Hi all,
This is my first post. I recently purchased a voltsrabbit - 1979 VW rabbit with 96 volt DC kit from Electro Automotive. The price was right and the car needed some love to get back on the road. The pleasant surprise was that the batteries are still ok (or so I believe). They are US-125 lead acid 6v batteries. They are about 5 years old (I think) and hold a charge well. I think they were very lightly used and always kept charged. Everything seems good. The car drives fine and the range is looking to be about 15 miles (have yet to really push the car). My daily round trip is 5 miles which I do twice a day.
I recently made an arduino based amp-hour meter to replace the broken amp meter in the car. To my surprise the meter works! But then I noticed that the car is using about 600 watt-hours per mile. I thought I had messed up in programming the arduino so I put a kWh meter on the outlet that the charger is plugged into. I got almost the exact same result - 6.55 kWh to recharge from a 11.3 mile trip. I am fairly certain that this is from full charge to full charge. This is in town stop start driving.
So now I am stumped. How do I figure out why a vehicle is so horribly inefficient? There is no obvious brake drag, the individual battery voltages all look good. Fully charged the pack voltage is about 104 volts. Even the instantaneous amperage readings indicate something is not right - cruising around at 30 mph draws around 200 amps! What do I do?
Is it really the batteries? (I may be deceiving myself because I really want to believe that they are ok). Would old batteries really cause such high amperage draw?
The controller is a Curtis 1221 and the motor is an Advanced DC 206-03-4001 (8"). Could a funky controller or motor be the cause?
Any help is appreciated and if this post is in the wrong place please let me know. Thank you.
This is my first post. I recently purchased a voltsrabbit - 1979 VW rabbit with 96 volt DC kit from Electro Automotive. The price was right and the car needed some love to get back on the road. The pleasant surprise was that the batteries are still ok (or so I believe). They are US-125 lead acid 6v batteries. They are about 5 years old (I think) and hold a charge well. I think they were very lightly used and always kept charged. Everything seems good. The car drives fine and the range is looking to be about 15 miles (have yet to really push the car). My daily round trip is 5 miles which I do twice a day.
I recently made an arduino based amp-hour meter to replace the broken amp meter in the car. To my surprise the meter works! But then I noticed that the car is using about 600 watt-hours per mile. I thought I had messed up in programming the arduino so I put a kWh meter on the outlet that the charger is plugged into. I got almost the exact same result - 6.55 kWh to recharge from a 11.3 mile trip. I am fairly certain that this is from full charge to full charge. This is in town stop start driving.
So now I am stumped. How do I figure out why a vehicle is so horribly inefficient? There is no obvious brake drag, the individual battery voltages all look good. Fully charged the pack voltage is about 104 volts. Even the instantaneous amperage readings indicate something is not right - cruising around at 30 mph draws around 200 amps! What do I do?
Is it really the batteries? (I may be deceiving myself because I really want to believe that they are ok). Would old batteries really cause such high amperage draw?
The controller is a Curtis 1221 and the motor is an Advanced DC 206-03-4001 (8"). Could a funky controller or motor be the cause?
Any help is appreciated and if this post is in the wrong place please let me know. Thank you.