Tom, Until you tell us what vehicle you are driving, what charger you will connect to the genset, we can only give you pot-shot guesses. If you have an evalbum listing pls let us know the URL. Pls give us more information of what you are trying to do: -how far do you need to drive?
IMO, you should just follow Cor's advice an bag a cheap prius for long trips. By your terse post, I assume you have a 144v pack made up of 12 12V agms, which likely translates to a safe-discharge SOC= 30 mile range. A search of the evdl nabble archive shows in the past (2009) you posted about using a bad boy (bb) charger (a cheap, inefficient, dangerous way to charge -- I know, I have done it). If you are still using a bb, a meter would show a 15A charge rate, but 50% of the power would be wasted, and you would need a 30+A outlet. Also if you are charging off 120VAC trying to charge a 144VDC pack, the first 30% will charge at a higher rate, but that rate will quickly drop to much slower as the pack voltage rises. Even if you were able to maintain a 15A charge rate using a generator while you drive, with a bb, as the pack SOC dropped, so will its voltage. So, it will cause the genset's breaker to pop. I first saw this way-way back in the early days, when Otmar drove his 24-optima 144VDC S-10 truck to the SF presidio for the SFBear EVent http://saccityweb.com/seva/evupdate/1996/evup0496.html Though the genset was emblazoned with the words whisper-quiet, it was anything but, as Cor said, spewing partially burnt gasoline smoke as he drove up Hwy 280 from Palo_Alto-CA toward the northern tip of SF. Just before we all (there was a caravan of conversion EVs trying to reach there) came close to the SF border, we stopped near Colma as Otmar's genset breaker kept tripping when he accelerated (which dropped the pack voltage, which drew too much current through the genset breaker = pop). We hung out for a couple hours (up wind) while his genset tried to put a charge on his pack. We did reach there, but it took Otmar a couple more stops to slow genset charge to get there. I arrived with a 144V MG that had 12 group 27 wet cell PbSO4 batteries. I could charge off 120VAC with less monitoring that him, as he had to baby sit his charge current. He used a series of extension cords to adjust his current rate: more 12-3 cords in series in the beginning, unplugging and removing an extension when the current dropped off as the pack voltage rose, repeat. I had a Bycan saturated-transformer type charger, and I was charged enough to leave before him, as his final charge rate was super slow (5A). I do not recommend anyone using a bb charger. Get a decent power factor corrected charger that can plug into the j1772 EVSE infrastructure at a 30A rate. My personal experience was to charge off different gensets. A 1kW genset was pretty much useless, adding only 5 to 10% to my range, and having to still stop and wait to finish the charge if there was no public EVSE available. Later, I had a large 10kW genset [like: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Tomahawk-Power-10-000-Watt-Gasoline-Portable-Generator-15-HP-4-stroke-Engine-/162387280425 ] powering a manzanita micro (mm) pfc-30. The best I could pull off it was 5kW. Only getting 50 to 60% of a genset's peak rated power is about the norm. So, if you need 6kW, get a 15+kW genset and a decent charger that can handle that power. Note: some gensets put out nasty spikes and harmonics even without being stressed under a heavy load, which can cause damage to some chargers. My experience found, most of the more expensive, better gensets have less spikes, and work well with mm pfc chargers while your driving (check with mm first of what you are doing for their OK). With all that experience from back then when there was no abundance of cheap used prius to use instead, we made do. But today, I would just follow Cor's advice. For EVLN EV-newswire posts use: http://evdl.org/evln/ {brucedp.neocities.org} -- View this message in context: http://electric-vehicle-discussion-list.413529.n4.nabble.com/Generator-tp4685732p4685736.html Sent from the Electric Vehicle Discussion List mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org Read EVAngel's EV News at http://evdl.org/evln/ Please discuss EV drag racing at NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
