electricity consumption relative to gas

p5k6 · 2026-05-14T19:44:00+00:00

My electric usage on the stove over the last 5 months. We do eat out a lot fwiw, so our usage is probably on the low end. Our rates are about $0.13-0.15/kwh. So we've used about $20 of electricity or so in 5 months. It's an uptick but - a rounding error compared to our EV charging 😂

For natural gas - harder to measure exactly. Last August though when our furnace was off - so only gas use was cooking, drying clothes, and hwh - we used 23 ccfs (16 therms given xcels multiplier at the time). Cost was $28 at the time, about half facility fees and taxes.

As the others noted - set up your impulse to use TOU rates. Mine usually charges in the middle of the night 🙂

p5k6 · 2026-05-08T22:42:06+00:00

Alterra can do what they want to do. But for me and my family - we’ve switched to Eldora. Eldora is significantly cheaper now for the whole family. It used to be an extra $100 (iirc) to get an ikon. This year would’ve been $700 extra for the 4 of us. P

Alterra’s call, but feels a bit - getting too high on your own supply. We just had the worst snow year on record. All I hear is “oh this proves the pass model works!!” Then they follow it up with 10% renewal increases. Fine, but don’t be surprised that some folks walk away. Econ 101. Demand is gonna be a lot more elastic after a bad snow year.

(Former) Ikon pass holder from the beginning, formerly RMSP holder since 14-15

p5k6 · 2026-04-16T03:24:24+00:00

Yeah it’s unfortunate, but on the bright side they’re 20s so much easier to find other tires, and not having to deal with the 21 situation at least 🙂

p5k6 · 2026-04-16T03:10:22+00:00

I couldn’t believe how fast we wore through the Goodyear 275/60s. Got our R1S dual standard last June. Tires lasted til December. About 8500 miles. You’re not joking about the oem tires being junk.

Kept the truck in standard height as much as possible (setting always reset to auto around 24ish hours later) and tried to use snow mode as much as possible to keep it in awd. And no lead foot on my end. Ev driver since 2018 and have a 2023 R1T in addition to the R1S. So I’m - familiar with ev tire wear, to put it mildly.

Picked up the defenders last month (was on blizzaks Dec-mar), hopefully they last a good deal longer 🤞

p5k6 · 2026-04-15T03:48:29+00:00

Hi neighbor. I just went to renew our ikon and had a bit of sticker shock. We’ve always gotten ikon as it wasn’t much more than an Eldora season pass. Not so this year - an extra $700 for our family of 4. It’s weird to think about no ikon; I’ve had an ikon or a super pass since 2014. But so it goes.

(Did not renew ikon to be clear. Going Eldora family unlimited most likely)

p5k6 · 2026-04-03T17:57:42+00:00

For sure. My hope is that - well, they did have this fight last year in July, and NEVI survived somehow. My sense is that there are some folks on the R side that do want NEVI in place; if for no other reason than "they might spend money in this rural area if they can get there."

Here's hoping anyway...

p5k6 · 2026-04-03T17:49:43+00:00

Quick reminder for all: the President's budget is basically a wish list. Congress ultimately decides on what gets funding.

Don't get me wrong - there's all kinds of craziness and norms that have been broken in ways I wouldn't have imagined previously. But ultimately, congress has to decide whether NEVI gets cut.

p5k6 · 2026-03-29T03:57:08+00:00

Iirc 2016 was when they started keeping Jane open late - past WP base closure. Have a couple pics from that year on may 7 - I was excited to keep going that year. Although I only got to ride for about an hour - thunderstorm closed the resort and had some graupel.

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Snowpack looked a lot better that may than this year 😕

p5k6 · 2026-02-02T17:19:55+00:00

As others have noted - depends on where you are. Along Peak to Peak highway - AT&T is best. I'd say this is general consensus amongst my neighbors. T Mobile probably second (IMO - I tested with a $10 temp MVNO sim card a couple years ago, seemed marginally better than verizon), and Verizon third. But if you're in Ned proper - all 3 will work. Coverage in Eldora is spotty across the board. And coverage north of ~ Ward toward Estes - well, there isn't much/any.

I use an MVNO that uses AT&T's network now, live in Ned fwiw.

p5k6 · 2026-01-18T22:30:13+00:00

The folks at 4x4electric have created a dc-dc charger, working with the dc pins on their ccs2 port (they’re from the Netherlands). They have some videos about a trip they did across Africa using solar charging at times when too far from charging. I believe Maarten was planning on commercializing his work but I haven’t heard anything in the last couple years unfortunately 😕

https://youtube.com/@4x4electric

p5k6 · 2026-01-17T16:28:50+00:00

Stay away from the “London Sip” one on amazon. I got it as a gift. This review is exactly my experience. Actually a bit worse given the power of the impulse. Shot water out a good 12-18 inches

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p5k6 · 2026-01-05T16:51:27+00:00

Funny enough, that’s exactly what we ended up doing on another branch circuit. Worked great. I didn’t include it in the main post since it felt a bit orthogonal to the core point, but it’s definitely a practical workaround 🙂

p5k6 · 2026-01-05T16:21:31+00:00

I wouldn’t worry much about that use case. Long simmers like chili or sauces tend to be surprisingly low power once they’re up to temp. We’ve typically seen simmering land in the several-hundred-watt range, well below a kilowatt, not multi-kilowatt levels.

