Ask HN: Anyone DIYed a solar powered ebike?
Ok so here's my basic plan:
- basic ebike (50-100 mile LFP battery, dime a dozen on the market)
- tow a trailer (adapt a kiddo trailer or whatever), basically a long box/cooler with a lid, but the lid is solar panels. Or has solar panels glued/mounted, I found these that can't possibly be legitimate they seem so light:
https://www.amazon.com/Solar-Panel-Flexible-Monocrystalline-Photovoltaic/dp/B0BNVLXKN1/ref=psdc_2236628011_t1_B0BC96BWGT?th=1
- so two of those would be 3.3 feet long, 21 inches wide (maybe room for three of them widthwise, 32 inches isn't even three feet), and really small. Basically, tow a long cooler with those glued on.
- even if 2-3 x 200 watt rated panels only return 50% in practice... that 200-300 watts, that would probably triple or quadruple the all-electric range of the bike maybe even perpetual, and the rider can toss in more wattage as desired. Even a lazy crank from a reasonably healthy human is almost 100 watts.
- heck you could add more batteries or extra batteries to the rear trailer, lots of room to haul camper equipment and rain gear
- the panels are DC, the batteries are also DC usually with an AC adapter, why invert to AC from the panels so the charger can re-invert for the battery, are there DC "adapters" for things like this?
- you could always tow two trailers for even more...
- obviously you don't want the panels to be 100 pounds, but those linked panels seem to just be 2 pounds each, and there are DC-DC vanlife inverters that weight 4 pounds. What else would you need besides a cable to the ebike battery charge port?