However, it probably doesn't matter due to the extreme mismatch between the engine's output and the generator's maximum power.
The generator appears to be rated at 5500W, which is 7.4HP. Efficiency of electrical generators is high, so we'll call the load 8HP maximum.
An Toyota Sienna engine has a peak power output around 200HP.
For reference, a car air conditioning system might consume around 4HP, or half of this generator's load. The generator is barely more than running the air conditioning.
So ideally, you'd pick a set of pulleys that let the engine basically idle. The goal is to minimize internal engine losses at this level, because you're nowhere near the peak efficiency islands on the BSFC map.
The limiting factor on early acceleration (0-60kph) today for all cars is now tyres. Beyond that air resistance might make more engine power matter but in general it's all about the tyres. Every car can spin their wheels at the lights if they want to. If you feel the need to floor it at the lights you're showing off your tyres not your engine power (and also wearing them out).
(racetrack joke — — who needs a big engine to squeal the tires when a set of crummy tires will do it even better?)
https://www.caranddriver.com/features/g44830210/cheapest-new...
There may not be a LOT of cars in that price range but they definitely exist.
A sub $10k "electric" vehicle that's essentially the best selling electric car in india right now because of it's price.
A 4 star global ncap rated car so not a death box btw
I'm embarrassed to have at one point unironically thought of myself as a serious Car Guy. EVs have done so much to expose mainstream male-oriented car culture as an utterly ridiculous and performative costume ball for manchildren.
and yes, 0-100 KMPH is the standard because KM and not miles is the standard.
0-60 is for those chasing numbers, 0-40, 0-60, 0-100, these are all for those who want to advertise how fast a machine is or for breaking records.
indian roads are NOT for driving at 100 KMPH on a regular basis. highways and expressways but that is not normal driving in india
edit: By point of comparison, a good cyclist produces about 100 watts, probably less if they're on a leisurely cruise. That's about 2% of the wattage of a car engine.
Bicycles are really efficient (and those motorcycles are very fast)
Is there any comparable mode of transport that can accommodate all of this in poor weather (i.e. a snowstorm) without having to wear burdensome clothing?
I realize 150 years ago people wouldn’t venture out in those conditions, but they also didn’t move more than 50 km from their birthplace over their lifetime.
I still use my car to go shopping and to transport myself. Carrying bags of groceries from the shop to the station, and from the station to my house is a lot of work and I'm not going to do that in bad weather.
And public transit is much slower than going by car. For example: My doctor (that I have to visit every 2 weeks) is 25 minutes away by car and 1.5h by public transit.
Don't trust stories about how you can work or read in public transit. The vehicles are so full in peak times that you're happy you at least get to fit into the vehicle.
And it's a thoroughly bad experience during summer, I am sensitive to smells and I just can't do it, the body odors are too much and I'd throw up immediately.
(If anything, you might find yourself too warm and sweating! Working your muscles puts out a surprising amount of heat, and modern textiles can do an amazing job of keeping it where it does the most good.)
Frankly, this is a skill anyone should have who lives where it gets cold enough to be useful. You won't always get to know ahead of time when you might be out in the cold - after a car wreck, for example, and maybe without a running engine for a heater into the bargain - so it pays to dress for what you could end up needing, or at least have the parts of such an outfit close to hand against the chance you might.
Snowstorms are a daily concern for 2 months of a year.
Extreme heat is a daily concern for 2 months of a year, too.
And rain is a daily concern for 2-3 months of a year.
A cargo bike might carry four or so grocery bins, but not the six to eight I now get on my biweekly shop.
This is why we've (unfortunately) built modern societies on fossil fuels. The amount of work done as a result of it is immense, and probably explains why there aren't vast numbers of people enslaved for manual labour any more.
This is a big difference to (piston) airplane engines because those are designed to give near 100% a lot of the time.
It sounds easier than on piston planes even. They run pretty hot when running flat-out while parked, like during a run-up test. We were always told to only do it for 30 seconds or so.
They generally use air cooling and despite the huge "fan" on the front it struggles in this scenario. When you're doing 100 knots it's less of a problem.
Also why I'd really like to have my car battery be usable by the house: storing solar or winter/night consumption all require a battery. You'll never need a bigger one for your house than the one already in your EV.
When rolling down a hill with regenerative breaking, the car is generating 50kW.
You can literally power many average homes with that.
It's not ridiculous until you compare against people doing it manually.
also, teslas are really quite efficient and it's amazing how they recover energy as well.
I wonder if there are efficiencies to be had recovering energy to come, since they can only recover what the batteries can absorb.
