Electric Cars

That is the way I approached it, as a money saving idea. Why pay to heat your home when the sun is happy to do it for free.

I planted deciduous trees on the south side of my house. In the summer, they partiality shade the collectors, and the house, preventing it from warming up too much. Yet in winter they lose their leaves, allowing the sunshine in.

 

When you compare the electric motor directly with a ICE, you are ignoring the source of the electricity for the electric motor. That electricity does not just magically appear. They are simply not comparable.

They are very efficient in converting electrical energy into mechanical energy. However, the total fuel required to create that electrical energy and convert it into mechanical energy is roughly comparable to an ICE.

As far as trolling goes, you are free to not respond. Call my posts whatever you want, but they are there to clear up your misconception about the efficiency of electric motors.

 

Anything can be done. But now you have converted a simple refueling operating into one which takes trained attendants and heavy equipment. I would be very nervous about removing and installing lithium batteries thousands of times for a single vehicle. One switch in the wrong position, one a malfunction of a computer or a dropped battery and you will get very big fire and explosion. Keep in mind that those batteries will contain the same amount of energy contained in the fuel tanks.

 

You seem to be banging up against the naysayer aspect of conservative thought.

If one looks at the history of Western thought, or should I say, the history of Northern European thought, of which the United States and Canada are included, a clear pattern emerges. Thousands of years of ideas and stories from that part of the world accumulated to create a secular ideology. An ideology that based its tenets on observation, investigation, experimentation, and sound reasoning, as opposed to the religious way of thinking, of those of the past. Its founders called themselves Enlightenment philosophers. Historians have termed their emergence, the Age of Reason. This is where the ideas that became American Ideals came from.

The followers of the Enlightenment, in time, came to be known as liberals, the bearers of reason.

Anyhow, in just about every issue, every product, it is typically a liberal who first proposed it. Be it the idea of elected government, to the introduction of electricity and the automobile, social security, and computers. First the idea and its creators and promoters are ridiculed and scorned. Yet liberal minded individuals keep at it until the idea begins to bear fruit. Then the progressives will start to pick up on it, giving it even more steam. If there is enough of a buzz, the wishy washy middle will then climb on board, tipping the balance.

Once the balance has been tipped, conservatives will start to see the advantages and in time will gradually accept the new idea/product. Given enough time, they will even come to claim, it was their idea all along. But then there are the true believers, the Evangelical types, who often have to be dragged, kicking and screaming into modernity.

 

Another concern I have would be how long would the connectors last?

They are going to be connected and disconnected maybe a few thousand times during the life of the battery and will be carrying a lot of current both charging and discharging and with lithium there another huge problem, there will need to be a separate multi-pin connector, because during charging cycle each cell and there will be hundreds if not thousands of them, to monitor the voltage of each cell to keep the battery properly balanced during the charging phase.

And I can see those connectors being damaged a lot which would take the battery out of service until the connector could be replaced.

As for a battery fire, that's a real hazard, I shot up a few lithium batteries and once penetrated they burn violently and since they are creating power while burning they cannot be extinguished with anything conductive like water or foam retardant.

 

No. He is banging up against the reality of electric power. His claim was that an electric motor is three times as efficient as an ICE. That claim ignores the fuel required to produce the electricity. If what he says were true, shouldn't the cost of a HP-Hour from a electric motor be about one third the cost of a HP-Hour from an ICE? In fact, the gasoline only costs about one and a third times as much as electricity. Throw in the efficiency of charging and discharging the battery, they will end up about the same.

A electric motor consumes .746 watts of electricity to produce one HP for one hour. That costs about nine cents. It requires about .05 gallons of gasoline to produce one HP for one hour. That gasoline costs about twelve cents.

 

You are talking to someone who has spent a career in R&D labs, figuring out how to do things that had never been done before.

 

It is not a Conservative or liberal thing, it is a matter of physics, logic and battery technology.

I have been working with photovoltaic systems for over two decades, I hold a Florida Solar Contractors license and a Florida Electrical Contractors license, and as part of my job at AT&T Wireless I design PV systems for cell sites, so I have a good idea of what can and cannot be done with PV systems in accordance with the limitations of the technology and the requirements of the National Electrical Code NFPA 70 Article 690 and 705 (13).

