B2600ev

I will have my truck on display at the Austin Mini Maker Faire, with AustinEV, this Saturday May 12.  I hope to see you there!

As of today I have logged 1526 miles of almost daily service.  My weekday round trip commute is about 12 miles and I usually put 20-30 miles each on Saturday and Sunday.  I have used a total of 4350 Ah, which at 141V (nominal) is about 613 kWh.  If I derate assuming a charging efficiency of 90% then that is about 680 kWh from the wall.  At 13 cents/kWh that comes to about $90 of electricity to go 1526 miles.

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Today I drove the truck to my house.  After “living” at Bill’s house for about 1.5 years, today we declared it ready to drive home.  So after spending the afternoon taking test rides and enjoying some good food and drink, tonight I drove it back to my house.

Once I got home, I plugged it into the socket in my garage that I installed just for this purpose.  Here is a photo of my truck plugged in at my house (first charge at home).

Charging at home

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When I started this project I wanted to know how the weight of the truck would change.  I was also hoping to change the weight distribution a little since the back end of the truck seemed light to me.  We weighed the truck before removing the ICE (internal combustion engine) and after, and just recently weighed it again with all the electrics installed.  Here are the results:

*Note: Total includes 100 lbs for transmission which was not in the vehicle when “Removed” measurement was made. Read more…

Thanks to Bill taking some time out of his day yesterday, the truck is now street legal.

Inspection and Registration Stickers

If you look carefully you may notice that the inspection sticker is not the same as a normal car.  Apparently the normal sticker is a safety plus emissions sticker, and this is a safety-only sticker. Read more…

We took another test drive of the truck.  This time it was a little longer, and in the day time.  We drove it 8.5 miles in total.  In that distance I used about 20Ah from the battery.  Using a nominal voltage of 141V for the battery pack, that works out to be 332 Wh/mile.  That is not too bad I suppose.  I had seen estimates of anywhere from 250 to 400 Wh/mi, so I am not unhappy with that.

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Elcon PFC 3k charger

I bought the Elcon PFC 3000 charger for my truck.  This is a 3kW charger that can handle 120 or 240VAC input.  I thought this would be handy and I would be able to normally charge using 240 at my house, but opportunity charge at 120 when there is a normal 5-15 plug available.

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I am using an mr2 power steering pump but it is not working well and needs to be replaced. I want to order a rebuilt but I need to know what year or year range to use when ordering a replacement. Can anyone tell me the year for this pump? Please let me know. Thanks!

A while back I made a post called First Test Drive.  We hacked together something so we could briefly drive the truck using the go-kart as the power source.  While this allowed us to test out the drivetrain, it wasn’t really a very good test of what it will be like to drive the truck when it is finished.

Well, now we have done a real test drive !!!

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After many weeks of working on wiring, we are finally at the point where we can attempt to charge the batteries. So, Sunday night we plugged it in (after preliminary electrical checks) and the battery pack was charging!

EV Display showing initial charging current and voltage

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I have been trying to decide what to do for a connector for the charger. Basically it became a question of J1772 or something else. I chose something else … Here is what I just purchased:

L6-30 connector set for charging

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If you have read some of my older posts then you know that I originally ordered my batteries and other stuff from EV Components.  There is ongoing legal action and it is moving at a snail’s pace.  Therefore I decided that I wasn’t going to wait any longer and so I placed a new battery order and now I have received those:

Crates of batteries

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I was reviewing video and photos that I had not yet posted, I realized that I had not made a post about the first test drive of the truck.  Yes that’s right, we drove the truck already.

First test drive after motor installation

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This is the first of two emergency disconnect features available in the cabin. This first one, the “big red button”, will be used to disconnect the coil of one of the contactors.

I was trying to decide where to locate this, thinking I was going to have to cut a hole in the dash. But when we started looking at it, we realized it fits perfectly where the cigarette lighter was.

Emergency disconnect

I will probably add some aftermarket under-dash power port to replace the function of the cig. lighter socket.

I purchased the emergency disconnect button from Current EV Tech, but these are readily available from EV suppliers.

I originally listed the major components I had decided on in this post.  However, some things have changed, and I have now decided on most things and started ordering whatever I still don’t have.  I updated my Components page to reflect my current plans.  But here is a summary:

• Motor – ADC FB-4001A
• Batteries – 44 Thundersky 160 AH
• Controller – Curtis 1231C-8601
• BMS – mini-BMS
• DC-DC – IOTA 55A
• Monitoring – analog gauges plus EV Display (state-of-charge)

Over the past several weeks I have been ordering a lot of stuff.  In this recent round of orders I have had this experience three times.  I place the order from the web site.  I get an automated acknowledgement.  And then … nothing, silence.  Maybe my card is charged or money removed from my paypal account, but no communication on my order.  Since this happened to me three times, and I eventually did receive my order in all cases, I don’t want to single out any particular EV parts supplier because I still think they are not bad businesses.  But suppliers, please, communicate with me.  If it is going to take time for you to receive parts from your supplier, let me know.  If you are drop shipping from somewhere and it is not within a day or two, let me know.  Maybe I am being unreasonable but in this day of amazon, etc., I expect to know pretty much right away what is happening with my order.  I am not asking for daily updates or anything like that. I would just like an estimate of when my order will ship, within at most 1-2 days of when I place my order.

Since we work on my truck once per week, I need an idea about when I will receiving parts so I can plan the work.

Oh, and if you have a contact email on your web site, when I email you to ask for the status of my order.  Please don’t ignore it because that is frustrating too and then I am just going to start calling you.

I have been spending time designing the wiring harness and am at the point where I need to choose some connectors.  For the circuits that are carrying any current, I think I am going to use Anderson Powerpole connectors.  I like these because they are sort of like lego blocks for connectors.  I also like the fact that it is simple selection process, it is clear what you need and what you need to order to get working connectors.  I like this site (powerwerx.com) for the Anderson connectors.

But when it comes to connectors for signal wires, I find that there is a bewildering array of choices. Read more…

Since I will have a significant part of my battery pack under the bed, I need a way to easily access those batteries for maintenance.  We thought about cutting the bed itself to make a hinged access door.  But the obvious solution is to make the bed tilt-able.

Read on to see how we modified the truck so that I can tilt the bed up …

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Even though here in Austin we don’t have a lot of days when heat is needed, I think that I do need a functioning heater in the truck.  For one thing, I might need to be able to blow hot air on the windshield if it starts to fog up.

So, I removed the original hot water heater core and modified it by adding an electric ceramic heater element.  Keep reading for the details …

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