I'm dedicating this page on my bicycle trailer website to an off-shoot project, now known as The Watt Yacht.
The Watt Yacht (#TheWattYacht) is a project I finally initiated in July of 2014. Building an electric bicycle has long been a dream of mine as I am lazy (as we all are at some point or another) and like making things to hopefully make my life (and maybe even the lives of others) easier! Yay for easy! Of course if everything was easy would we really experience much personal growth? No! Not at all. That's why I made this project a difficult one. Success is really just evidence of having failed a lot previously. Failure is the path, the way, the means to that thing (however you define it) we call success. The Watt Yacht is a prototype. It's taken me about seven months and $1700 dollars to build. Commercially, a vehicle such as this one would sell for about $4000, so I consider this project worth the expense, blood, sweat, tears, pain, misery. . . you name it. Each little failure has been a learning opportunity for me, and each little success has felt like reaching the summit of a mountain.
I'm quite proud of this silly thing and I look forward to the journey it will be taking me on.
A MAJOR special thanks to Jake, whom with which this has all been made possible. I'd also like to thank The Ventura HUB for helping me learn some of the invaluable skills which made building this possible. I'd also like to thank the Santa Cruz Bike Church, and the Really Really Free Market of Santa Cruz, and www.cyclone-tw.com for moral support and key components!
Thanks!
There's some real and raw, trial-and-error, failure and learning contained within these images, some much more than others. A trained eye will likely be able to spot the 'learning' as it's happening. This entire process has been immensely valuable to me.
Update, April 1st, 2015
In conversation with the distributor I purchased my e-bike parts from, it became clear that the weight of the trike was not helping me. I overbuilt the trike in order to support the immense 'dead' weight of the deep cycle batteries. I wasn't getting the range per charge I was seeking (30 miles per charge. Ambitious, I know..) so I grudgingly 'bit the bullet' and decided to purchase the lithium-based battery pack and 24 volt charger from the distributor, which is now a decision I am quite pleased with. Once the pack and charger arrived I meditated on my situation, and reluctantly concluded that the trike was on longer necessary. The lithium-based battery pack is roughly one-sixth of the weight of the lead-acid based deep cycle batteries. So I gutted #TheWattYacht (cue Taps) and mounted all of the bits and bobs on my junk/work-bike. Accomplished that, gladly, in one evening, and it immediately ran, and did so pleasingly well. I am so happy to say.
I just didn't believe it. I needed to see it for myself. See that the deep cycle batteries were just too heavy to be practical. Now I know.
I'm still getting to know this new battery pack, and am still finding what its limits are. I wanted to attempt some calculations on 'fuel' costs as I am using this as my principal argument for the use of electric vehicles. I'd prefer any discussions on the matter be about the bottom line: What will this do to one's wallet? I think that is a topic that anyone can agree on regardless of other firmly held convictions. That being said, read on.
Here I've sourced a couple of different items online. One is the average cost of electricity in my area in February of 2015 (quite recently). The second item is a method for calculating the amount of electricity one is consuming via a specific appliance/device:
So, from this source I see that my averaged electricity cost is somewhere in the neighborhood of 22 cents per kilowatt hour. Plugging in my other data to the formula provided looks like this:
Battery charger watt rating: 690 watts (115 vac at 6 or 3 amps. I went with 6.) Average hours charging per day: 2.5 (estimated full recharge from 'empty' is projected to be 4 hours. I'm only using roughly half a charge.)
That gives me 1725 watts consumed per day. Divided by 1000 equals 1.725 kilowatt hours per day.
If I then recharge my battery pack five days per week for one year, that's about 240 days.
Multiplying 240 days times 1.725 kwh gives me 414 kwh annually.
22 cents converts to the decimal value of .22, which is multiplied by 414, which gives me a value of $91.08 per year.
$90 per year in fuel costs! Sure beats gas prices. And if my electricity is coming from a solar array then it's basically for free and the carbon footprint gets even smaller. That's pretty remarkable. I must of course acknowledge that the mining of lithium is a destructive practice, and the people who are involved in producing the batteries (perhaps the entire bike, even, arguably) are probably poor and miserable. . . so the next project should be creating a battery that's made of happy thoughts. I'll get on that.