104km trip from City to hinterland

Today we had a go at driving our Imiev from Brisbane to our off grid house in the Sunshine coast hinterland. Total distance was 104km with a 500m + climb up into the hinterland along with several hilly undulating sections along the way.

Below is a altitude profile of the trip.



We made it to the house 104km with 2 bars (2kwh) remaining on the SOC gauge and 9km on the RR gauge (though the last 20km were all uphill or undulating). We had a good load in the car to. two adults and one child, a 35lt Engel compressor style car fridge(40kg including the food inside), luggage 4 bags 30kg and the charger.

Parked the car in the shed at 11AM unplugged the air compressor and started charging. The solar charge controller sprung to life to cover the load.The inverter was showing around 2400w AC output 2 200w was the charger and the other 200w was the idle house load.

Looking at the solar charge controller it was pumping around 3300w into the battery's to hold float. 27% loss. 15% would be inverter loss and the remaining would be flooded lead acid battery's that are not very efficient. When I switch to lithium's on the House in a few years there will be a big improvement in efficiency.

Anyhow it shouldn't be a problem At the moment I am just using the 3960w of PV that's on the roof NE facing. When I have time I will put up the additional 4200w on the NW roof of the house. I thought it would be a good idea to get up on the roof and clean the solar panels as I have been lazy and the last time I did it was over a year ago .

The plan is to pump 7kwh or so into the battery today and top of with another 7kwh tomorrow for the drive home Sunday afternoon..

I had the charger on from 11:00am 2:15pm today and pumped back 7kwh into the Imiev. The house battery's are full and on float so it was great to be able to actually use some of the excess kwh that just gets wasted each day. I Will top off the next 7kwh tomorrow and drive back to Brisbane on pure sun power tomorrow .

I also had a go just for fun at fitting my old 15x6 polished five spoke Honda mags with 195,50,15 tyres on the front. As I was expecting the wheels fit as they are the same 4x100 PCD but being 6 inch wide with a 45 offset they clash with the strut just , as expected. Boy they looked great though.Completely transformed the look of the car.

I would say 16x5 or 16x5.5 wheels would be perfect as the strut leans away from the wheel so a larger OD wheel would gain some clearance along with a 5 or 5.5 inch width and a 45 offset would keep the stock geometry. I was getting 5lt/100km with the 195's at 40psi on my old civic and about the same with the stock 165's. So I don't see there being that much consumption difference going to say 185 up front on the Imiev over the silly 145's.


















Kurt

A huge well done there, what a great effort. Seems the i-MiEV is a perfect fit for your trip to the house.

Fantastic! Loaded down as you were is pretty much a worst-case scenario and I'm glad you made it. Your trip home will be a piece-of-cake. Like you altitude display - what app are you using?

I just used Google earth to get elevation over the trip. I just looked up the directions from my starting point to my destination. Once I had a blue line on the map showing my travel path. I then right clicked the path and selected (show elevation profile). It then shows the little graphic display of elevation on the bottom of the screen. I then just take a screen grab of it with windows snip it tool.

I like how it shows total elevation gain and loss over the trip. If you know the rough weight of the car and continence you can use a formula and the elevation totals to come up with a sum of power that was used to shift weight up hill and subtract that from the total used over the trip. This will give you the total energy used for that distance if the road was flat.

With the help of others on another forum we had pre calculated that the climb into the hinterland would consume 1.8kwh of energy and it was true when we did the climb in practice we used two bars on the fuel gauge the first bar was just slightly consumed before making the climb so a rounded estimation of 2 bars was perfect.

Elevation gain - loss is a huge factor in calculating range of a EV.

Kurt

After charging the battery up to full again from the sun. I made it back to the city 104km again with 5 bars remaining on the Gauge. 37km on the RR guage. I took the motorway on the way home so 40% of the trip was at 100kmh.

I think this is how I will do it most times side road on the way up 80kmh and motorway on the way back.

Coming down the range I had consumed almost 2 bars by the time I got to the top of the hill. My RR was climbing rapidly as I regenerated down the hill though at the 3/4 way down mark regen start to fall off as the battery was to full (15 bars) to acept full regen.

Kurt

offgridQLD, your trip behaviour is exactly what I had anticipated, and I'm happy to see it worked out that way. The nice thing about coming back is that even if you do not fully charge before leaving for home (e.g., due to overcast), then you should nevertheless get those bars fully filled on the way down.

I have not noticed any temperature-related regeneration limitations in the iMiEV (as I do on my Gen1 Honda Insight). In my iMiEV, the reduction in regeneration seems to be only SOC-related, and for me occur only when 16 bars are showing.

I was getting some reduction in regen braking before 16 bars. On 14 bars I had full strength Regen 16kw showing on the gauge but towards the end of the descent I could only pull 8-10kw on the guage with bars showing at 15 on the gauge.

