Recent content by wayne325

Really?

And that sound is the straight-cut gears in the gearbox.

Not sure anyone cares.... But it's not the motor you hear. It's the caps in the power electronics. :D

For sure everyone should understand that defeating the ground on an EV could be real trouble. It's illegal, if you do it and there's a problem (people could get killed) you will be liable possibly in a criminal complaint and if not that certainly a civil one. Just don't ever do it. (for those...

You're prepared to pay more for overhead and you understand the technical issues at hand. So what we're talking about the way I see it is "do I bet that materials science will move forward significantly in the next X years". And you pick your poison for X. I think the answer is a resounding...

To be fair, the i3 is really the first mass-produced "affordable" car made from significant quantities of CF and it results in a car hundreds of pounds lighter than almost anything else on the road. I think it's pretty darn cool and I point it out to everyone I show the car to. How many people...

Try this guy - it's Z-wave though so means a start to home automation that you go crazy with - locks, lights, motion sensors, garage door controller, thermostats,... ...

The 25 foot 14 ga extension cord Cartman showed is just fine given as you said all the contacts are good. I'm seeing 14 ga at 2.525 ohms/1000 ft. Cartman's cord has 50 feet of wire (there's two conductors in the cord - carrying the current to the car and the return), I'm calculating 0.12625...

You should be fine to charge the car on the high setting. A breaker will only trip if it gets too hot and that won't happen during the 8 or 10 seconds the garage door is opening or closing. Besides on the high setting at 120V I think the car is pulling about 1200W and that gives you 600W of...

Should be well under 10W when the relay is not energized.

There is a relay in the EVSE. Probably on the EVSE there's a "charge" light that indicates when the relay is closed (i.e. supplying power to the car). When the "charge" light is off and the relay is open, the amount of energy going into the car's charging electronics is exactly equal to 0...

Steven, Seems very unlikely the starter is on the HV system. It means more HV wiring to kill unsuspecting amateurs (and professional mechanics who've never before in their careers dealt with such dangerous electrical systems) poking around in there, and a custom built motor. Holding back...

Whoa. With all that back and forth, my head is spinning :? . I was originally speculating that the headlights were coming from the HV battery out of a step down transformer, hence, the testing of driving without headlights in very bright big city close traffic conditions where the LED "U"...

The converter is far more complicated than "being turned on and off as necessary" or operating like an ICE car with a simple regulator circuit. There's a bunch of SW running in a controller in there, it'll be far more complex than you've described.

The fact that ultimately all the power used by the accessories can be traced back to the converter is not a proof that the battery is "doing nothing". The battery is a component in a circuit and it's a very important one. Sometimes current is flowing in and sometimes current is flowing out...