Quote:
Originally Posted by puddleglum
Now that a few of you have these kits working, what kind of speed and range can you get on battery power only (assuming 70%DOD)? I"m curious if you could realistically expect to be able to stay in EV only mode if you were only short tripping in the city?
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I've been using my Enginer kit heavily in cold weather. It's been installed over a year. It seems to work pretty well, although my converter has spontaneously started dropping its cutoff voltage. Today it puts out 12+ amps at 220V but drops down to 2 amps after I get to 230V. It seems too low. Last summer that cutoff would happen at 237V or so. It could be cold weather, I don't know. I still get the "red triangle of death" if the amps are too high. So it's an odd mixture: probably too many amps, but too low voltage. Anyway, so far so good.
Because of this voltage cutoff, I only get decent gains once the OEM battery drops below 6 bars. Probably at 25 mph I can carefully go 5 miles before hitting 2 bars and the Prius kicks the engine on.
Range on the highway is much more, like 120 miles before the kit depletes. But that is because the voltage is too high for the kit to do much good. Over that distance on a pure 65 mph highway use I average 58 mpg instead of 50, which I guess saves me over a quart of gas. It's short highway trips where I can't get much gain.