The Blue Light I Didn’t Notice

I’ve discovered a blue light I’d overlooked before.   It was there, it was happening, I noticed it, but I didn’t pay any attention to it.   Now I realized what it means.  

This is about the Awesome Car, which I forgot to mention.   And if you don’t know what the awesome car is, you should ask my children, because as far as they’re concerned, that is the official name for our Tesla Model S.  

Our typical day goes something like this:  select the awesome car when possible.   Get there first—don’t be the one stuck taking the kids to school in the ICE minivan (Internal Combustion Engine).   Drive in great comfort and style while simultaneously focusing your energy on maximum efficient driving habits so you can arrive home with better Wh/mi than your spouse can manage.    Plug in the car to recharge it for the next driver.

Okay, it doesn’t really happen like that.   We always agree on who is going where and with which car, mostly dictated by those children factors and the car seats in the minivan, but the rest of the story is reasonably true.    Every time we come home we plug in the car.   It recharges via the grid (or now solar) and when we go out next we have a fully charged car.

The plug for the Model S has a light ring around it.   There are multiple colors the light ring shows to indicate what’s happening.   There is red which means you aren’t even close to getting the plug in, orange which means you’re close, but not quite, green which is what you want to see, meaning you’ve successfully mated your car with the charging plug.   When charging is done or nothing is plugged in, the ring is white.

Until recently I hadn’t realized there was another color that flashed by so fast I didn’t pay attention.   The color blue comes up, followed by green for charging…that is unless you have delayed charging on for things like time-of-use energy consumption plans such as what we’re now on with our electric company.  We were able to get on this plan when the solar system went live.

It is more economical to have the car charge on off-peak hours than it is during some of the on-peak hours.   The car is programmed to defer charging until after 9PM.    That blue light is the “all is a go for charging later.”   Charging overnight and watching the energy utilization and production has been pretty exciting, so much so that I wrote an entire blog post about a blue ring of light.

The Big Boy Update:  He had to eat dinner last night without his shirt on in the restaurant because he refused to lean over the plate when he ate food dipped in a sauce.   My husband warned him if he got the sauce on his shirt he was going to lose it.  

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  We had my daughter’s birthday celebration at school today.   She held the earth globe and walked around the candle representing the sun while we sang the song about how the earth goes around the sun one rotation for each year we are old.   From the number of times she walked around that candle during the four rounds of singing we did, she is at least in high school.