Best use for excess electricity on a bike?
 

I would like to streamline my bike in a full fairing and cover the fairing in solar cells to generate extra electricity. I was wondering what would be some good uses for the extra electricity after the electrical needs of the bike are taken care of?

I was thinking an HHO cell can't hurt converting the electricity into a combustible gas, but are there any more effective/more efficient uses for the electricity besides HHO?

Walk before running- I'd suggest just working on/planning the shell first.

A heated seat in this weather. Head light on all the time for safety.

I plan on heated seats in the near future as well as heated grips :D

Well a talking coffee maker is a must have.

How many of the PV cells are going to be pointed at the sun? I suspect that you are not going to get much output from what you can fit on a faring, it will help if the strings of cells are as short as possible because if you shade a single cell in a string then it becomes a load, reducing the output of the whole string, shade half the cells in a string of cells and you get an output near zero, same thing if you don't have them pointed at the sun and I don't mean just having them out where they are getting light, but pointing right at the sun, having PV at an acute angle cuts their output as well.

If you design it well, I suspect that you could get 100 watts out of a full faring, that should be enough to run a regular headlight, LED running lights and the engines ignition system, if it's a fuel injected bike or if it has an ECU then it might take 50 to 200 watts more depending on the age and type of bike.

When it comes to solar you need to go big or go home. Id suggest you aim for a mppt charger controller to keep things charged and topped off and if you are lucky, maybe you will have some extra. Id suggest putting the extra in a battery so if you get beside a big truck or its a cloudy day you can still use your goodies.

If you need to loose the energy, get a dump controller. They use those in wind turbines to regulate speed in high winds. :turtle:

I don't want to dump the energy, I want to use it in some way. Would adding a second deep cycle battery be feasible to store excess energy for use in my house when I get home. Instead of plugging the hybrid into the house, you plug the house into the hybrid.
It would make it awesome to go camping in then! State Parks tour anyone?

How much area of PV are you going to have that is pointing at the sun???
4-5 sun hours per day tends to be pretty average unless you live in Arizona, lets say your electrical loads are only 100 watts, that is nearly 7 square feet of PV panels to have a 100 watt output, I assume that if you are making a faring that you are ridding a distance every day, not just a few miles, so half hour each way is 100 watt hours or more just from the head lights and ignition of the motorcycle, 7 square feet of fairing that is pointing at the sun is a lot of fairing! 2 square feet of fairing that has a good angle and is pointing at the sun at any given point of the day is more realistic so at that point your faring is just covering your lights and ignition of your motorcycle for your commute with no extra!
Like others have said, make sure you have your needs covered before worrying about how much extra you will have.

an extra battery is extra weight.

extra weight is the suck on a bike.

install enough solar to hopefully let you run with the alternator off. do not worry about any more. better to set up any other solar capacity you have in a place that makes sense, like a south exposure in your yard. carrying it around simply wastes energy and makes your bike handle worse.

For most people this may be true, but I plan on traveling around the country teaching people about renewable energy and how everyday folk like me and you can implement renewable energy into our lives at a very low cost well under retail. I plan I driving my streamlined bike and camping at night, so the extra power in a separate battery could be used to run things like my computer, a fan, and lights without worrying about draining the battery at night. All I would need was one extra deep cycle battery to accomplish all of this. 18v@36 cells could charge the battery while I am riding to my next destination.

Assuming you can have enough PV capacity to produce a surplus I suppose it could make sense if your extra battery capacity is li-ion. So much for less than retail.

The problem, it seems to me, is that you are more interested in making a mobile PV system than you are a motorcycle. i just don't see how a MC can mount enough cells do do what you want without making aerodynamic compromises.

I am building a fully enclosed streamlined fairing for the vehicle, I can mount the solar cells on that and maintain a streamlined shape. I am interested in creating a vehicle that can be used to tour the United States (and beyond?) teaching people about how they can implement renewable energies into their lives. I want to teach people about reducing dependance on foreign oil. How increasing the national speed limit on side roads to 55mph would allow the fuel miser to take advantage of the lower speed limit and get better fuel efficiency, giving tax bonuses for buying less fuel as well as producing an alternative fuel to reduce the need for the pump.

The bike is more than a bike. It is a micro caravan of experimentation and learning.

Hard part is going to be finding a good, low cost lithium battery with a battery management system, if you want to skip the battery management system then you might as well go with lead acid.
As I see it, you don't have the area on a motorcycle to have a surplus, unless you were to go with a 3 wheeled design or build a trailer, even on a car it's hard to build enough non window area that points at the sun to do much good, but if you are planing to teach people about implementing renewable energy in to their life this should already be 100% clear to you.
If you build a trailer, then you have more space for storage batteries as well and if you are going for low cost then maybe lead acid is the way to go, of course in the long run lithium costs less and when on a vehicle lithium for sure costs less.
I'd be temped to run a 24v system with a step down converter to run your lights and to run the electrical system on the motorcycle because that opens up a lot of options for lithium batteries.

In the end I see a three wheeled electric vehicle, however I want to journey though all of this first to show the world different ways to get off foreign oil. I am not above adding a hack frame to make space for batteries and a motor in line with the chain drive. when I get more funding I can build a passenger compartment with two front tires and the electric/ice engines attached behind it. The entire floor compartment could be used as a battery bay to increase range. I would love lithium batteries but as of now I am on a shoestring budget [I already have several kw worth of solar components so they are essentially zero cost to me]

The excess electricity can be directed to the seat in such a way as to make you pedal faster!?!? ;) Sorry, you know I couldn't resist.

But seriously, how about a second motor. Faster is better and easier is better, so that might work. Or maybe a bigger motor? Although I like the idea of disengaging the motor(s) which don't have enough power flow, so more smaller motors is more economical and efficient.

So just to cover the motorcycles electrical needs you need 100 watts of panels, right? lets say you some how find enough space to have 200 watts of output that gives you 100 watts of extra power, you could power a radio with that, charge a small battery slowly or power a motor... a 100 watt motor on a bicycle would propel you down the road at about 8 mph, a nice relaxed speed, in other words, you would almost go faster/further/save more gas, if you put a set of pedals on your motorcycle then if you tried to add 100 watts worth of electrical energy in to the drive train, of course taking that load off the alternator is going to help but it would help more if you could remove the alternator and that is not possible on most motorcycles.

I have all led lights except for the headlamp, I draw maybe 65 watts max without brights on.

So low beam is around 60 watts, half a watt to one watt each for the rest of the lights instead of the standard 5-10 watts each and how much power does the CDI in the Honda Rebel draw? 20 to 30 watts?

I believe I once read about an LED headlight. That would reduce the need for electricity.

BTW, how heavy is the whole thing?

Since it will be fully enclosed, perhaps you can have enough cells to have a small bit of surplus electrons.

I think this would be best used by increasing your battery size a bit to a modestly sized deep cycle to ensure longer alternator off driving during cloudy/night driving. Not sure I would use this to power much other than maybe a laptop for a short period as it will run the battery down quickly and shorten its life.

average sun hours in the USA is between 3.5 and 6 depending on where you are, 4-5 is most common, so really if you plan to ride for 4-5 hours per day (120 to 300 miles, depending on speed) you could very easily use up any stored energy, like I said before, I'd be tempted to run at a higher voltage and have a step down converter to run the motorcycle, BMS's on lithium batteries tend to have a low and high voltage cut off control so you don't kill the battery, hooking it up to a DPDT switch to turn the alternator back on would allow you to run 99% of the time off solar with a safe cheap back up.