My opinion about ‘‘suggested’’ battery range
@rich I would definately go for bigger capacity pack, if I were you… Lower cost might be appealing at first… but once you start building it will be a lot harder to upgrade your pack later on… of, course, you will be able to install additional parallel packs. but then again - more space / planning needed to fit them!
Personally, I think a ‘‘good distance’’ for these ‘‘light commuter vehicles’’ would be / is - ‘15km / 9.3 miles’.
I’ve got a board which is able to do about 8km (5miles).. and there have been so many times when I would have rode more, If the battery allowed lol
Also, better capacity does not come alone for the range alone… you can charge at faster rates while doing ‘‘less harm’’ to the batteries, which means you can more quickly ‘‘pump back’’ valuable Ah/Wh energy into your battery…
On top of that… if you are from the ‘‘preserver’’ type of people, who like to be gentle with the batteries, you will consider the option to charge them only till 4.00-4.10v max, which again decreases the usable capacity a little bit but not too much (at least in my case).
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So yeah, I personally think that ‘‘minimum’’ suggested emtb battery life range shold be in 12km / 7miles range.. 15km/9.3miles is even better… with some ‘‘margin’’ on top of that, you never know when after you have rode your board a little, that you might need to use it again… but oh no… you have’nt charged it yet enough to go riding further
I hope you got my point here… personal experience… so if you dont plan on go further distances with your board, you can throw my opinion in garbage
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[Edit] I decided to do some theoretical calc for your battery, probably should finally find a calc, which does this for me by itself
Distance with maximum capacity sqeezed for 10S 3P VTC 5 pack
(not very likely in real life, as the discharge rates wont be low + at lower temp than 23C is a bit lower)
270 Wh (3.6v x 10 x 7.5 Ah)
16.88 KM maximum (at 16Wh/km) **
15 KM (9.32miles) (at 18 Wh / km)
13.5 KM (at 20 Wh / km)
More realistic calculation:
253.8 Wh (3.6v x 10 x 7.05 Ah) / 2.35 ah usable per cell
at 16Wh = ~ 15.88 Km
at 18Wh = 14 Km (8.7miles)
at 20Wh = 12,7 Km
16 Wh/km - ( @whitepony achieved something like 15wh/km with his older evolve, so I assume this is pretty close to what you can get)
18 Wh/km - What I have somewhat achived with lower speed but having big wheels (9inch vs 7 inch ones)
20Wh/km - Fast / harsh riding… lots of acceleration, higher speed)
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Im personally having 192Wh battery… Im not using all of it… since I leave out on high / low range on my battery… it also gets pretty useless below 3.45v anyway…
So basically, it looks like you will get a pretty good/decent distance anyways…
Sorry about my long rant lol… I just try to improve my ‘‘battery mathematics’’ with doing all this WH / consumtion thing math…
So with 4P 10S, batt, you should probably, get something like 20Km (12.4miles) distance.. which would be awesome by the way!
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Personally, I think, someone should come up with some numbers for 7inch wheels… have not seen much data there…
Plus, if you got dual, I think that changes the math a bit, too…