I also have access to tools that allow me to run designs of PV systems based on projected load, charging needs and reliability based on the location latitude and longitude and altitude of the system and yes that makes a huge difference as to how a system must be designed.

PV is as simple as many think it is, you cannot just place a series of panels on a roof and hope all will go well and now that the NEC 2020 has been released a whole new set of PV rules and regulations are going to be put in place, and they must be followed or the safety of the system and the end user can be compromised.

Then there are battery systems, a common theme I see in this thread is a total lack of understanding of battery systems and how to properly install them, like PV systems there are rules that must be followed for them to not present both an electrical and fire/explosion hazard, and that brings in even more requirements on top of the NEC including NFPA 1 The Fire Code, and NFPA 855 Standard for the Installation of Energy Storage Systems.

And once one understand all of those Codes one gets a better idea of why some of what is being proffered in this thread is neither practical nor legal.

I doubt you would find too many people recommending storing time bombs in ones home, but an improperly designed or installed battery string is just that, a time bomb waiting to go off to destroy ones home and maybe worse killing the occupants in the process.

 

Well, check my math, but at .12KWH I can charge my 74KWH Tesla battery for about $9 and drive 320 miles. To fill my Corvette with premium and drive that same 310 miles will cost me about $45.
That comes out about 5X at the plug or pump.
I'll leave it to you to play games with efficiencies.

 

I have a very old electric motor that my great grandfather bought in the thirties. It is rated at one horse power and weighs about sixty pounds. I've never checked, but I'm sure it draws more current than modern motors.

Speaking of that, when I was Junior High age, I made little electric motors using strips of sheet metal and Bell wire.

Early in my career I worked on a project that propelled mass transit vehicles via a linear motor. It was a rather clever design that encoded command, data, and voice signals in the changing phases as the vehicle passed by.

I have also worked on projects were I used stepper motors to perform robotic like functions. I've long thought, that a microprocessor, a few stepper motors, and the appropriate mechanical connections and most jobs could be eliminated. I have a lathe that works that way. A couple of stepper motors connected to threaded rods. Just mount a piece of stock into the machine, and load a profile. Then stand back and watch the stepper motors do all the work.

My son has a half dozen or so 3D printers. They all seem to operate on the same principle, stepper motors connected to threaded rods.

The latest craze in electric motors is brushless motors, which are more efficient than traditional motors. Being as brushless motors use sensors and electrical logic to sequence the polarities in the motors, I'm sure people will find clever ways to make them even more efficient.

 

And you are talking to someone who has invented over 50 currently marketed unique products, mostly medically related, with customers in over 110 countries. Also a person who has had psychologists attend classes I taught in process of mental training and discipline to greatly improve their ability to understand, to read people, to make the right choices consistently. More than once I've been told by clinical psychologists that what I had accomplished was impossible to do- and at the same time, they ask how I had done it. Always cool to have you someone tell you it can't be done when you have already done it. Hope you have experienced that one.

Education is a classroom is sort of like getting a learners permit so you can begin to accumulate real experience. R&D people and engineers in my experience are turning ideas into realities, so I find that an important calling. The real school is hands-on doing it. Until it's fact rather than theory, it's still just an unproven idea. I look at R&D as sort of a proof test for new ideas; working out the bugs and refining, creating prototypes to prove concepts and then into products. In my case, that takes place in-house. IF you can turn those ideas into viable products or processes- you win. If not, you at least learn what doesn't work.

The fact is that everyone is different in their mental processes, with both limits and advantages. Everyone has something of sufficient value to do well- the trick is finding what you have and learning to make the most of it. I believe in people- at the same time, I'm frequently very disappointed in people. No resource is greater than what the potential of people is, and probably none are more squandered.

 

The energy equivalent of one hp is 746 watts. It has nothing to do with the age of the motors, efficiency or anything else.

 

If you have a typical grandfather clock with a mechanical movement, and if you oil the clock, dust will stick to the gears and over time gum them up until your clock grinds to a stop.