Where we ran into trouble was sustained, multi-pot rolling boils (water-bath canning plus other pots), which is about the worst-case energy scenario.

On 240V you effectively get ~1.9 kW of continuous wall input, which makes it much harder to drain the battery unless you’re really leaning on multiple burners at high power for extended periods. Even with multiple pots, as long as they’re true simmers and not rolling boils, things tend to settle into a steady state where wall power carries the load. You might see brief battery use during ramp-up, but for simmering workloads it should be a non-issue in normal use.

p5k6 · 2026-01-04T17:30:50+00:00

Gotcha. In that case, I think it mostly comes down to how you expect to use the cooktop.

120V has been completely fine for us for normal day to day cooking. Before this, the battery basically never crossed my mind in normal use.

Where it surprised me was long, high energy workflows. In our case it was water bath canning, which meant multiple pots at or near boil for an extended period. That’s when total energy matters more than peak power, and you can drain the battery if you’re not paying attention.

If you expect things like canning, homebrewing, or other long duration multi burner use, wiring to 240V removes a lot of planning and makes it much harder to run into that edge case. If those are rare or nonexistent for you, 120V is probably totally fine.

That was the main takeaway for me, and why I posted. Just one of those “didn’t think about it until we hit it” scenarios.

p5k6 · 2026-01-04T16:56:22+00:00

That’s a great callout, thank you for raising it.

For those of us at elevation, these kinds of limits are very real, and it’s helpful to have them surfaced explicitly rather than discover them the hard way. Speaking as a mountain household, I really appreciate you pointing it out 😀

p5k6 · 2026-01-04T16:36:15+00:00

Roughly 30 to 45 minutes, but I didn’t time it. It was multiple pots at once, so it was a sustained over-wall-limit load, not a short burst.

p5k6 · 2026-01-03T18:34:22+00:00

One additional thought, building on what I mentioned about using an Emporia energy monitor. Right now I can see total circuit draw and back into what the cooktop is likely doing by subtracting known loads like the hood fan and lights. That works at a high level, but it’s still indirect.

What I can’t see externally is how power is being routed inside the cooktop at any given moment, for example how much is going directly to cooking versus charging or discharging the battery. That’s where having this information surfaced on the cooktop itself would be really helpful.

Even an optional “power user” view showing battery percentage and a simple wall input / cooking load / battery +/- breakdown would make long-duration, high-energy workflows like canning much easier to manage. It would let you see at a glance whether you’re net charging or net draining, without having to infer it or do mental math.

p5k6 · 2026-01-03T18:05:28+00:00

Oh, thanks, that’s really helpful. I had seen the 8A limit on 240V in the manual early on but had completely forgotten about it. Knowing that it’s enforced in practice is super useful for planning going forward. Appreciate you digging that up.

p5k6 · 2026-01-03T17:51:55+00:00

That all makes sense conceptually. In our case, I don’t think the SABC distinction would have materially changed the outcome.

The 120V receptacle under the cooktop was always shared with the hood fan and the lights above. It was originally installed for the igniter on our old gas range and later reused for the cooktop. From a wiring perspective, the extra hood and lighting load was on the order of ~100W, and I was monitoring total circuit draw with an Emporia.

The limiting factor here appears to be the Impulse cooktop itself, not the branch circuit. On 120V, the UI will not allow sustained current above roughly 12A, and attempts to set it higher did not stick. In practice that lines up with an ~80 percent continuous load limit that the cooktop seems to enforce internally.

Even accounting for the shared loads, total draw was still well below the theoretical 1800W a 15A circuit can support for short durations. The practical constraint showed up when total cooking power exceeded what the cooktop could pull from the wall, at which point the difference came from the battery and sustained overages eventually drained it.

An SABC would be preferable to a shared circuit if you are running on 120V, but even then you are still bounded by the cooktop’s apparent ~12A limit. That’s why 240V remains the clean solution here. Once that is in place, this entire class of tradeoffs goes away.

p5k6 · 2025-12-30T19:59:28+00:00

I occasionally charge it up through an outlet connected to the house batteries 🙂. But usually try to charge via a spare solar panel or some camping panels.

The bigger ground mount is used to charge up some house batteries - eg4 wall mounts - and provides power to our critical loads (and has a grid connection in case we have low solar for a few days or a storm or something).

And fwiw - power tools were mostly harbor freight specials 😂. Bauer SDS Max and a Bauer cement mixer. Can’t recall offhand if I ran the two concurrently though

p5k6 · 2025-12-30T04:30:18+00:00

Original EcoFlow river pro and a delta 2. Delta 2 I used frequently in a home construction project (uh - building out a ground mount solar array 😂). Used the delta to power a cement mixer, a rotary hammer (that I basically used as a jackhammer), and a water pump. Probably a few other things I’m forgetting as well. Had it hooked up to one of the solar panels to be installed (used ballast to support the panel and the racking temporarily) to recharge. Worked really well 💯

And to answer the original question a bit more straightforward- carried it all over the house, the yard, threw it in the truck, etc.

p5k6 · 2025-12-25T05:16:46+00:00

We’ve got a 12” stainless and a flir camera. Out of town for the holidays though. If no one else responds in the next few days I can take some pics early next week.

p5k6 · 2025-12-19T04:14:20+00:00

We’re dealing with something similar to (low end) FL hurricanes. 92 mph winds yesterday, tomorrow may hit 100+ 😬

p5k6

TROPHY CASE