GeekFury.com

I’m flipping through the latest issue of Pop Sci (a favorite I might add) and I ran across an interesting full page ad. No it’s not one of those ads in the back of the mag promising better stiffies, more hair on the top my melon (I’m making bald look cool, thank you very much) or some other “miracle product”. Nope just an ad for a little ‘ol spark plug – the Pulstar™ spark plug.

It looks like a new kind of plug, at least to me. They say it uses a capacitor to control the sparking better than conventional plugs.

Looks pretty cool and they’re claiming a pretty nice looking increase in gas mileage and an increase in performance. I started thinking to myself, “Hey self, why don’t we give those a try next time we change the plugs on the familymobile?” I went to Autozone & JC Whitney’s websites to find out how much they might run.

Are you sitting down?

raman amplifier

You might want to… According to JC Whitney’s website for my vehicle they’re retailing for $24.95 EACH! Holy crap. Even on a little four-banger that’s $100 in plugs. Damn those puppies better do a lot more than just ignition.

Um yeah, I might be waiting a little while till I replace the current plugs…quite a while.

It nice to know they exist but I might have to pass on these for now.

Something that never occurred to me…using your hybrid car to feed power back into the power grid. Willett Kempton suggests that we can use our hybrid cars during the day to help smooth out spikes in the demand for power.

Kempton parks a plug-in Toyota Scion in his garage that can discharge 19 kilowatts of power from its battery. The average house uses 1.5 kilowatts. “When I run it backwards at full power,” says Kempton, “I’m running my whole block,” or he would be if the system were up and operating.

I like the idea in theory, but I don’t know how practical is really is. It also seems that the car makers and utilities themselves aren’t really fond of the idea. But then again, when are they ever fond of a new idea?

Kempton argues that:

Driver patterns are predictable, and motorists could control when utilities tapped their car for power, making sure they wouldn’t be stranded. As for battery usage, Kempton says that initially utilities would need only tiny bursts of power to balance cycles for a minute or two, so there would be no need to fully discharge the car’s battery…

Read more of this article at:
A Light Bulb Goes On – Forbes.com

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