[OFB Cafe] Cool Electric Bike

[Chris Olson]

From: Derek Broughton 
Sent: Sunday, July 13, 2008 6:03 PM
To: An Open Discussion Forum on Just About Everything,Especially for Techies. 
Subject: Re: [OFB Cafe] Cool Electric Bike


> So I'm 
> thinking you need about 2KW of solar panels to keep your electric bike 
> charged - far more than I need to keep my house running.

Derek,
We'll have to compare some notes sometime on our setups.  My wife bought 106 acres of lakefront property last fall and I logged out a road and a nice spot to park our RV on the lake for the summer (it's our "lake home").  A few weeks ago I pulled the generator out of the RV and installed a deep cycle battery bank in its place, along with a 12 VDC -> 120 VAC power inverter, and a solar panel to keep the batteries charged.

Our RV is the size of a small house (as far as electrical load) and so far it has worked extremely well.  We don't live there, but we spend a considerable amount of time there, and the RV has been completely power self-sufficient all summer.  We even got an HDTV in the RV, which we watch in the evenings sometimes and which draws quite a bit of power, and so far the solar panel keeps up with the load.  A good deal of our lighting in the RV is 12VDC florescent, which is quite power efficient, and all the AC light bulbs are energy efficient ones too.  One of these days, out of curiosity, I'll have to throw an ammeter on the various circuits in the RV to see what they actually draw when everything is lit, but I'm thinking we're in the (average) .5-.7 kW load when the RV is occupied.
--
Chris