From Middelburg to Trondheim

To Hirtshals

Last Saturday we left at 08:00 from Middelburg for the 1.100km drive to Hirtshals, Denmark. From there we would take the ferry to Larvik, Norway on Sunday morning.

It took us 14 hours to reach Hirtshals. Traffic was bad, very bad starting at Hamburg towards the border. Roadworks and border controls made it stop and go over almost 100km!

A short night followed since our ferry left at 08:00.

Lier South SuperCharger

After arriving in Larvik our first SuperCharger in Norway was Lier South, 100km from Larvik.

It was busy! After we parked all 8 stalls are occupied. Other Model S had to wait in the queue.

A queue is bad, but it also shows that the infrastructure is used! It’s not a charger which is rarely used. From what I understood it was also a vacation period, so that might have caused the spike in traffic.

Lillehammer

After charging in Lier we headed to Lillehammer. We would stay the night there and charge again.

Fortum CHAdeMO

While heading to Lillehammer I stopped at a CHAdeMO from Fortum to see if I could charge there. The people from Fortum told me that I could use my Dutch phone and send a SMS to active it.

Well, that didn’t work. I borrowed a RFID tag from somebody else as a backup. On the Lofoten Islands I will need to use a Fortum charger, so I wanted to know if it worked. Lesson learned. It doesn’t.

Busy times at Lillehammer

On the E6 to Lillehammer we already spotted a lot of Model S coming from Lillehammer, so I expected the SuperCharger to be crowded.

It was! 9 of the 10 stalls we busy, so we parked at the last stall available.

As we were charging we saw more Model S arrive. We still had 100km left in the battery and we would leave the next morning. We vacated the stall and to decided to charge the next morning for the 155km drive to Dombas and Trondheim.

We checked in at the hotel and went for a dinner in Lillehammer.

SuperCharging with a cold battery

The next morning the car had been in -8C for the night. When I switched to ‘Drive’ a warning indicated that regenerative braking had been disabled. This was due to the battery being cold.

SuperCharging didn’t go very fast. When I just started it would charge with 17kW and slowly climbed to roughly 30kW before we had enough to leave for Dombas.

This was a similar experience as last year at the Krokom SuperCharger in -22C.

The picture below shows that we were charging with 24kW where under normal conditions it should have been about 80kW.

To Trondheim

From Lillehammer we drove to the Dombas SuperCharger. After a charge and lunch there we headed down to Klett (near Trondheim).

Nothing really special on this part of the trip. The temperature was about -5C and the (road) conditions were good.

To the Lofoten

Our destination is a house we rented through Airbnb on the Lofoten Islands.

From Trondheim we are taking the Hurtigruten ferry to Stamsund on the Lofoten. This will take 2 days.

From Stamsund to the house it is just 21km. Time to relax!

Energy Consumption

The tripmeter shows 1861km and a total usage of 391kWh. That’s 210Wh/km. Not bad at all!

Ceph Monitors are laggy or clock might be skewed

This weekend I got to investigate a Ceph cluster which had issues where the Monitors were constantly performing new elections.

After some investigation on of the three monitors was eating 100% CPU on a single core and kept printing this in the logs:

mon.charlie@2(peon).paxos(paxos updating c 106399655..106400232) lease_expire from mon.0 [2a00:XXX:121:XXX::6789:1]:6789/0 is 2.380296 seconds in the past; mons are probably laggy (or possibly clocks are too skewed)

Digging further I found that the LevelDB store in /var/lib/ceph/mon/X/store.db was 2.5GB in size.

Compact on Start

You can tell the monitor to compact the LevelDB database on start. Add the following to your ceph.conf:

[mon]
mon compact on start = true

Now restart the monitor and it will compact the LevelDB database.

The CPU usage now dropped and the monitors were happy again.

Last SuperCharger in Sweden, going to Norway

Leaving Sweden

In the past two days we visited Stockholm and continued our journey towards Norway.

We both never visited Stockholm before, so yesterday morning we visited Stockholm. We saw Gamla Stan (Old City) and visited the Abba Museum. (My dad is a Abba fan!)

From there on we continued to the Sollentuna and Gävle SuperChargers. We spend the night in Gävle and today we continued towards the Krokum SuperCharger via the Sundsvall.

Nothing really special actually. It started snowing and the temperatures started to drop, it’s -11 Celcius right now and snow is still falling.

Heading to Norway

Tomorrow we are going to drive from Krokum to the Grong SuperCharger in Norway. This is a 250km trip via what it seems some very small towns.

It looks like we have to cross mountains as well, so we’ll do a 100% charge at the Krokum SuperCharger before heading to Grong in Norway.

250km should be doable under the worst conditions possible with a full battery, so it’s looking good. We’ll be in Norway tomorrow!

Energy Consumption

I’m keeping a detailed spreadsheet with the energy consumption during the trip and we are currently at 225Wh/km over 2200km. That is really not bad, I expected higher consumption.