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EV and My Commute

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If you read my analysis of the commute blogpost , one of the pieces that I had to guess about was the multiplier of battery usage.  Essentially, I was guessing that going uphill would use 2 times as much battery and going downhill would use 1/2 the battery. I was wrong on my predictions, but in my defense, I was about to spend several thousand dollars and I did not want to be wrong, so I was conservative with some of my predictions.  I want to go back and look at them and refine the multipliers due to elevation and also add some in for some other pieces as well.  Let me define what I mean by multiplier.  When I drive 1 mile, I expect that the battery level of miles left will drop by 1 mile.  That is not always the case.  In fact, that is rarely the case.  Every commute is different and most people do not drive an electric car or do not have a commute that is as close to the EPA mileage rating of the car.  My commute is 80 miles.  That is ...
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One Week of Commute Data

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After a week of commuting, I have found that I use, on average, 25 miles of battery getting to work and 40 miles of battery getting home.  This has to do with the net elevation drop going to work and the elevation gain coming home.  Here are the charts of battery marked mileage vs actual mileage going to work and going home.  See my earlier blog post on analyzing my commute . I am working on a way to show how I drive.  Honestly, I drive with the flow of traffic, but on the rads I drive, it rarely goes far above 50mph.  So I am working on a report of miles/kwh that would make sense.  I have been reseting this measure at every checkpoint so you can see the miles/kwh for that stretch of road and not the average of the trip or week.
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Day 1 of Commute

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Day 1 of the commute would be Monday morning.  I had a Sunday night debacle where the 220V port was not working, so I had to charge with the 110V charger on Sunday night and Monday night What's the issue with the 220V versus the 110V?  The Kia Soul EV takes 5 hours to charge on a 220V charger while it takes 24 hours to charge on the 110V charger.  Go figure, getting more electric current causes you to charge faster.  Not every vehicle has the same time-length requirements, but you get the point (slower current = slower charge AND 110V is slower than 220V). So my 220V debacle is that the 220V plug in my garage was not working.  We had the electrician come over and fix their work on Tuesday morning.  Once that was taken care of, I had full charges a plenty.  But on Monday and Tuesday I had to drive to work with a 70% and 60% charge respectively.  This is not a problem, but I do drive a roundtrip of 80 miles and I needed to make sure I made ...
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Elevation and Range of my EV

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After 3 days of collecting data, I figured I would show some of the results I have so far.  Here is my current data of mileage versus elevation. What the heck does that show? RED:  Elevation of each checkpoint along the route Blue: miles gained from between the point before to the current point X-Axis - Actual miles traveled to get to this point For example: Going from 10 to 15 along the bottom.  That means that I traveled 5 actual miles of distance.  The red line goes up (from 1309 to 2665) meaning that I was going up a hill and the elevation changed a lot.  The blue column is at -5, meaning that I lost 5 miles of travel on the vehicle.  Basically, it took me 10 miles of battery to go 5 miles of actual distance.   When the blue columns go down, I lost distance that I could travel.  Another way of saying this...The car used more power to go that distance.  When the Blue columns are up, I gained distan...
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Analyzing my commute for an EV switchover

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I mentioned that, in order to make the best decision possible, I did plenty of research.  Here is the research that I did on my commute.  The weekends are easy, the commute is what I wanted to make sure the EV could handle.  Most people drive less than 80 miles per day, hence the 24 kw battery in most EVs that gets an estimated range of 84 miles on a test track.  What does that mean?  we do not drive on a test track.  So here is the research I did on my commute. Resources: Elevation of points along my commute - https://www.whatismyelevation.com/ An app to help me determine what EV to purchase - http://mygreencar.com/ Spreadsheets - I am a Google sheet person Map tool - maps.google.com Here is a map of the route that I take, by elevation.  Why?  because they say that elevation affects the energy used by an EV and can change the range of the vehicle. So it is not a perfect elevation chart, but you can see that I sta...
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Buying the Electric Vehicle

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So I needed a new car.  I had a 2011 Hyundai Sonata with 145K miles and I put a quart of oil in the car every 2 weeks.  It is not that it is dead, but it is showing signs of heading that direction.  I don't have lots of extra wiggle room in the budget, so I figured, the only way to take on a car payment (Hyundai paid off) was to give up gas.  Not that it was a definite, but it was something that I wanted to check out. So I checked out every used Electric Vehicle on the market.  In reality, the tax credits are awesome on the new cars, but I don't have the funds to cover that up front.  So used we go. There are plenty of used EVs (electric vehicles) out there that get in the realm of 80 miles per charge.  The issue is, can I rely on that from a used EV?  If not, am I willing to change my life and spend an extra hour on my commute charging every day? Let me explain my commute.  I commute 40 miles to work, but the commute is no on the ...
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