Thrusting a car through air at 100kph though, that takes a lot of work. Drag scales with the square of the velocity and proportionally to the frontal surface area.
Cars are a fast, but woefully inefficient means of transport.
Drag force scales with the square of velocity. Drag power (rate of work or rate of energy consumption) scales with the cube of velocity.
One of these is not like the other. Pedalling a bike doesn't come even close.
Humans consume several million calories per day at most, now as a rule of thumb a million calories is about the same as a kWh. And the only reason they consume that much energy is because the human body is inefficient at converting this heat to work. Even the best cyclists struggle to produce anything more than a few hundred watt.
More to the point, humans struggle to power a light bulb, let alone a house.
The human body does not convert heat to work. We do something entirely different (look up the "ATP/ADP cycle").
But yeah there are certainly conversion losses in the conversion of egg sandwiches to labor. 25% or so. Which is actually pretty good; you won't be able to match that with a steam machine built over the weekend (start with solving the problem of setting eggs on fire?).
I think teslas are pretty efficient:
https://forum.abetterrouteplanner.com/blogs/entry/22-tesla-m...
A model 3 LR uses less than 100 watt hours to go 1 mile at 25mph
I wonder how efficient bikes become at higher speeds with respect to drag coefficient (without a streamlined fairing)
A kilowatt is the instantaneous consumption of 1,000 watts.
This whole setup almost certainly isn't going to be able to supply "north america normal household power demand" volumes of power reliably for months at a time, but almost certainly do whatever a cheapo generator was doing before that cheapo's sketchy 150cc motor crapped out.
I thought you meant the car's gearbox
Didn't watch the video yet, but under normal conditions the car is flying down the freeway so (I'm assuming) gets some cooling effect from that flow of air. But that's not happening in this case. Might be a problem.
Cooling from running down the freeway is easy to replace with a bigger fan. However the radiator itself is not large enough to get all the power the engine is capable of. (I also didn't watch the video, but I'm guessing the donor generator had a 12 horsepower engine so the radiator should be more than good enough). Of course there are other trade offs - many mechanics have a sign "speed costs money, how fast do you want to go", this sign isn't referring to the initial cost to tune the engine for max power, it is referring to max power means your engine needs a full rebuild every 20 hours of operation.
Highway cruise for a compact car needs around 7 to 20HP, so a reasonable target output is in that range. That's 5 to 15 KWh. Seems small, but as others have pointed out, auto engines have peak outputs far beyond their continuous rating.
1800 RPM 60Hz generators are available, and larger generators tend to run at 1800 RPM. Or you could do something with belts or gears to keep the engine RPM down, as others pointed out. Running at low RPM is good if you want to run for a long time.
Probably a good idea to have the system disconnect output power until the frequency reaches at least 50 Hz, because this thing needs quite a while to reach operating frequency. Bringing up something like a refrigeration compressor (a likely emergency load) from 0 Hz to 60 Hz over the course of a minute may burn it out. Under-frequency operation is very bad for AC motors; they draw way too much current and overheat, because the inductance of the motor isn't able to oppose the lower frequency. Put an ohmmeter across an AC motor and note how low the DC resistance is.
My old 2004 Opel 1.6, 105hp could deliver almost full load (car fully packed with passengers and baggage, with roof trunk also packed, going 140km/h uphill with fully open throttle, fuel usage was reported as 16L/100km, typical road usage was 8L/100km) for about half an hour without any problems.
Smaller engines are designed to operate at higher percentage of maximum capacity at lower speeds. Roll back to the days of 40hp engines and they max out highway speeds and can sustain that for hours. As you keep adding HP the maximum sustained load at a given speed doesn’t increase. So, 1000+ HP super cars can make use of that power at 200+ mph, but they don’t waste weight having radiators large enough to dissipate that heat continuously at 85mph because there’s no way the car is staying that slow while applying that much power.
External temperature also plays a role, cars need to be able to handle highway speeds at 45C adding headroom at lower temperatures. Trucks also need to be able to do that while towing a large load.
Also catalytic converters provide more complete combustion and thus generate even more heat.
In addition, I don't see why you wouldn't just buy a home battery pack and use that to store up energy. You can run the ice in the high power bursts to top off.
I just kind of like this post because there's going to be a lot of excess ICE engines out there once EVs take over the primary job of consumer transport.
Would be nice to have a DIY recipe to convert them over to leveling for your solar grid at home
Waste heat from an ICE must be way more useful than a simple 10 or 20° gradient that they're trying to use for house heating and cooling
What I mean - cars can do fine for long periods under load as long as they are cooled appropriately, not only for 10s of full power.
