How long should a battery last?

swimmer_spe wrote:

JimK-NY wrote:
This thread reminds me of a friend who bought an EV and wanted to take a road trip. In theory they should be able to drive a couple hundred miles before charging so not much of a road trip. To make it worse they wanted to travel in the winter months. The batteries are less efficient in the cold and battery power is needed to heat the interior of the car. So no road trips in that car.

They had great intentions. First they thought they would save on operating costs. We live in an area where electric rates are way, way over the national average so that is not going to happen. Next they thought they were helping to keep pollution down and doing their part to reduce global warming. That electric power did not come free. It comes from a power plant burning natural gas or an older plant burning oil.

Sometimes there just isn't a good fix after buying the wrong thing.

I have plans of getting a generator in a year or so, so it is not that I bought the wrong equipment, but that I am not yet prepared for what eventually I will be for.

I don't know what the genny rules are like in Ontario but if you ever do a trip to BC all the provincial parks and such are limited to 8am to 10am and then again at usually 6pm to 8pm, not enough for the average person to recharge their batteries. yes, you will extend your power a little, but for the price you're going to pay for that generator you could put a decent solar setup in so that you could run all day and even charge while you're driving. if you can install it yourself you can have a great setup for about 6-700 dollars cdn (not including your batteries) that will be 6-700 watts of panels. to give you an idea I got a system installed in my 5th wheel as part of the purchase deal before I knew how easy it was to do it yourself so I spent way too much money, but it is a 480 watt setup and four 6V GC2 batteries (the new ones are only 420AH capacity as I finally retired my old batteries last spring after almost 14 years.

With that set up I can turn on the inverter and make coffee with the Keurig and toast for breakfast, then after super make coffee again. a few minutes of microwave time, and let the kids watch a movie before bed (when they were young and liked coming with us haha. I also have run the furnace all day in the fall where it was getting close to freezing at night and the batteries would be at 100% when the sun went down every night. the next day it would recover the evening/night usage by around 1pm. I have a generator at home, but it has never left home, and there has been only 1 time in the last 10 years that I wish I had one and that was so I could run the ac during the heat wave two summers ago. 48C wasn't fun but it cooled down enough to sleep by midnight... The money I spent on that genny was wasted and I could have done my full set up on my little truck camper I bought 3 years ago.