ICE Vehicle is hiding a major category division here, hybrid vs. traditional ICE. I think in the case of the latter this would only make sense as a bandaid to deal with parasitic battery drainage on a vehicle that is usually parked outside.
ICE Vehicle is hiding a major category division here, hybrid vs. traditional ICE. I think in the case of the latter this would only make sense as a bandaid to deal with parasitic battery drainage on a vehicle that is usually parked outside.
The cyclic nature of the sun actually makes for way better maintenance of lead acid batteries in practice than float chargers. Basically everyone with a boat, RV or rarely used heavy equipment has switched over at this point.
Can you elaborate here?
Float chargers do fairly frequently kill batteries by evaporating the fluid over time. It's like the difference between a battery being dead in a month or two of non-use vs 3-6 on a conventional float. It's hard to get the charge current just right. By contrast a charger that's voltage naturally decreases in proportion with what the battery is willing to suck up and tapers its charging and turns off overnight has the effect of more or less just "topping off" the battery without boiling much/any of the fluid. If you don't have a parasitic draw in excess of what the solar charger can make up for a battery is likely to be good for 6+mo without being touched. I can go 6mo on cars and other stuff that has digital electronics that draw a little bit and I can go 12+ for heavy equipment that has a hard cutoff switch.
And yet I know quite some people who report to be very happy with their plugin hybrid, doing max 40 km they hardly have to use fuel anymore and some can charge off their own PV setups (in summer).
I guess it’s a testament to the Netherlands being very compact.
I went the plugin hybrid route. The added complexity caused a lot of maintenance and reliability issues. I ended up having to dump the vehicle at a loss.
Something to keep in mind: A full EV doesn't require oil changes, which you still need to do with a plugin hybrid.
If you're able to do all your daily driving on battery only, then why bother with a gas engine that you aren't using? High speed charging works very well for the occasional road trip; it's at the point where if you take your bathroom breaks at high-speed chargers, you don't even need to "think" about charging.
I'm sure; it's certainly intuitive that a hybrid could do quite a lot with a PV setup. I just don't see PV doing much for a non-hybrid ICE vehicle outside of acting as a battery tender.