I literally stopped at the Ford dealer today; there, I told the sales lady trying to sell me on the F150 that, for a few more thousand dollars, I prefer the F250 because I don't want a dinky euroboost 2.7 L turbo V6.
Luckily the F250 has a 6.8L V8 base.
Basically sounds like your typical American that buys a massive car truck. Just a drive around suburbia with for no real practical reason and F-250 would be ridiculous for that.
I'm glad every American male feels compelled by Ford and GM's advertising to buy 70 and $80,000 trucks because we'll be that much easier for them to budget out for EVs when they start coming out
They sold very different cars in Europe than they did in the USA, but it was the same company.
I'm no expert, but I can't imagine that this is true. I agree that is "average driving conditions", but there are plenty of times you're driving way outside of those conditions. That can't be how the cooling system is designed. I've never seen a car even tick up in temperature, under all kinds of tom foolery.
I've towed large loads up extended grades (hello shasta and grapevine) and you absolutely will overheat on a hot day. And that's with an uprated towing rig that had a radiator sized for the job - imagine that same horsepower of engine in a passenger car with 1/3rd the radiator surface area.
This, it can be done.
Afaik, that won't help your transmission though. If you run that at high loads often, you'll want enhanced cooling for that; often part of a factory tow package, but often available from the aftermarket as well.
Top fuel drag racers need a rebuild after every run, which typically lasts 4-5 seconds. Their engines can produce 10,000 HP, which is about 7.5 MW.
Le Mans cars and other touring cars are famous for holding up 24hrs under very high loads, even with the engine strung out beyond its street legal spec, but I think the most impressive feat is the Baja 1000.
Modern trophy trucks make ~1000 horspower, and the load is insane. The engines are running a pretty high average throttle, at high RPM, pushing a giant, heavy truck through sand, in a blazing hot desert. The fine dust can clog the filter, radiators, and get in all sorts of crevices. The whole drivetrain is constantly being shocked as the wheels leave the ground then jolt back to the correct RPM when the truck lands. And the whole truck is constantly being G-shocked, crashing into terrain you wouldn't even want to hike over at highway speeds, over and over again, for 1000 miles.
This was impressive back when the trucks were making a mere 300-600 horsepower, but honestly I have no idea how the modern turbocharged monsters even hold up.
That seems minor, but there are no paved racing leagues where a 1000hp+ engine can run flat-out for a long time. Le Man's formerly 6 km straight was the extreme, and they eventually shortened that with chicanes.
Fun fact: the Porsche 917 still holds the lap record at Talladega, even though it was set in 1975, because no one else is crazy enough to run a 1200HP 1700lb car around it. And it got so hot (running an open throttle?) that it spontaneously caught on fire when it stopped in the pits without any airflow.
https://www.jimcoracing.com/pages/fastball-racing-spec-troph...
I dunno if that counts the spares, the fuel cell and such, but thats in the ballpark of an F150.
(Why peak torque? Because that’s peak efficiency, for petrol engines at least. Makes sense if you think about it.)
Sometimes a truck will be designed to run near peak torque while towing uphill on a hot day (AC) with a headwind, but when you do that it takes a long time to accelerate to highway speed and so truckers typically just buy more peak power (trucks are already notorious for slow acceleration). Running at less that peak torque isn't too much a loss (and diesel engines don't suffer nearly as much from running at less than peak torque so the savings doesn't add up very fast for trucks)
Trains can use overhead wires, but running that on roads is tricky when people expect to pass.
Unless you're in Colorado doing 80 mph, uphill for ten miles, fully loaded with cargo - then you engine brake (ie dissipate your KE into the engine block) on the way down. Or you take you car to the track. In both situations your cooling system is still expected to deliver, and does, since its not that big an issue to size it properly and a massive reliability issue if it isn't.
25 HP would be enough to power a small apartment building.
Heating (and water) comes from natural gas, or a high efficiency electric heatpump.
Unless it is a tiny house I wouldn't not expect 35amps to be enough to run a heat pump any everything else in a house (at least none of the houses I've seen in Europe, though I've only been there for a few weeks total so there is much I have not seen). Large RVs in the US get 50 amps at 240volts, while small ones get 30 amps at 120 volts - both compare to a tiny house in size.
Cars are already designed to run A/C and alternator almost continuously, and the AC not only generates load, it pumps a lot of heat into the air coming through the radiator because the condenser is in front of the radiator. They're designed (if the manufacturer did their environmental testing properly) to do that even in ~110+ degree weather.
