Bright idea for a road trip

And we’re off again. Heading north to see family strewn from NSW Central Coast to Byron Bay. Driving straight up the Hume Highway is easy, but a bit boring, so we took the back roads along the Black Spur to Alexandra, with packed lunch (thank you Krissy) by the creek, then followed another spur through Tolmie, with a photo op next to a random Tardis.

Up the Black Spur with a birthday cake in the camp fridge

Fran baked a coffee cake in our new oven, to pre-empt Helen's birthday tomorrow. The cake rode to Marysville in the camp fridge in the back of the Tesla, out of sight until the picnic table. First stop was brunch at My Little Kitchen, Healesville. "The best coffee I've had all year" was Helen's verdict, but I'm not sure that her half strength latte qualifies. From Healesville the Maroondah Highway climbs the Black Spur, under mountain ash and tree ferns. It is a slow, winding 30 km, and a quiet electric car suits it. We found the perfect place to park, at Gallipoli Park in Marysville, beside the Steavenson River. The locals joined us. A pair of king parrots liked sharing our strawberries, and an Australian wood duck pair led a duckling along the river bank. We came home the same way, and stopped in the Spur for photos of the car among the tree ferns.

The grid went out and the car kept charging

I happened to see AusNet's email this morning — a possible outage in our street. Then I noticed an alert from our Tesla Powerwall, to say it was running off grid. Nothing in the house had missed a beat. Every appliance had kept running without a hiccup. I tapped into the app to see how it was going. The solar was still funnelling through our system, charging the car up from its 60% low after yesterday's run into the city. Once the car was full, the leftover topped up our Powerwall batteries. When you install a battery and solar, get it in writing that in a grid outage the battery will still charge from solar. It is one of the things on my list of what to ask for in a battery installation. I suspect the outage was caused by a tree on a power line, given how windy it is today, up in the hills. This one only lasted a bit over an hour, unlike others that have gone on for up to nine days, taking out streets of homes, shops and the local petrol station. And then, just as I posted this, a…

Red Model Y and a passing steam train

At Puffing Billy Railway Selby Tressel Bridge. See full post: Mid day drive to nearby Selby.

Mid day drive to nearby Selby.

Watching Puffing Billy cross the Selby Trestle Bridge, showering Francis in steam (harmless) as she sat on the hill, waving to excited tourists. Brunch earlier at Selby General Store & Café. Basic menu offerings, including the best egg and bacon roll we’ve eaten. We were welcomed by the hosts, cute dogs, turtles and fish who were as keen to watch us and we were to watch them.

A month of cooking on induction

We have cooked on gas and on electric elements for years. This is our first month with a Westinghouse full induction cooktop in place of the gas. We had trialled induction on a small scale first. We bought a portable hotplate last year (also Westinghouse), as a spare in our kitchen — on the bench at home, and in the back of the car on road trips. Induction still gets confused with the electric cooking most people remember, a metal hotplate or a coil glowing red, sometimes under glass. Induction works differently — it makes the pan itself the heating element, so nearly all the energy goes into the pan rather than into the kitchen, and the glass beside the pan stays cool enough to rest a hand on. Here is what a month of it has been like. What stands out is how fast and how responsive it is. It comes on instantly, goes off instantly, and changes power the moment you ask. It boils faster than the gas did. CHOICE's testing has induction boiling a litre of water in about half the time gas…

Car camping for the night in Coober Pedy

Red on red at Gembrook Station

Making the most of the sunshine, in Gembrook

A welcome sunny weekend invited us out to nearby Gembrook, while the bed slats dried (another story) and the home battery soaked up the energy. Brunch at Over the Road Gembrook, where we joked with Sarah we were stalking her from Over The Road Emerald. Then a picturesque walk along side the Puffing Billy Railway line, past the cows and horse riding.

Multicultural food tour

A 30 minute drive down to the Dandenong Market Street Food Tour — bolani, falafel, spice platters and sugarcane juice — then home to charge off our own solar.

Sunset charge at Kulgera Roadhouse

Charging from a paid campsite, just for the car, at Kulgera, on the way to Uluru.

Where does the shower steam actually go?

