What would be a cost effective solution for charging an electric bike (36 V) while riding. Do I need 3x12v panels?
Comments
Hello Dan,
Chances are you would not need that quanity of 12V modules. The key factors here are going to be: the capacity of the battery, the ammount of charge that it requires to become recharged and the average number of available sun hours that you have in your area.
For a PV recharging system for your bike, you want to think in terms of Amps rather than Volts. This is an over simplified calculation, but let's assume we have a 50 Ah battery. We don't want to discharge that battery to more than 50% of its capacity. That leaves us with 25 Ah of usable capacity. Now, let's say that in our area we have an average of 5 sun hours per day. We can, roughly, divide our 25 Ah requirement by the number of sun hours (5) to determine that we need a moudle with at least 5 Amps of current to satisfy our battery. This means that you may only need to have a single module to produce the energy you need to recharge your battery.
Agan, that is an very simplified way of approaching sizing the recharging system, but it does help to illustrate the manner of matching PV module to battery in terms of Amperage rather than voltage. In your set-up you would want to look at charge controllers that have a 36V ouput for the battery bank.
If you are having trouble figuring out the module sizing for your set-up I can help with just a little more information. Feel free to reply here with further details if you need a little guidance.
Comments
Hello Dan,
Chances are you would not need that quanity of 12V modules. The key factors here are going to be: the capacity of the battery, the ammount of charge that it requires to become recharged and the average number of available sun hours that you have in your area.
For a PV recharging system for your bike, you want to think in terms of Amps rather than Volts. This is an over simplified calculation, but let's assume we have a 50 Ah battery. We don't want to discharge that battery to more than 50% of its capacity. That leaves us with 25 Ah of usable capacity. Now, let's say that in our area we have an average of 5 sun hours per day. We can, roughly, divide our 25 Ah requirement by the number of sun hours (5) to determine that we need a moudle with at least 5 Amps of current to satisfy our battery. This means that you may only need to have a single module to produce the energy you need to recharge your battery.
Agan, that is an very simplified way of approaching sizing the recharging system, but it does help to illustrate the manner of matching PV module to battery in terms of Amperage rather than voltage. In your set-up you would want to look at charge controllers that have a 36V ouput for the battery bank.
If you are having trouble figuring out the module sizing for your set-up I can help with just a little more information. Feel free to reply here with further details if you need a little guidance.
Adam