge at our home, which had a rarely used, somewhat sparse front lawn and parkway. Long Beach makes the process surprisingly easy. And despite our novice landscaping skills, the results are beautiful. Trust me, you can do it too.  The first step is to file an application with Lawn-To-Garden, which we submitted on-line in a matter of minutes. The application itself is easy - you just need your water account number and the square footage of grass you are replacing. Next we received a letter in the mail telling us our application was approved and we had 45 days to submit our garden design. This is the reality check in the process – are you actually willing to do the work? Lawn-to-Garden has a lot of resources available, so you don’t need to hire a professional landscaper. You start by taking a short mandatory landscaping class (either on-line or at the water department). Then, you review the list of approved plants and other requirements and make a drawing. My husband and I looked at all the on-line examples, grabbed some graph paper, and went to work. Our drawing was crude, but accepted without ridicule. Then we waited… A few weeks later we received a letter saying our stick figure drawings were approved and we had 120 days to construct our new garden. Step one is to kill your grass. Since ours was already parched, we were in good shape. We hired the incredibly strong Miguel to dig up our remains and fix our sprinklers, which we converted to low flow rotator heads. In the meantime, I showed our plans to my friend Leslie Grenier, a professional landscaper and extremely generous person. She gently suggested a few changes to our design with phrases like “I consider this a freeway-quality plant.” Yikes. We ran the changes by the Lawn-To-Garden folks who didn’t even raise an eyebrow at the fact we were tweaking our design with two weeks to go. I am sure they’ve seen it all. Then we started visiting nurseries to collect the plants and mulch. Seeing all those shades of green and beautiful flowers lined up in front of our house made me realize low water does not mean boring and monotone at all. And in one very long day, Nick, Miguel and I did it – planted over 120 plants in our front yard and parkway and mulched every one. We even had our first butterfly – a perk of going native. We emailed the city, they came and inspected, and we passed. Glorious victory!  Joyce Barkley, Long Beach Water Conservation Specialist, told me there are more than 500 Long Beach homes currently in various stages of the Lawn-To-Garden program. The funding comes mostly from a refinanced bond and the program is accepting applications. According to Joyce, the Water Department “expects to see an average water savings of 30% per single family household” that converts to a low water garden. At our home we reduced our water usage by 9 hundred cubic feet in the first partial-year alone. Joyce hopes the program will help change the perception that lawns are beautiful. I am definitely a convert. I feel like my new front yard has a wonderful organic quality that evolves and changes with the seasons. And converting a lawn is a tangible, important step towards responsible water conservation. It feels good to do our part.
For us, Lawn-to-Garden covered about ½ of the cost of replacing our lawn. Our expenses were split about evenly between Miguel’s time and plant/mulch/paver materials. If we were willing to dig out our own grass, we would have come close to breaking even (unless Leslie had charged us what she is really worth). More importantly, Lawn-to-Garden made the process simple. They were constantly available for questions, were flexible with our changes, and really did provide all the on-line resources we needed to succeed. For more information, check out www.lblawntogarden.com. |
AuthorsNick Brown, CEA Archives
September 2025
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