eBike energy consumption
People have asked "so just how much power does that consume". Sadly, the built in intelligence doesn't provide that info. Somewhere buried is my old "killawatt" meter. Giving up on finding it, I ordered a generic replacement. After a bit of data collection, I can say between .02 and .03 kwh/mi. My typical commute (13 miles) requires about .330 KwH to replenish the battery.
The Stromer provided charger appears to only use the battery pack voltage to determine SoC. By measuring the power at the outlet, losses in the charger are accounted for ... so perhaps it's for the best that the charger doesn't attempt to report just the power put "into" the battery (although that would have been nice ... and suitable for most folks). As I have two chargers, I've noticed some interesting things:
- The amount of power consumed for roughly the same miles traveled varies. Either the hilliness factor is substantially different, or the chargers do not exhibit a consistent "charging profile". Given that there is no automatic shutoff, I'll need to gather a lot more data to come up with a reasonable diagnosis.
- The peak amps are below 2.3. Sufficiently low that just about any office (or residential) outlet does fine.
- The charger "never" actually shuts off. While it signals "green" when "done" it still trickle charges at a fraction of an amp. After enough time, the charger goes from green to yellow and gooses the amps up a bit. While users are warned about overcharging, it seems likely that if one doesn't allow it to trickle charge from time to time, cells are probably "unbalanced" with weaker cells getting worse. Hard to know for sure, since the battery is sealed (warning).
Folks who want to compare this to other vehicles may want to use this sort of analysis. Assuming they got it right, that's about .73 (Prius) vs .02 (Stromer), and 100x better than (ignore the early posters who didn't notice the difference between Wh and kWh!) Tesla