now traveling less miles... birds are doing a number on the trunk... is it worth to start engine every day or no?

 

as long as its driven a half dozen miles once a week or two, thats better than starting and shutting off. even if you let an engine idle for 10 minutes or whatever, it doesn't reach full operating temperature, and the moisture of condensation isn't boiled out of the oil.

 

yep, you can go longer but after a week you need to start looking out for the battery. We're doing the social isolation best practices too so thanks for the reminder - last time I drove my car was on the 13th.

 

thanks i'm going to try driving around a bit, nowhere to go but gas is cheaper...
stay well people....

 

i have a f250 diesel pickup that often sits for weeks, I keep it on a solar panel battery tender.

 

I try to run all of my 12 cars at least once a month, not always successful, batteries often go down, especially in colder weather. I run them for a minimum of 20-30 minutes.

 

did a 10 mile roundtrip today lol big event added shell reg. gas 5 gal...

 

i did my first trip in 10 days, met a guy in a parking lot to sell a used book (woot, $100 for a out-of-print Astro Atlas!), kept total distance, both of us with masks, gloves...

then i stopped at the water store to fill a couple 5G carboys, water store had door barricaded with carts, asked me to put my bottles in a cart, and they filled them for me, while I waited outside, nice. they wiped them down with a santizer wipe before and after, too.

then I swung by Grey Bears recycling to dump some ejunk, including a (groan) 185 lb Sony 32" Trinitron monitor thats been in the back room for 15 or 20 years, along with assorted old stereos and stuff we no longer want.

then home.

this was in my F250 diesel, that TV monitor wouldn't fit in a car.

 

Anybody who feels the need to have 12 cars or even mention they have 12 cars is a fool of life... Volvo or not
Goldenblock

 

then Jay Leno is one of the biggest fools of them all, with his collection fo around 300 rare and unusual cars all restored to pristine operating condition AND driven regularlly.

 

OMG, I just realized I am sitting in a room with 7 PCs. (all Windows, no Macs). I too must be a fool of life since I only use 2 of them. 5 have been rendered obsolete but I keep them anyways since they are milestones to my right of passage as a technologist and as a parent of raising tech savvy kids (including one who's a front line MD in the Covid war).

 

i have a windows vista machine here i'm using as a lamp stand lol, willing let it go cheap!
hard to fathom all the operating systems have gone through since OS2/Warp

 

if I'd done that, i'd have to start the collection with one of these...


(an IBM 1130 from the late 60s)

and then have several minicomputers from the 70s, CP/M systems from the late 70s, a DEC VAX 11/780, a DEC Rainbow, and just about every generation of IBM PC since the very first model in 1983. yeah, right.

no, I toss all old electronics now, the purge we're undertaking while in lockdown here has gotten riid of the last of my SCSI stuff.

 

went 9 miles today in a monsoon...scored TP.. mission accomplished..

 

Every day or two, no. Every month or three, yes. Run it long enough for the oil to reach 100°C, then continue to run it for maybe ten or twenty minutes to drive the moisture out.
More in Seattle; less in Phoenix.

If the battery's in good condition, it should be able to sit dormant for a month and still retain enough charge to start the engine.
Putting a full charge into it once a month -- especially in freezing weather -- is a good idea.

 

Pierce, you are the man! When I was in college, I was required to take a Fortran programming class where we punched up our cards on an IBM 129 to run in a 128K core allocation on an IBM 360/370 (we had both on campus). I told a friend that was exactly why I was an EE major not CS. Unfortunately he took me into a back room full of VT100s connected to a PDP 11/50 and I was heartbroken having seen the future and knew I missed out.

The IBM Key 129 Punch

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/#year1970 (talking bout my gggeneration...)

 

hey, we mostly had 026 keypunches which were from the 1950s.

 

thanks for replying drcampbell good advice stay safe

 

we got tested in high school on those infernal machines... wow were they a PIA!

 

Funny as I started with IBM in 1966 designing semi-conductor equipment used to manufacture the chips and substrates for the 360 systems. Fun times.