My thinking is It could have been heat or just the fact that one cell had reached a high voltage point though I would think so. Perhaps that max regen (effectively fast DC charging) is only available to 80% soc though must be wrong and doesn't add up as I get Regen at home just after charging (though i dont get to push it as hard) Perhaps I was just regen braking to hard for to long. It is a average of 12% grade and 15% at some points over about 5 km. I was pulling about 70- 85 km kph
in D mode coming down.

Kurt

offgridQLD said:

Today we had a go at driving our Imiev from Brisbane to our off grid house in the Sunshine coast hinterland. Total distance was 104km with a 500m + climb up into the hinterland along with several hilly undulating sections along the way.

Below is a altitude profile of the trip.

We made it to the house 104km with 2 bars (2kwh) remaining on the SOC gauge and 9km on the RR gauge (though the last 20km were all uphill or undulating). We had a good load in the car to. two adults and one child, a 35lt Engel compressor style car fridge(40kg including the food inside), luggage 4 bags 30kg and the charger.

Parked the car in the shed at 11AM unplugged the air compressor and started charging. The solar panels controller sprung to life to cover the load.The inverter was showing around 2400w AC output 2 200w was the charger and the other 200w was the idle house load.

Looking at the solar charge controller it was pumping around 3300w into the battery's to hold float. 27% loss. 15% would be inverter loss and the remaining would be flooded lead acid battery's that are not very efficient. When I switch to lithium's on the House in a few years there will be a big improvement in efficiency.

Anyhow it shouldn't be a problem At the moment I am just using the 3960w of PV that's on the roof NE facing. When I have time I will put up the additional 4200w on the NW roof of the house. I thought it would be a good idea to get up on the roof and clean the solar panels as I have been lazy and the last time I did it was over a year ago

.

The plan is to pump 7kwh or so into the battery today and top of with another 7kwh tomorrow for the drive home Sunday afternoon..

I had the charger on from 11:00am 2:15pm today and pumped back 7kwh into the Imiev. The house battery's are full and on float so it was great to be able to actually use some of the excess kwh that just gets wasted each day. I Will top off the next 7kwh tomorrow and drive back to Brisbane on pure sun power tomorrow

.

I also had a go just for fun at fitting my old 15x6 polished five spoke Honda mags with 195,50,15 tyres on the front. As I was expecting the wheels fit as they are the same 4x100 PCD but being 6 inch wide with a 45 offset they clash with the strut just , as expected. Boy they looked great though.Completely transformed the look of the car.

I would say 16x5 or 16x5.5 wheels would be perfect as the strut leans away from the wheel so a larger OD wheel would gain some clearance along with a 5 or 5.5 inch width and a 45 offset would keep the stock geometry. I was getting 5lt/100km with the 195's at 40psi on my old civic and about the same with the stock 165's. So I don't see there being that much consumption difference going to say 185 up front on the Imiev over the silly 145's.

Kurt

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Great going man.. Best informative post.. There is lot to learn from you in terms of energy generation.. Really lovely pics..

There is definitely a reduction in regen above 90%. I started down a hill at 95% SoC, and had very little regen, maybe 10 kW. A little while later with 13 bars, I started down a long, steep hill, gained a bar, but didn't have a reduction in regen. It's limited by high SoC or low battery temperatures (below 13 C).

I was thrown for a second when you said your panels face north, but I see you're in the land down under.

By the way, how does the Midnite Classic work for you? Is it a decent controller?

By the way, how does the Midnite Classic work for you? Is it a decent controller?

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I am very happy with the classic 150 charge controller. I often see the full 4000w sustand for several hrs from my 3960w of pv. With a bit of cloud reflection I even see well over 4000w. It dose a great job of extracting every last watt oft output from my PV has to offer. A huge improvement from the two 40A non mppt controllers it replaced in both output and features.

The data logging and remote monitoring & control via apps and free websever over the internet is my favorite feature. The after sales service from the mid nite team is 2nd to none. Through there forum your often communicating directly with people who designed the products yet they take the time to run through any issues with a real one on one level and that's not common to a reasonable sized company.They get there customers involved with there products and new lines so they just keep getting better.

No I'm not a sales agent :lol: just a happy customer. I have just purchased a 2nd classic 150 to handle an additional 4200w of PV.

this is the control dashboard I can monitor and make changes to every setting live via my laptop from anywhere in the world, (saves going outside and pushing buttons)


This is the free data logging web server. Great to look up via your iphone or any device that can access the internet just to keep tabs with a overview of the days output when away from the house.



Kurt

Awesome. I've been following the Classic for about a year before its release. I've been impressed by its feature list through development, and I'm glad it seems to live up to it. I briefly met the Midnite crew at the Mother Earth News Festival, and they were friendly and knowledgeable. We got distracted though when Ed Begley, Jr. snuck past. That was pretty awesome that I got to meet him the next day. :mrgreen: