bmeagle

Would you feel comfortable doing a daily highway commute of 180km without any recharging? Would probably need to top up the rex fuel tank daily. Sent from my SM-N910F using Tapatalk

Quick question, what do you do to remove the sulphur from the biogas? Sent from my SM-N910F using Tapatalk

Thanks for pointing me to this cable, nothing wrong with this one, somehow I completely overlooked this. Combined with a rpi and a bit of wifi I'll be able to keep tabs on things from afar, this installation is about 50m from the house. Sent from my SM-N910F using Tapatalk

Hi guys My off grid solar energizer is up and running now I want to gather some performance data. Is there any rpi or similar alternatives to the official victron module that I could use to monitor this controller? Sent from my SM-N910F using Tapatalk

That middle class and up is keeping it alive not the masses.

Starve the beast bit by bit.

We all work to make money, so we're all in the same game, I've found that importing parts from the UK to be cheaper than buying a whole new diesel pump because of local dealers. The biggest risk is government inventing a new tax on EVs to make up the fuel levy tax.

Dealer denying to sell you parts, I have never experienced that on all the out of warranty cars I owned and currently own.

If you buy an out of warranty car, or the battery is out of warranty and you are willing to replace the cells yourself that could be even cheaper, if they aren't currently subsidising the battery cost substantially. Sent from my SM-N910F using Tapatalk

R100k for a battery replacement after 100 000 km in the worse case scenario compares favourably to fuel cost per km as your cost is fixed up front and not slowly increasing as the ZAR continously weakens. The benefit is then hopefully reduced maintenance costs, for now, at some stage the dealers will realise their biggest cash cow is going to dry up with EVs, same with the fuel levy...

For the foreseeable future in SA an electric car will only be able to be a second car.

We know that battery life is limited, even Li Ion batteries, if you are going to max the range every day, deep Dod, or if you are parking in the sun during the day and the batteries heat up during summer then you should definitely not expect the batteries to last much beyond the guarantee.

Looks like BMW in SA only guarantees the battery up to 100000km. Sent from my SM-N910F using Tapatalk

I did a quick search, based on this sae article http://articles.sae.org/14942/ a new 60 Ah (Li ion) battery for the i3 would cost about $16000 (R224000), looks like BMW offer a 160000km, 8 year warranty on the battery, which works out to about R1.40 per kilometer.

You guys should already be able to roughly work out what a battery swap out will cost. Use the cost of your favourite fork lift batteries.

i3 can't do what a land cruiser can, so that is an apples oranges comparison. If you want to compare the total cost of ownership of an i3 to something else then you need to compare it to another car with the same limited capabilities in moving a certain amount of people and weight. The cheapest mode of transport for a single person might be an electric scooter.

I think a fairer comparison would be to an VW UP or Toyota Ay go. Price difference vs money spent on fuel etc..

Every power station tries to regulate the frequency it is producing, if your inverter was seeing 50.3 then it probably means that somewhere some big load dropped off the grid, would take some time for the boilers to ramp down a bit to get the generators back to 50 hz.

"Mya was playing around, and she coated this whole thing with a very thin gel layer and started to cycle it,” said Penner, chair of UCI’s chemistry department. “She discovered that just by using this gel, she could cycle it hundreds of thousands of times without losing any capacity.” “That was crazy,” he added, “because these things typically die in dramatic fashion after 5,000 or 6,000 or 7,000 cycles at most.” The researchers think the goo plasticizes the metal oxide in the battery and gives it flexibility, preventing cracking. “The coated electrode holds its shape much better, making it a more reliable option,” Thai said. “This research proves that a nanowire-based battery electrode can have a long lifetime and that we can make these kinds of batteries a reality.”"

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/advancednano/~3/iufbbdxE4QE/uc-irvine-invents-nanowire-battery.html "University of California, Irvine researchers have invented nanowire-based battery material that can be recharged hundreds of thousands of times, moving us closer to a battery that would never require replacement. The breakthrough work could lead to commercial batteries with greatly lengthened lifespans for computers, smartphones, appliances, cars and spacecraft. Scientists have long sought to use nanowires in batteries. Thousands of times thinner than a human hair, they’re highly conductive and feature a large surface area for the storage and transfer of electrons. However, these filaments are extremely fragile and don’t hold up well to repeated discharging and recharging, or cycling. In a typical lithium-ion battery, they expand and grow brittle, which leads to cracking. UCI researchers have solved this problem by coating a gold nanowire in a manganese dioxide shell and encasing the assembly in an electrolyte made of a Plexiglas-like gel. The combination is reliable and resistant to failure. The testing electrode was cycled up to 200,000 times over three months without detecting any loss of capacity or power and without fracturing any nanowires."

Your DOD is probably very low with such small loads. Sent from my SM-N910F using Tapatalk

They sold me a 15A pwm controller. Sent from my SM-N910F using Tapatalk

On my small holding I want to power the energizer for my electric fence purely with solar, no inverter needed. Energizer supposedly uses about 27 Watts. Nemtek wanted to sell me 140W panel and 100AH battery at exorbitant prices. Energizer can pull up to 40 watt. Any offers in centurion, midrand area? I think 100Ah is to small to ensure long life, battery should last at least 3 years.

So this mean that the infini is combining solar plus grid.

This is the fundamental challenge that most tree huggers don't understand when they advocate 100% renewables.