Jan 2015 Drive Report

WOW!! Just paid $1.939 for gas yesterday.  Did not think it would be that low but recent news reports suggest issues at the refineries on the West Coast may drive gas prices up soon so enjoy it while you can!!

In January, the Corolla went 1050.5 miles at a cost of $55.54 or 5.29 cents per mile.  As always, this cost is an estimate due to the fact that I do not fill up right at the beginning of the month but its close enough.  My 3 fill ups for the month averaged 36.1 MPG which is my lowest figure ever. (previous low was December 2014 which was 37.7 MPG) I will be keeping an eye on this and hoping its not an early warning of major upcoming repairs!

Now there has been some noise hinting that these low gas prices has made getting an EV a mistake? Well, not quite.  Ya, 5 cents a mile is cheap (and yes, I am ignoring that extra ½ cent + per mile in oil changes!) but my LEAF still came in UNDER TWO CENTS PER MILE! so gasoline prices still have a long way to go and keep in mind, its looking like the prices are about to make a u-turn but hopefully not too soon.  We should be raising gas taxes now to get the badly needed extra revenue while prices are so low then reducing them as prices go back up but...

Either way, the LEAF did manage to go 654.0 miles on $11.68 of PSE juice (which includes a few freebies...) or 1.8 cents per mile.


**Sidenote** Yesterday, I went to the garage to grab something out of the freezer and one of the charge lights on the dash was blinking. Unfortunately, I had forgotten what it might mean but a quick query on Facebook helped me determine it was likely a 12 volt battery boost in progress.  Now, not that I constantly check this kind of stuff but it was the first time I had seen this in 4+ years of LEAFing.

This was a bit of a concern so got up this morning and checked the voltage and it was 12.18 volts at 7:35 AM. This was a concern!  My blog about others having 12 volt battery issues in Oct, 2014 showed my average voltages being in the 12.4ish range.  Now, it is colder now (which hurts the battery) and the LEAF sits a lot more (which also hurts) so the 12 volt battery is not getting the constant boosts now.   So I decided that since I have most of the day at home, I would check it every hour or so to see what it did.  My 8:30 check made me feel MUCH better

7:35   12.18 volts
8:30   12.30 volts
9:36   12.29 volts
10:53  12.28 volts
11:58  12.27 volts

Ok so now I am thinking I checked the voltage at 7:35AM when something else was going on in the LEAF that was causing a voltage drop. Whatever it was apparently was only on a brief moment. If I should ever run across this again, I will check the voltage every 5 mins or so to see how long this event lasts.

Ok, its been a week since I started writing this. Got sidelined onto something else so FYI; gas has gone up about 20 cents a gallon so I expect to pay a lot more at the pump but then again, been LEAFing it mostly this week to see if I can drive my batt stat numbers back up to the range they were in when I switched to driving the Corolla mostly. I will let you know how things turn out!