Clock gears are different than most gears, as the gears in clocks don't transfer energy as much as they stop it, in steps.

If a clock's gears were made of steel, they would need lubrication because steel weakens, thus degrades the more it is worked. The lubrication would be needed to protect the steel. However, clocks use brass. Brass has the interesting characteristic of being work hardened. The more it is hit, the stronger it becomes. That is why drummers use brass cymbals. Steel ones would break after awhile, but the brass ones only get better.

 

Here is a secret, concerning electrical and electronics circuits. Design a circuit and calculate out the expected outcomes. Then carefully build the circuit and make measurements. You will see that measurements don't exactly match your calculations. They will be close, in the ball park, but never exact.

The energy represented by 746 watts may be the same as the energy of one horsepower, but that does not mean that putting 746 watts into a motor necessarily means that motor will produce one horse power of mechanical power. There are losses in electrical motors. That is why they get warm. That warmth is lost energy.

 

Energy is measured in Wh, not watts. Just saying! There can be no energy equivalent to 746 watts, unless you specify the time over which the power is expended.

 

I took a class on solar energy in college, back in the 70's. Photovoltaics were only mentioned in passing as the class was mostly concerned with capturing heat.

Liberal minded people have long had an idea to power our lives through clean solar energy. It didn't just pop up out of nowhere. People have been working on this, developing the technology over several decades to get to where we are now. Many conservatives are still criticizing the technology, but many are starting to come on board.

I grew up in a rural area. It was rather common to hear of people's LPG tanks exploding, sometimes taking the house with it. With electricity, a short could start a fire and burn the house down. A gas fire can cause the house to explode and take the neighborhood with it.

 

"A power level of 1 hp is approximately equivalent to 746 watt s (W) or 0.746 kilowatt s (kW). "
https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/horsepower-hp

 

I have beadboarded enough circuits, AC and DC, in circuit design classes to last me a lifetime.

 

duplicate

 

That is YOUR MISCONCEPTION about something that I have NEVER POSTED! You are just pulling that crap out of your nether regions!

REPEATING your bovine excrement STRAWMAN over and over again IS trolling my posts and no amount of BASELESS asinine allegations on your part is ever going to ALTER that FACT!

 

There is a great deal of TROLLING because the Fossil Fuel cartel is feeding the extremist rightwing a massive load of DISINFORMATION just as the Tobacco Cartel did when the toxic product that provides their income and profits was threatened by scientific FACTS.

The reality is, as you well know, that fossil fuels are unsustainable and are the equivalent of a global cancer caused by burning too much of them. Using them to make plastics and similar products makes sense but BURNING them makes no sense at all.

Unfortunately that takes rational thought and the majority of those opposed to Green technology are EMOTIONALLY invested in their gas guzzlers and are therefore easily MANIPULATED by the Fossil Fuel Cartel.

On the plus side there are corporations in the Freight and Utility industries that understand that being held hostage to the PRICE SURGES of the VOLATILE fossil fuel industry is BAD for their business models so the Green Energy ALTERNATIVE just makes a much better case of COST JUSTIFICATION to move AWAY from the Fossil Fuel Cartel's unstable business model.

Once we reach the tipping point the Fossil Fuel cartel will LOSE their DEATH GRIP on Congress and their TAX SUBSIDIES will drop away and we will all be able to breathe easier, quite literally!

 

Industrial strength connectors and switches already exist!

 

There is another fallacy which is the misuse of horsepower as a comparison instead of torque.

EV's are more efficient because they deliver their maximum torque immediately which is something that an ICE cannot achieve without wasting a great deal of fuel irrespective of the horsepower.

 

Regardless of how you choose to define efficiency, the electric car will cause about the same amount of BTUs of fuel being consumed as the ICE. The only difference is where it is consumed.

 

Wow, now we are down to the definitions of energy and power, while trying to have an adult discussion about energy efficiency.

power = energy/time

Again, while yout conversions of POWER are correct, they mean nothing for energy unless you specify the time interval. Running a 1000 hp engine for 1 second uses less energy than running a 100 hp engine for 100 seconds.