Quote:
Originally Posted by gustavo
How much further than 50 miles do you need for the villages lifestyle?
I have 8, six volt batteries, traveled 44 miles one day just to see how far my range was. Still had three bars on the coulomb meter. Spent all day doing it, never would need even 3/4 of that for my normal routine.
cost, 9 kWh or $1.00 to recharge. At $3.80 a gallon, that's 160 mpg.
Can't see where the solar would be cost effective.
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It's not only the distance and now with Brownwood there are many carts that will exceed 50.
It also goes the the state of charge SOC you had on you little meter, you ran that battery bank low, maybe to to low. Batteries can only take so many deep discharges, so you may very well shorten the life out of those batteries.
Now add in replacing those 8 batteries at say $750, that same set of batteries on a solar system will not discharge that much because it will constantly be recharging the batteries all day long.
Now you can get 5-6 years out of the battery bank, that help figure your cost effective calculations???
Now you said U spent all day to drive 44 miles so that means U averaged 5 mph give or take.
So at that speed the draw on the batteries was very slow so the meter showed reserve.
Had you gone out and did 44 miles in say 3 hours that meter would have been much much lower or perhaps even dead.
The faster U go the quicker the discharge.
Ok you estimate to recharge the cart at a $1 a day or $30 a month, fine let's use that number.
That's $360 a year, your batteries amortized over two years ($750 by half) is $325.
So in the first year you spent $360 on elec, $323 on batteries. Your at $683.
at that rate in another three or four more months you just spent the cost of the solar system.
That system will last 20 years will add value to the cart and can even be transferred to a new cart.
It's a great investment.
