morganberwinkle
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does anyone know if you buy a battery jumper box and buy the female adaptor to plug I-miev charger into jump box for a few hours will it give you any extra mileage(range)?
extra miles from jumper battery box
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Most 'jump boxes' have pretty small 12 volt batteries inside
http://www.harborfreight.com/12-volt-jump-start-and-power-supply-38391.html
This one has a 17 Ah battery. Doing the math, that means under the best of circumstances you would get 12 volts @ 17 amps for one hour from the box - In actuality, it won't even do that. Your one hour would provide you with about 200 watts of power (12 volts times 17 amps)
If you used that 200 watts to power a 100% efficient inverter to provide A/C power for the OEM EVSE, it would run it for about . . . . 12 minutes - The 8 amp EVSE uses 960 watts per hour, so 200 watts is about 12 minutes worth of charge time
An 8 amp L1 EVSE charges the car at about 3.5 miles per hour, so your 12 minutes would give you about 1/5th of that - A good bit less than one mile of added range
You could do better by forgetting about the 'jump box' with it's small battery and buying a marine trolling motor battery. If you got one with a 105 AH rating, you would have about six times as much power, so it would run your EVSE for about an hour, giving you the full 3.5 miles of extra range. In actuality though, there are losses everywhere which would reduce that somewhat. No inverter is 100% efficient, the EVSE isn't either and a battery cannot provide 100% of it's rated output more than a few times before it begins to deteriorate
The traction battery under the car weighs several hundred pounds and has a much greater energy density than ordinary lead-acid batteries, so any auxiliary battery which would add even 10 or 15 miles of extra range is going to be either heavy or very expensive . . . . likely, both
Don
Most 'jump boxes' have pretty small 12 volt batteries inside
http://www.harborfreight.com/12-volt-jump-start-and-power-supply-38391.html
This one has a 17 Ah battery. Doing the math, that means under the best of circumstances you would get 12 volts @ 17 amps for one hour from the box - In actuality, it won't even do that. Your one hour would provide you with about 200 watts of power (12 volts times 17 amps)
If you used that 200 watts to power a 100% efficient inverter to provide A/C power for the OEM EVSE, it would run it for about . . . . 12 minutes - The 8 amp EVSE uses 960 watts per hour, so 200 watts is about 12 minutes worth of charge time
An 8 amp L1 EVSE charges the car at about 3.5 miles per hour, so your 12 minutes would give you about 1/5th of that - A good bit less than one mile of added range
You could do better by forgetting about the 'jump box' with it's small battery and buying a marine trolling motor battery. If you got one with a 105 AH rating, you would have about six times as much power, so it would run your EVSE for about an hour, giving you the full 3.5 miles of extra range. In actuality though, there are losses everywhere which would reduce that somewhat. No inverter is 100% efficient, the EVSE isn't either and a battery cannot provide 100% of it's rated output more than a few times before it begins to deteriorate
The traction battery under the car weighs several hundred pounds and has a much greater energy density than ordinary lead-acid batteries, so any auxiliary battery which would add even 10 or 15 miles of extra range is going to be either heavy or very expensive . . . . likely, both
Don
acensor
Well-known member
morganberwinkle said:
What Don said.
BTW, IIRR our battery packs weigh about 500 pounds... Just emphasizing Don's point about how tiny a battery jumper box is in comparision.
..........
If you really really wanted to haul around something for some range extension independent of charging station a portable gasoline generator might work.
You can get a new 1000 watt 2-cycle generator new for $140 (note that a jumper pack can cost that much) . It'll run about 8 hours on about half a gallon of fuel....which would be about 25 miles of range added using the stock 8 amp charger.
I'm not sure if the charger demands really clean sign wave power, and some of these generators have caveats about using them to power electronic devices for reasons related to the quality of the power.
I suppose the kind of situation where this kludge might make sense is where you HAVE to get from point A to B (which is beyond a full charge with no stations in between) and can live with stopping several hours to stop and charge with the generator.
May be drive out to a wilderness area and charge overnight.
But who would want to camp overnight with a gas generator buzzing all night? :roll:
morganberwinkle
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Thank You Don and Alex for your feedback, I really appreciate it very much, Morgan.