We run the ensuite fan for every shower, and I have wondered where it blows. Last week I took a torch up through the manhole to find out. It does not go outside. There is no duct at all. The fan is part of the combined heat lamp, light and exhaust unit in the ceiling, and it discharges straight up into the roof space. So does the one in the loft bathroom, an older unit doing the same thing, but I think into a tighter roof space. Up there it is timber, insulation and still air, and in winter it is colder than any room below. Every shower we have taken in this house has sent its steam to the coldest, least ventilated part of the building, several times a day, for years. Fixing it properly is not simply a matter of running a pipe out to the eave. The cheap axial fan fitted in most Australian ceilings moves plenty of air with nothing attached to it, and far less once it has to push through a duct — so the fan has to be able to shift air through the pipe as well. The Australian…

Picked up their first EV, didn't make it home

John and Anne's first EV is an MGS5 EV Essence 62. Solar and a battery at home settled the decision, and the Corolla went in as a trade.

Wet windows: the free dehumidifier

One morning the guest room windows had condensation 70 cm up the glass. The same night, in the same house, two other rooms had none at all — and the only difference was that those two had a window open. My first thought was that the wet glass was the problem. It is the opposite. That water was in the room's air an hour earlier. The glass is simply the coldest thing available, so it is where the water goes first. The measurements back it up. Overnight the guest room's moisture level fell, even with the two of us asleep in it and the door shut. Nothing in that room was removing water except the window. The catch is what happens next. Leave it and it runs down to the frame and sits in the corners, and that is exactly where the black spots turned up. We bought a RYOBI window vacuum at Bunnings for $119 — a battery-powered squeegee that sucks the water off the glass into a small tank as you draw it down. Unlike a cloth, it doesn't just move the water somewhere else. Tim Forcey, whose…

Did going all-electric cause our mould?

We spent 2025 and 2026 getting off gas — heat pump hot water, a multi-head air conditioner replacing the ducted gas heater, and finally an induction cooker. Then we found mould on the bed slats. Was it due to electrification? We first found this same mould, on these same slats, in December 2024 — fourteen months before the air conditioners went in, while the gas ducted heater was still doing all the heating. Whatever causes it was here first, and it was here while the gas was. Gas cooking turns out to actually make it worse. Burning gas makes water: roughly 1.6 kilograms of water vapour for every cubic metre burnt. That is on top of the water coming out of the food or boiling water, which happens whatever you cook on. Going induction removed the extra moisture. Not to mention the benzene, which is a known carcinogen. What did change is the ventilation. The old ducted system leaked, and those leaks quietly brought in outside air. Reverse-cycle doesn't leak. Better heating, staler air.…

How to find an EV charger?

A first-time EV buyer asked what the charger app is called. It's PlugShare — free, built on check-ins from real drivers, and the reason we once found a working charger in a town three hours from anywhere.

Flushing wet air out of the house

Warm air holds far more water than cold air. Heat a closed room and moisture is drawn out of the carpet, plaster, timber, furniture and us. Turn the heating off, the room cools, and the air can't hold it any more. It picks the coldest surface it can find: our single-glazed windows, or the slats under our mattress. The fix turned out to be free: open the windows when the heating goes off. Wide open for half an hour reliably removes a third to a half of the moisture the room is holding above the outside air — we've measured that seven times now. But simply leaving a couple of windows open for a few hours, such as overnight, has beaten it every time we've compared the two. Slower per hour, but it keeps working through the small hours when the outside air is at its driest. Our sliding windows turn out to have a catch built into the sill that locks them open a few centimetres and stops them going any further. I had lived with those windows for years without understanding what it was for —…

Our heating doesn't breathe

Last post we found the mould. This one is about where the water was coming from. I assumed the ensuite — showers, obviously. That is a real part of it, though not quite as I pictured. The door stays shut and the fan runs while we shower. It's afterwards that the moisture gets out: the fan goes off, the door opens, and the wet walls, floor and towels carry on evaporating into the house for hours. But it wasn't the whole story, and working out the rest meant unlearning how I thought our heating worked. Here's the misconception, and I held it for years. You switch on the air conditioner. The big fan in the unit outside starts spinning. Air blows out of the head on the wall inside. Obvious conclusion: that fan is pushing outside air into the house, warming it on the way in. Wrong. No new air comes in at all. The outdoor unit and all that white insulated pipework only move refrigerant gas, and the gas never enters the room. It just makes a hot surface inside, and the head blows the room's…

