I am starting my ev and purchasing the parts here and there, but could not find the heater parts.

Thanks
David

David,

The liquid heater in the car was basically a bust. I used a 500W heating element and it was pretty much useless – I may have had some better results with a 1500W unit. On warm days, there would be some warm air coming out of the vents, but it was only barley noticeable. Others have had success with a similar setup but I did not. In the end it’s quite alright for myself as I don’t run the car in the winter anyways (gets far too cold here in Maine).

The parts are all off the shelf type stuff. The heater I used was a 120v block preheater – you can get these anywhere online and you can even pick them up at Tractor Supply. The pump you can again find online or at any marine supply store.

If you’re serious about running the vehicle in cold weather, I would suggest looking at a more commercial solution. There are some propane fired heaters that I have heard great things about. I know it goes a bit against the ideals of an electric car, but when you’re cold you want heat.

Thanks for taking a look at the site. Best of luck on your project.

Ed
ZeroGasoline Administrator

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-Marvin-

Marvin,

The motor mount that I put in the car increases the integrity of the front end. It is bolted to the original motor mount on the passenger side of the car, and there is a new mount that is welded to the frame on the drivers side. Now, I haven’t had an engineer review this, but a custom car builder of 20 years agreed this was the best route to take.

Maine has special inspection and registration laws for 3 wheeled and low speed electric vehicles. My car has 4 wheels and is technically highway capable (55mph) so I don’t fall into either of those categories. I spent a good month tracking down all of the Maine laws on electric vehicles and the two above were all I found. Actually, the low speed vehicle law just came into effect recently. After asking around at all the inspection stations, I just brought the car into one. It was a pretty standard safety inspection. I had to prove that all the safety features of the car were in proper working order (lights, blinkers, horn, wipers, etc…) and had to show that the car could stop in a reasonable distance. There was no problem with any of the standard safety checkpoints so the car was then inspected.

Thanks for taking a look at the site.

Ed
ZeroGasoline Administrator

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This is a post from www.diyelectriccar.com:

I’ll give you a few examples. Let’s say it takes 10,000 Watts to keep your car at 50 mph. And we’re striving to maintain speed.

First example…
Say you put the wind generator attached to the outside of the car. Wind generators work by creating drag on free flowing air to convert the wind energy into rotational then into electrical. Thus the wind generator can’t produce any more energy than the drag it creates on the air. So if you installed a 100% efficiency 1,000 Watt wind generator on your car, your car will then need 11,000 Watts of power to maintain speed. Your wind generator is supplying 1,000 Watts of that, so you’re back to 10,000 Watts to maintain speed. Hence without even looking at efficiency losses, there is no gain.

Second example, slightly more complex…
Your car needs the 10,000 Watts to maintain speed because of the drag on the body and wheel friction. We’ll just look at the drag on the body as at high speeds it is much larger than the wheel friction. Now imagine you removed the radiator under the hood as you don’t need it for your electric car. Reason stands you could duct the air from your car’s grill into a wind generator where your radiator once was.

Let’s assume again everything is 100% efficient. The car is already suffering from drag because of the air being stopped under the hood so we’ll say drag is the same with the wind generator, 10,000 Watts. Let’s imagine you can fit a 1,000 Watt generator underneath the hood driven purely by the frontal area of the grill. With everything perfectly efficient, you will deliver 1,000 Watts additional to your motor, effectively decreasing your energy needs down to 9,000 Watts.

Sounds good right? Well in actuality there are inefficiencies. 95% loss from motor, 95% loss from controllers, 95% loss from transmission. 1,000 * .95 * .95 * .95 = 857 Watts. So now 10,000 – 857 = 9,143 Watts. Still better than nothing.

Now let’s approach this differently. Instead of trying to harness the drag we’re creating, let’s try to get rid of it. Buy a $20 sheet of aluminum and place it over your grill. Your drag has reduced by 1,000 Watts, meaning your car only need 9,000 Watts to maintain speed. Much easier, simpler, and cheaper than a complex ducting/generator system.

Third example…
We’ve been assuming no external wind. Say like your car was parked with your wind generator running. It would generate power from the external wind and store it into the battery. You then bring in the generator to remove the drag and begin driving. That is completely doable and why many people install wind generators at their house (it’d be a pain in the butt to haul it around in the car).

The post Couldn’t You Put a Wind Generator on the Car to Charge the Batteries While Driving? appeared first on ZeroGasoline.

Where I live is roughly 2000 miles from where the oil comes into the US. That means that gasoline must be transported from the Louisiana/Texas area to Maine. A heavy truck with a full load of fuel may get 10 mpg, meaning the truck will burn 200 gallons of fuel just to get the gas into my state. Then I must drive to the gas station to get the gas into my car, thereby burning more fuel. Electricity is sent directly to my home over transmission wires emitting no carbon.

The “average Joe” does not have the ability to generate their own gasoline. In time I am certainly able to install a wind generator or PV cells and generate my own electricity, reducing my dependence on the carbon emitting grid supply.

Slate did a fantastic article that compared the all electric Tesla Roadster with a 2006 Toyota Corolla. It is a very good article that goes into a fair amount of detail.

