In case it's missed your attention, car-based transportation is expensive.

The gas alone at 25 miles per gallon is $0.12/mile at $3/gallon and is closer to $0.13 a mile with this week's spike to $3.20/gallon. When the prices drift toward $4/gallon you're soon paying $0.16/mile for gas.

However, most of the alternatives aren't really that much cheaper. Most hybrids drop the fuel cost from the $0.12-$0.16/mile to more like $0.06-$0.08/mile. Throw the actual cost of $25,000 vehicles, depreciation, insurance, repairs, etc. and even the $0.445 that the IRS allots for car cost seems low.

Now, what about cruising along with the wind in your hair at 20 mph without getting sweaty or even having to pedal? What if that only ran $0.003 in fuel and the complete vehicle costing less than $500? That's what electric bikes offer.

Given that the safe bet is for $4 gas and $5 gas within the next couple of years (hey, we still had $0.85 gas in 1999), and the fact that I can currently take all city streets to get to work (nothing over 40mph speed limits), I decided to do a bit of digging into supplementing my Geo Tracker (which already gets 25-30mpg) to keep my transportation costs down.

Beyond the purely financial benefits is the fact that most of these designs allow for pedaling to supplement the electrical system, meaning some exercise can still take place without the whole dripping-in-sweat experience of normal bike commuting.

So, what are the options?

First, after a first pass of reading about this stuff (which actually happened last year), I had a couple of design parameters.

I knew that I didn't want a dedicated electric bike or scooter. When the system is based on a regular bike, you can easily swap bits out to improve performance, comfort, looks, etc. Whether it's pulling the electrical off of the bike and putting it on a better bike or upgrading motors, batteries, etc., a system based on a regular bike just makes modular sense to me.

I also am not going to consider weight or regenerative braking very seriously. In the bicycle world, lighter components cost more. And, "lighter" usually means by a few ounces. 10 or 20 pounds extra on the bike itself isn't going to affect the project nearly as much as having to spend an extra couple of hundred bucks for lighter versions of things like batteries. Besides, if I want to get rid of weight, it's a lot cheaper to get rid of it off of my body than off of the bike. Before I start worrying about how heavy the bike is, I should drop 30 pounds myself.

That lack of concern about vehicle weight (at this scale it's not nearly as big of a problem as in a car) is driven by another parameter: distance over speed. I'd rather have a system that can go 20 miles on its own and 30 with pedaling, but can only go 12 mph than one that can go 25 mph for 10 miles. That means that I'm heading toward the biggest batteries that make sense, even though they'll weigh more and reduce maximum speed. Somewhere in between the ultra-light batteries and pulling a trailer full of them is a balance between those things.

So, what are the options?

One option is the hub motor kit that is sold in a variety of places. This is currently the frontrunner plan. The 600W motor and 36V system runs about $350 most places. I like this option because it's easy to install, doesn't require any messing with gearing, sprockets, etc. to transfer power from the motor to the wheel.

This kit includes the battery setup too, which you should watch for in other kits. Lots of them are sold at much higher prices and don't include even basic batteries. Installation of these hub motor kits is reasonably simple from what I can see.

Given that I always like to know what all of the options are, I've also looked into a few other designs.

One of them is the Bidwell bike pusher. It's basically a little trailer containing the motor and batteries that pushes the bike along. The guy who wrote it up has filed a patent though the only thing particularly inventive about it is the coupler that hooks it into the bike.

The biggest problem with that design is common to the rest of the R.Q.Riley designs. They all are based around tearing apart a specific existing product and then building the design. That leads to designs that don't age well. Many of their early designs are based on the original VW Beetle, which was plentiful when they designed the conversions, but they're much harder to come by now. I prefer a more off-the-shelf type of design.

This particular design is based on a scooter that runs about $400 where I looked. That puts even the Bidwell + cheap Target bike at the $500 mark.

However, I think that a similar device could be built with individual components and make the result much more powerful. This 1000W motor is $100 instead of the 350 watt motor that comes from the scooter that the Bidwell specifies.

When you pair it with a controller at $50, you're set for a lot more power with lots of money left over for the batteries (the other major component) and the misc wheel/gear bits.

I did buy a copy of their plans and wasn't impressed. Among other things, they have a section where they mention adding an MP3 player and their explanation of how to do that is pretty much, "add some speakers and an mp3 player". If you look at the patent, you've got all of the useful information on the device.

So, at any rate, what I'm planning on for next spring is a basic Target bike and the hub motor kit. Once I run some numbers on that first setup, I'll start tweaking things like smoother tires, bigger batteries, etc. I'm also planning on using a plugin electric meter that I bought a while back to monitor exactly how much juice goes into the charging to measure how many killowatt hours are actually used to move my carcass around.

Eventually, I'd like to have a recumbent trike with a 1000W motor and enough batteries for some serious range. That will have to wait. I'm also curious about what it would take to combine 2 of these hub motors to do the trike.

My Grandfather

It's been a rocky week. On Sunday, after we got back from Up North, we got a call that my Grandma Zwart (maternal grandmother) was sent by ambulance to the Sioux Falls hospital from the nursing home she's living in as her already failing health was going downhill. By Monday morning, we had gotten an update that she was doing better and would be back in the nursing home by Thursday. That ended up being exactly what happened, but with her condition varying with each passing day, I decided to take off half of Friday and drive down to see her.