Our winter guest: mould

While changing the sheets last week, Fran spotted green mould on the bed slats. Then black spots on the window sills. Then more on the curtains, and on the underside of the mattress. Up here in Emerald, in the Dandenong Ranges east of Melbourne, winter means months of fog, rain and single-digit nights — lovely for the ferns outside, less so for the timber inside. We'd met this mould before — the same slats, the same underside of the mattress cover, in December 2024. We cleaned it off and thought that was that. Cleaning treats the symptom, so this time we went looking for the cause. That decision turned into a two-week investigation that took over the house. We started logging temperature and humidity in every room, several times a day, and we bought two dehumidifiers and a window vacuum along the way. What we turned up were things we didn't know about our own house — behind the tiles, under the floor, and in the ceiling. The surprise wasn't where the water was coming from — showers,…

Off the gas for good

91.16 cents a day for a pipe we no longer used. Cancelling it took a chatbot, a $9.13 fee, and a question about whether the house was being demolished.

Rebate for replacing our gas stove

The rebate is worth about $200. I'll get $120. You cannot claim it yourself — and the app only accepts documents from your phone's photo gallery.

Installing our induction stove

The crew arrived at seven. By lunchtime the gas was capped, the old Smeg was gone, and 40 amps of new circuit ran from the switchboard to the kitchen.

Where does this circuit go?

Ten circuits, one unreadable label, and a 20 amp breaker that powers nothing. What I found by switching off every breaker in the house, one at a time.

Quotes to install an oven and induction cooktop

I thought connecting an oven was an afternoon and a few hundred dollars. The first quote was $3,014 — so I went looking to understand why it's such a big job.

Archie halfway from Sydney to Melbourne

Goodbye, Archie

Today we said goodbye to Archie, our much-loved cat — kitten-era companion, road-trip supervisor, and a big part of our move from Saratoga to Emerald.

Oven bought in March, arrived in July

The docket said “ETA 3 weeks”. It took 106 days, six phone calls, and an oven posted back to the warehouse because nobody read the email saying hold it.

Chasing Puffing Billy's Train of Lights

Chasing Puffing Billy's Train of Lights from Emerald to Gembrook on a cold July night — and setting off a Pet Mode alert 1000 km away.

Day trip to Torquay and Queenscliff

We left our home in Emerald, crossing the mist-ical Puffing Billy Railway for a two hour drive to an appointment in Torquay. What to do after a long drive with a few hours to kill? Let’s take a drive, along the coast, from Torquay to Queenscliff, stopping at a few lookouts along the way. Oh, and a few stops for lunch (The Salty Dog Cafe Torquay), coffee, coffee and dinner (Pholklore).

FSD version 14 first impressions

Updated car software and self driving installed. - Shiny! The car looks so much shinier now. Well, on the screen at least. - It actually managed to reverse out of our driveway, turn, and head the correct way up our one-way street. - It’s fast, maybe too fast. It now has “speed profiles” including sloth, chill, standard, hurry. I think the USA version also has “Mad Max”, but not in Australia, which is ironic. I think my normal driving is somewhere between sloth and chill. My driving around curves is closer to standard. - The speed limit indicator is now near the current speed, which is better UI, and quicker to see both. - It shows your best “streak” – maximum kilometres driven on FSD.

Keeping the camp fridge cold, from my phone

Tesla took away 12V-while-idle power, breaking our camp fridge unless we gave up Sentry Mode. A year on, the fix finally reached the phone app.

Between the sun and moon, on Gippsland Lakes

The shortest path between two points is usually mundane. So, we tapped a random lookout on the way home, and asked the navigation to add it to our trip. The self driving car took us all the way there, and back to our accommodation, except for a couple of abrupt interventions by me to avoid potholes.

Everybody loves Raymond Island

With the promise of seeing koalas, we headed over to Raymond Island, in the Gippsland Lakes. We opted to leave our Tesla on the mainland, in Paynesville, and caught the ferry across as pedestrians. The ferry runs every twenty minutes, free for pedestrians, $15 for cars. On the other side, we hired a four person bike for $50, for one hour. It turned out that we created more emissions pedalling the bike around than we would have if we’d taken the car. I blame strained digestive systems fuelled by the coffee and cake from the cafe van. The koalas were sleepy and elusive, but we managed to find a few.