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First off it’s still much cheaper than running the gas car. Secondly, it is still less polluting than my gas car. Most of all though, this has been a great project and I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything. I learned a lot about electricity, cars, and managing a large project like this. I’ve made friends from near and far, but most of all we had a blast making it. It has been very fun and will continue to be fun as we tweak and improve the vehicle over the years.

The post I Bet You Wish You Hadn’t Spent All That Money Now That Gas Has Gone Back Down … appeared first on ZeroGasoline.

I really appreciate the reply. You have already helped me a LOT! I have a Plymouth Neon that I want to convert to an electric vehichle buy I don’t have a lot of money to accomplish it. The curb weight i have to work with is 2457 and I estimate the engine weight with all the other stuff that will be removed to be about 800 lbs. This will leave me with about 1700 lbs driving weight plus all the electric conversion items. I like your idea of the 144 v components and use 72 volts as I am more interested in range than performance. If I can get 50-60 miles and 35 to 40 mph I will be really happy. I’m also hoping to find other ways to increase both on these forums and other internet sources. My neon has aluminum rims which will help a little. I will be keeping you informed and my friend who is helping me is a professional mechanic with 30 years experience and he has an idea for increasing the range a LOT. If it works I will share it and you can use it in your conversions.

Thanks again, Bill

Bill,

Thanks for taking a look at the site, and congratulations on deciding to convert your own car.

I’m free to offer any help I can while you do your conversion. Let me also say that I am in no way an automotive or electrical expert – but I’ve dealt with most of the obstacles you’ll have to deal with and I can certainly let you know how I worked things out.

I hope you can get started in June also. It took me about 2 full months worth of weekend to get the car on the road. If you start in June, you should have plenty of time to get some driving in before fall.

I’m glad you liked the Exxon letter, it’s even better that your connected to it the way you are. Some love the letter, some hate it – I honestly think people read too much into it. It wasn’t meant to be political, a satire on American business or anything else with any deep meaning – it was just a joke. Nonetheless, I’m happy you enjoyed it.

As for what voltage you should run, that is completely up to you. Depends on what you want out of the car. For example:

Lets say that in the Tercel you can fit a total o f 12 batteries (and that is pushing it). If you run your car at 72 volts, you can have 12x 6volt batteries. This configuration will give you good range overall, but your motor performance will be limited. On the other side of the coin, you could run the car at 144 volts, giving you 12x 12volt batteries. This is going to give you killer performance (expecially in such a small car) but you’ll be trading off range for this performance. It all depends on what your goals are for the car, and what your budget is like.

As your voltage goes up, so does your horsepower (generally speaking). As your horsepower goes up, so does your cars performance AND so does its energy consumption. A Mustang will use more fuel than a Metro. If your goal is to have a show car/toy, I would go for the higher voltage setup. If your goal is to have a commuter car, lower voltage is probably going to be better suited (unless you have a very short commute).

The other option is this, and I wish that I would have gone this route. Buy a 144volt motor, controller and charger. However, start running the vehicle on only 72 volts (6 good deep cycle 12v batteries). The car will run just fine on 72v even though your components are 144v. As time goes forward, you have a lot of flexibility. You can add more batteries in series to crank up the volts/HP, or you can add more batteries in parallel to increase your range. This would work very well if you lived in an area where you have a winter of some sort. Batteries don’t work real well when it gets cold. In this example, you could run the car at 144v in the summertime, then when it begins to get cold, switch your configuration around and run it with 2x 72volt strings. This will help combat the effect the cold has on the battery.

To sum it up, it just depends on what you expect from the car.

If you’ve got deep enough pockets, go with a 500hp AC motor and $15,000 worth of lithium batteries. Then you can have performance and range!

On the contact page of my site there are a number of links to some different calculators that I used. One in particular is evconvert.com. There is a range calculator here that will let you plug in all the information about your conversion and let you know what you can expect the range to be.

If you are looking to get 70-80 miles per charge on lead acid batteries you are going to have a difficult time. I have 6x 12volt batteries and I can get 20 miles on a good day. If I went with 12x 6volt batteries of a very high quality I might get 50 on a good day, 40 on average (summertime temps, winter would half that). 12x 6volts would cost in the ballpark of 2500$ or more.

If you need to get that much range out of the car, I would suggest 1 of 2 paths. If you stick with a small car like a Tercel, your going to have to get better quality batteries – current lead acid batteries simply won’t cut it. I think you’d then be looking at some flavor of lithium to get the job done. If I were to buy a lithium pack to replace my current pack, it’d cost me about 9600$.

If you want to go with lead acid batteries, you may want to look into converting a Chevy S-10 or something similar. The S-10 is a pretty popular conversion. The bigger benefit here is the fact that trucks were made for hauling things. Many people will take the bed off the frame, put 18 or more batteries in between the rear frame rails, then put the bed back on. You are going to reach the maximum weight rating on a Tercel much faster than you will an S-10, so you can really pack the batteries into an S-10. The other thing to consider is weight. You start adding more weight to a vehicle and you then have to verify that it will brakes, steering, suspension and all other vehicle systems work correctly with the added weight.

This is a very good forum: http://www.diyelectriccar.com/. I’m sure your familier with “Gav” from KiwiEV, he’s very active on these forums.

I’ll be very interested to see how things go for you. Whatever the result, it is a very fun project and has taught me a lot. Please keep in touch, I’m always happy to offer any help I can.

Ed
ZeroGasoline Administrator

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