Solar Powered Golf Cart

[Steven Lake]

http://www.hammacher.com/publish/11164.asp

http://solarcarts.com/

Happened to stumble onto these while wandering around the web looking up solar topics. They're rather hard to find (one company has completely stopped making them), but they look like something I think would be very cool to have. Get one of the all terrain versions, boost the size of the battery bank, and you're good to go. Not sure how practical they would be, but given all the doom and gloom topics on the news lately, I think they'd make a very cool way to get around without spending any money. Well, assuming most of your travel was within the 40 mile range these have. (60-70 with full sun)

If you figure $4 a gallon for gas (I'm merely using that as a way to make the math easier), then this thing would literally pay for itself completely within 4 months, assuming you drove it the full extent of its range each day, and never plugged it in, and only ran it every other day. heh. Anywho, just a random thought and some interesting info.

[solar_dave]

I don't know how you could recover the $9000 in 4 months. A single panel is going to be hard pressed to do a full charge on the battery in even a couple days of really good sun.

Did I miss something in your calculations?

[niel]

dave's right as it states it could extend the range by 1/3 so you need at least 2 more pvs of that size. i don't know if they would consider that as street legal either and even if it was your speed would be limited making the roads you travel all side roads and no highways or major roads. they make these things to go between greens and not between towns.

[Steven Lake]

Yeah, I did the math wrong the first time. It actually takes closer to 10-15 to recover the costs, depending on the millage of your car. So I ended up scraping the idea. :(

[WillWinston]

Here is my home-brewed version

[westbranch]

Will, have you got some details on it??

[WillWinston]

Some details -- from memory

The cart is a Prestige --top speed is 23 MPH according to my GPS (with a slight tail wind LOL)
This is the only speed my 5 YO grandson finds acceptable But I am always on board and in control.

Four 50 watt 'nominal 12 Volt' panels from Sunelec wired in series (48 Volt system)

6 lengths of 1 1/2 inch 1/8 inch thick aluminum angle from Ace,, a box of 1/4-20 bolts and nylok nuts

8GA wired into a Xantrex C-40 charge controller under back panel (remote mounted control panel up by the dashboard)

a DPDT heavy duty DC switch from McMaster Car -- to switch from the onboard charger or the panels



It works well but the output is only about 150 Watts according to the C-40 panel (I saw 4 Amp briefly once on a cool sunny day)

still it was a fun project

[Photowhit]

If your looking for local transportation that might pay for it's self, you might check out and electric scooter or bicycle. You can find conversion kits around $300.

There is a neat electric scooter Called a Freely 3000 They make some pretty impressive specs, with a 700 watt motor and 20 amp 48 volt battery bank they claim a range of 40+ miles.

These technically 'bicycles' are allowed on standard roads (roads with above 35mph speed limits. They generally suffer from too rapid a current draw shortening the life of batteries, Ones with large lithium battery banks don't suffer from this problem but lithium batteries are pretty darn expensive.

[Steven Lake]

lol. After getting sticker shock during my research into this project, I opted for just taking the bicycle approach. I can hit 20mph with a tail wind (25 down hill), it's good for me, and it doesn't cost me anything to run save some spare parts. The food required to power the human that drives it is already covered in another area, so it makes the bike option cheap.