Metung, Winter Festival

Soup, souvlaki, juggler, chainsaw (electric and fueled) wood carving and a fun collection of outlets for locals and visitors. Happy end to another lazy day.

Up Swifts Creek, along the Great Alpine Road

Beautiful sunny winter’s day in East Gippsland. Perfect for a half day trip from Metung, along the Great Alpine Road. We only drove as far as Swifts Creek, this time, having previously traveled all the way to Bright and beyond. Swifts Creek is a charmingly quiet small town, where I attempted to blend in with a couple of the locals (see photo). The Great Alpine Gallery’s Winter Festival Exhibition was somewhat oversold, but interesting nonetheless. Bakery for lunch, coffee, a thermos of tea, and packed snacks. Then back south, taking any chance along the way for a detour and a photo.

Up Swifts Creek, just off the Great Alpine Road

Up Swifts Creek, just off The Great Alpine Road, Victoria.

Right on the tip of Metung

Lazy morning, followed by a lazy drive around Metung, and down to the tip of the peninsula. Beautiful bayside town. Plenty of boats and accommodation along the foreshore. Lunch at Aroma Metung, where I demonstrated my precision road trip meal dissection skills, giving Krissy exactly one quarter of my burger.

Packing our chef and barista, for the road trip

Off on another road trip. This time to Metung, Gippsland Lakes, about 300 km away from home. We picked up our passengers, Tim and Krissy, at Alkira, in Emerald, and made use of the large luggage space of our Model Y. Bringing along our own chef and barista is a little indulgent, I agree. But their professional standards apparently necessitated them packing their own cooking and caffeinating equipment. One onlooker came over to assist with our “engine trouble” because I had the frunk open to pack more in. Archie, our cat, supervised the morning packing. We grabbed what has become our ritual road trip brekky, at Over the Road cafe in Emerald.

Thinking about an EV? Here's what surprised us

When we first thought about getting an EV, we knew almost nothing. We wondered about the basics — would our local mechanic still service it? Where on earth would we charge it? The reality turned out to be easy, just different to running a petrol car. A few of the pleasant surprises along the way: No more servicing. There's no engine oil to change — there's no engine! No timing chain, no spark plugs. An EV has around 20 moving parts instead of 2000. In years of driving we've only ever replaced tyres and wiper blades, which you can get done just about anywhere. I like to joke that I'm "servicing" the car when I top up the wiper fluid. No more fuel stops. We don't visit charging stations the way we used to visit petrol stations — we just plug in at home. It's more like charging a phone than filling a tank: the car sits in the garage or driveway and quietly tops itself up. We started with an ordinary power point and the mobile cable that came with the car — about 50% of a "tank"…

From a diesel van to an EV

My daughter Amber has gone from a manual diesel van to a used 2023 Tesla Model Y for $39k. It's great to see EVs becoming more accessible. Here's her story, in her own words.

Lithium ion, or lithium iron?

All our batteries are lithium ion — but only some are lithium iron, and that one letter changes nearly everything. A plain-English tour of what's actually inside an EV and a home battery.

Marvin's charging strike is over

Remember Marvin, our robot mower, clocking off at 45%? Turns out he wasn't slacking — the charger was quietly feeding the wrong voltage. A quick recap for anyone who missed it: a few weeks back Marvin started docking, beginning to charge, then quitting somewhere between 38 and 45%. Every light was green, every menu said "normal." Mammotion's live chat walked me through the usual suspects — firmware, cleaning the contacts, a photo of the power supply's batch number — before landing on the culprit: a faulty charging-station power adapter. I put a multimeter across the base-station contacts and it read 33.5 V — a good five volts higher than the dock should ever deliver. Whatever the exact failure, the charge kept stalling around 45% and wouldn't budge, and both Mammotion and our retailer confirmed it was a charger fault, rather than battery. I forwarded the diagnosis to Robotech Australia, from whom I bought Marvin back in 2024. Vinni opened a warranty claim within about an hour and a…

Can you help my family member into their first EV?