She is really having a hard time of it, with pneumonia settling into her lungs and congestive heart failure is starting. I sat with her for a while on Friday night again on Saturday morning. She was definitely doing better on Saturday morning and was in better spirits, but she's clearly ready to go and has a "do not resuscitate" order on file. It's really hard to see her like this, unable to lay down because she can't breathe.

Beyond actually seeing her, the trip itself was interesting in a couple of ways. Pretty much my entire extended family lives in Sioux County, IA or within a few miles. That includes my dad's parents as well as all of my uncles and aunts, etc.

I stayed with my Uncle Delbert on Friday night and stayed in a room (my cousin Brian's room) I used to stay in a lot when we were visiting. It was funny to be in a room that I remember being pretty much frozen in 1985 or so. It no longer has Knight Rider or Airwolf posters and was now sponge painted blue.

However, despite remodeling the main level the nearly ladder-steep stairs and the overall layout of the upper level was exactly like I remember from the last time I stayed there nearly 20 years ago.

The houses I actually grew up in are all long gone (one burned down, another has a highway to thank for its dissapearance). So, I don't get this sense of nostalgia about many places.

Then, Saturday morning when my Uncle Ron stopped by for 9:30 lunch. . . let me explain a minute as that's confusing to most people. See the day on farms in NW Iowa is broken up like this:

• 6:00am - breakfast with eggs, bacon, toast, cereal, etc.
• 9:30 - lunch with cookies, pastries, doughnuts, and coffee
• 12:00 - dinner with meat, potatoes and vegetable
• 3:00 - lunch with a similar menu to morning lunch
• 6:00 - supper with alighter full-size meal
• 9:00pm - lunch again. This is only on really long days like baling hay.

Anyway, as I was sitting there having my morning lunch, I looked across the yard and saw the first car I ever drove, a gray Ford pickup. I spent the summer between 6th and 7th grades working for Ron, Delbert and Ver (the 3 work the family farm together) and moved this truck a few times from one end of the farm to another. Weird to see it still in use.

On Saturday, after leaving Grandma Zwart, my dad and I headed over to my Grandpa Wynia's apartment to take him out for lunch and then on to the nursing home where my Grandma Wynia is staying and sit with her for a couple of hours. Grandpa shared some of the geneological information that he's been writing down over the last few years, including how Jesse James' gang watered their horses on the family homestead. My family (on pretty much all sides) came to this country in the 1880's and settled in NW Iowa. Until the last 30 years or so, that's where the vast majority have remained.

I'm looking forward to getting a chance to read through what he's written down. It's also prompted me to get back onto the project I started a while back of digitizing the boxes of slides I took home when he moved into the apartment. I got busy and it fell to the side. I'd really like to get them done and onto video for him to watch.

Saturday afternoon, I drove my dad home the 4 hours to his house and then the 2 back to mine afterward and crashed for the night. It's been a long weekend and a short one all the same.

Well, it took me a couple of weeks from recording the conversation to actually putting it out on the site this morning before leaving for work, but it is finally up. This is the first podcast I recorded with the split channel setup in PowerGramo. This simultaneously let me fix some things that have been a problem in the past, including noise from the side of the conversation where the person is being silent and overlap due to cellphone lag and caused some problems of its own. I spent too much time trying to fix stuff and probably missed glaring problems while getting lost in the minutae.

It also wasn't as easy to cut this conversation down as others have been. In other episodes, I've just cut whole 20 minute segments out because it made sense. In this one, I cut out 30 of the original 60 minutes in lots of 1 minute chunks and 3-10 second slices. I'm much happier with many of the new bits, but still want to make improvements on future episodes. I also need a better way to end these recordings. It's all just a process and I'll just keep moving on.

Episode 7 of The Glass is Too Big is an interview with Dave Gray, who is the CEO of XPLANE, the visual thinking company.

Show Notes or Download the MP3

Tonight, Shelly and I were out with the dogs for our evening walk. This is often done as part of our routine because we know we need to, and not as recreation.

Tonight, we were actually having a fairly serious conversation that we'd interrupt when we got near people and were just in a hurry to get home. Because we walk with 2 basset hounds, we regularly get kids who want to pet the dogs. However, we also get lots of kids and other dogs that just stress Rowdy and Bailey out, so we make any stops short. We usually end up getting stopped 3 or 4 times a night and by the end, we just want to get home.

Tonight, on the last 4-5 blocks a woman with a 150 pound mastiff and 2 kids came up and we did the 3 second stop before tugging on the dogs and moving on to get home and take our conversation indoors. Besides, the huge dog hadn't caused any problems and we wanted to keep Rowdy calm.

As we were walking away, I heard the one kid say, "I didn't get to pet the puppies, Mom."

She replied, "That's OK honey, they're just not friendly people."

The ceiling above me is rapidly thumping as Bailey pounds the floor trying to scratch her belly. Her late summer allergies are back.

Every year, we somehow lull ourselves into believing that they might be gone this year. After all, we got through July without them reappearing. I mean, summer's nearly over by the second week of August, so we made it right? Nope.

She's been on allergy shots for 2 or 3 years now and they've helped cut down on it, but we're still in for about 4-6 weeks of her pretty much scratching constantly while conscious and putting a spastic floor drumming beat into the soundtrack of our lives.

I'm sure in a few days we'll be giving her regular baths in soothing shampoos and dosing her with Benadryl (what the vet recommends) and otherwise just trying to circumvent her reaction to whatever she lays in during the day that causes this.

And, for the record, she's allergic to TONS of stuff, including, ironically enough, cats.