Methinks you should stick to things you know something about.
PS: Many cars, even regular passenger cars - can handle being driven around a track, where you can go through a full tank in under an hour's worth of driving, and are either on the gas or braking during most of the session.
There are also things called hills and mountains, which may take minutes to climb, or more. Plenty of cars make it up the Mt. Washington auto road (where the challenge is making it back down without overheating one's brakes; engine braking must be used.)
There's something called "towing", which lots of people do the world around with minivans and passenger cars (not just pickups and SUVs.)
From what I was able to dig up[1][2], the generator (that the alternator came out of) has a 1-cylinder, 4-stroke, air-cooled, 305cc engine.
A Toyota Sienna minivan's[3] engine is around 3L, so it's basically 10 times as big.
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[1] generator product listing: https://www.lowes.com/pd/Troy-Bilt-5-500-Running-Watts-Porta...
[2] similar engine: https://www.briggsandstratton.com/na/en_us/product-catalog/e...
This engine is capable of around 150kw of power, and the cooling system is capable of keeping up with that at highway speeds.
My guess is that if they are using the standard cooling system, it isn't even close to being taxed with a 5.5kw load even at 3600 RPM. That's less power output than you would expect while running the ac in stop and go traffic.
Best efficiency would be to use the fact you’re not moving to have more radiator surface area available but it’s probably not worth it.
One nice side effect of using car as generator - free heat in winter if you extend cooling loop to your home.
I don't have any idea if it's relevant at all (or how much the number can be trusted), but when I floor the accelerator in my Bolt, the dash indicator says it's using about 120kW.
1. install larger fans on to the radiator.
2. use a big shop fan to blow air over the radiator.
3. remove the mechanical thermostat on the engine, so that it takes longer to get to operating temperature.
Modern engines are designed to work at preferred temperature. They have two cooling loops, one small which is constantly cooling cylinders and one big (with radiator) which cools the small one to keep engine at proper temperature, not too high and not too low, by mixing some of small loop coolant with large loop coolant.
Point 2 is the best solution.
2:1 could easily mean crank the gearbox into a gear that approximately produces that ratio.
> You've tried to inject something on your own accord for possibly a misunderstanding??
WTH is that supposed to mean? If I misunderstood anything it was a honest mistake. GP suggested a RPM reduction for fuel efficiency reasons, it would be counterproductive to offset that efficiency gain with a high-loss mechanical device. There was neither ill intent nor hidden agenda.
Similarly -- the concerns about how to cool the device if it s putting down 100hp -- that's 74570 watts; it's unlikely they're using a harbor freight generator's alternator to generate that kind of power.
I didn't specify what type of gear box because there are many different options. Belts of the front pulleys would work. You could rig up a chain drive system as well. there are pros and cons to each.
Correct. IIRC again (numbers from 2010ish, probably there were some improvements since but I bet physics limit those) the best stick were 15%-20%; slushboxes were 25%-30%.
Such loss is justified by making the car able to operate on a much wider range, from standstill to highway speeds, and solve the ~zero torque at <1000rpm problem. IOW without a gearbox the car is useless.
Without that requirement a simple reduction would be much more efficient.
One of the huge benefits of going electric is that - in addition of having stellar electric to mechanical energy conversion efficiency (90-95%, vs a very lousy number I can't recall for chemical to mechanic energy) - the engine can basically be put on direct drive because torque is immediately available starting at 0rpm and all the way to max rpm, so no additional loss.
> I didn't specify what type of gear box because there are many different options. Belts of the front pulleys would work. You could rig up a chain drive system as well. there are pros and cons to each.
Totally fair! I didn't want to sound dismissing, only complementary.
a) expand the workable range of the IC engine (1000-5000rpm for Diesel, 1000-9000 - at best - for NA petrol, turbocharging dials it down)
b) solve the zero-to-low rpm problem that causes stalling due to nonexistent torque
It results in a complex device where many parts are still spinning even on the non-engaged gear. Look at a cut out of a manual transmission. The irony is that an epicyclic automatic transmission is mechanically efficient, up to the torque converter which uses fluid coupling.
Efficiency is a secondary goal to the ones above, without which the car would be useless.
I seem to recall improvements in that area around 2015 (probably driven by emissions regulations) but don't know the implementation details. One change was also a marked increase in available ratios (7, up to 10) which combined with better logic drives mpg down overall, sometimes lower than stick or dual clutch on standardised tests.