A family member's after their first EV — a cheaper used Model Y. If you're upgrading yours at Tesla soon, we'll beat the trade-in quote by $3,000 and happily wait until your delivery day.

Amber knew. AAMI didn't.

4:40am alarm. Snooze for 5 min. Scramble to get out the door by 5:20am — Erin to the airport. She's off to Airlie Beach for a week, back to her old stomping ground. Last night I told the Amber Electric app "Ready-By 90% by 5am" — pick the cheapest, greenest five-minute slots overnight and have the Tesla ready when I am. The Full Self-Driving (Supervised) confirmation email landed at 4:45 — partly for the barely-awake drive ahead, partly to play with on the NSW road trip in two weeks. By 4:48 the Tesla was sitting at 89% and ticking up to the target. No thinking required from me. Bolte Bridge came up lit purple as we crossed the Westgate — twin pylons against a still-dark sky. Beautiful, and I have no idea what cause it was for. Anyone know what was on? Erin onto her flight. Tesla back over the bridges, FSD doing most of the driving, me mostly trying to wake up. AAMI's safety-scoring app recorded me on the way home: "severe acceleration" on Heatherton Rd (38 km/h in 6.8 seconds —…

Our last gas appliance

Our Smeg 90cm oven and cooktop. We’re replacing it with a Westinghouse 90cm oven and induction cooktop, from The Good Guys. Then we can finally get off the gas.

Hey Siri, unlock the front door

That's the sentence I wanted to be able to say. It now works. It also took several weeks. Our old brass door handle had stopped working after an earlier repair — a replacement was on the cards anyway. Smart felt like the upgrade worth doing. The brief was simple: unlock with Siri, share a code with a visitor when we're away, and use a fingerprint to simply open while grabbing the handle. Bonus marks for Apple Home Key — tap an iPhone or Watch against the lock, like a hotel room. The Aqara Smart Lock U300 was the only one in Australia that ticked every box. $268 from Officeworks, matte black. 4× AAs, paired with HomeKit through our HomePod mini, first fingerprint added — easy enough. Fitting it to our door was the bit that should have been easy. Our handyman, also named "Tom", had the new unit on in an hour, only for both of us to realise it was wide enough to clang against the screen door handle on every swing. I'd measured. Apparently not well enough. That's why we call him "handy…

Our battery refuses to fully charge

Our battery has stopped charging properly — and we've only done 500 km. Cue collective gasp from the EV crowd, and a smug "told ya so" from anyone who says we should still stick to dinosaur juice. Don't panic. Our Tesla's fine. Modern EV battery management systems are quiet little wizards — balancing cells, managing temperature, and reserving a buffer at each end of the pack. Tesla's own research projects their batteries to last over a million km. No — the misbehaving battery belongs to Marvin, our Mammotion Luba 2 AWD 3000 robot mower. After nearly 500 km of lawn, 665 hours and 215 charge cycles, he's started docking, beginning to charge, then quitting somewhere between 38% and 45%. Mammotion’s in-app live chat sent me on a small adventure. Charging contacts? Clean and level. Indicator lights? Solid green. Voltage at the base station? 33.5 V. Firmware update? Did it — the changelog even mentions "optimised low-temperature charging efficiency". Still no full charge. This morning's…

Framed by the gums

The almost-daily drive to Alkira

Beautiful almost daily drive lately to nearby Alkira Eco-Glamping Retreat.

The 100 W parasitic rumour, checked

Short version: another Powerwall 3 owner heard our pilot firmware might be quietly leaking 100 watts to the grid, around the clock. I checked our own data — five days, every five minutes — and we're not seeing it. Here's the rumour in his words: "With the current beta they do see an issue where the GW is constantly drawing 100W from the grid even though the home is using battery. Tesla told them yes they are aware of the issues but will be addressed in the final release in July. Do you see that grid draw on yours?" The "GW" is the Tesla Gateway — the small box on the wall between our batteries and the house that decides what flows where. The claim: on the current pilot firmware, it's constantly pulling about 100 watts from the grid (a tenth of a kettle, all day every day) even when the batteries are supposed to be running the house. That's roughly 12 kWh a month, or about $3 at our rate, silently bought from the grid for no good reason. Annoying rather than catastrophic, but…