I attended the regional Sustainable Energy Expo on the 5th of April which was another great opportunity to show off the car and get people converting their own! It was a great day with loads of people and lots of questions. Interestingly, the Tredia was positioned right next to the Toyota Prius on display. I found it amusing that a gas-powered hybrid is at a sustainable energy fair. I stole all of the Prius' attention anyway as you can see in the photos! (cue evil laugh).
I must say a big thank you to Peter who took the photos on the left (and down the bottom of the page) as I was so busy answering questions I completely forgot to take any.
I had little window display cards with all the quick facts like time to convert, cost of conversion etc to make things easier on my voice (any EV owner will know exactly what I mean!) and while most of the people around the car were guys, the Tredia had a lot of attention from women too. This is good as we need more girls to convert electric cars proving that anyone can do it.
Apart from the Prius, there was a cool diesel Peugeot running on waste cooking oil, and a few solar and wind energy displays. The school where the expo was held has a wind generator and solar panels to supplement it's energy usage too. I couldn't resist having a sniff of the bio-diesel Peugeot's exhaust as discreetly as possible while it was running. I could definitely tell it was running on cooking oil and because it was used in chip fryers it smelled faintly of a fish & chip store!
I was asked several times what sort of incentive I recieved from the government to convert the car which of course the answer is none. That answer shocked everyone and it got me thinking just what does the self-proclaimed Clean & Green government of NZ have as it's priorities? Considering our country's image It's saddening that EVs aren't one of the priorities. Still, it doesn't deter me from wanting to convert another EV one day.
All was forgotten soon however as the Tredia clocked over it's first 1000 gas free kilometres! That's 621 miles of completely gas free driving!
I had one scare after hitting 1000 km however. I was demonstrating the car for another EV fan and we'd only got 800 metres from home when I put my foot down to show off the acceleration. At that moment the car made a crackling noise and I lost half of my power. I quickly yanked the circuit breaker and tried restarting the car again but it wouldn't move more than an inch before the familiar Curtis whine turned into the unfamiliar Curtis crackle. After contacting EV America we'd tracked the problem down. All that worry, all that arcing, all that crackling, all those attacks from a car-less wife - all due to a loose bolt! I replaced the washers and the nut & we we're driving fine again! Phew! Photos are at the bottom of the page. Thank you to Bob at EV America for his awesome support!
I'd also like to send a big thank you to Rex Nowland for sending me his 72V Alltrax controller as an emergency backup. I owe you one. He's just purchased a new 120V Curtis for his car so he had the Alltrax floating about. Thanks Rex!
Later in April my shiny new Zivan 16 amp onboard charger arrived ready for installation. First stop was the Rexel electrical store which is a treasure-trove of goodies for gadget freaks such as myself. That's where I found the ideal cable and weatherproof plug for mounting in place of the old recharging plug. I stopped by Supercheap Auto on the way home and purchased 2 new drive-on ramps to make the charger install easy - and of course it'll make KiwiEV #2 much easier as well. ;)
Next step was to remove all the remnants of the (now) old charging system. Only 10 weeks ago I was installing the multi- pin plug and here I am taking it out again!
It wasn't long before I had wired up the new beast and was trialling it with the batteries unplugged. I then triple checked all the connections and flicked the switch. After a couple of "hello" beeps, the charger fans fired up and the charging light came on! Woohoo!
The batteries were already near full so after only 20 minutes the charger turned off and the green charged light came on. I then took the car for a quick spin to drain the batteries down a bit. After zipping the EV around the city at night, I'd brought the voltage down from 160 to 149 volts, Perfect! I plugged in the car and it started charging with a beep.
In just over 2 hours after plugging the car in, it was fully charged again and the charger had switched off! Is that cool or what!
From 50% to full takes only 2 hours and 45 minutes and with the standard household plug under the gas cap we have opportunistic charging. I just have to figure out where all the local charging points are around town...
