Zapino Li-Ion Conversion: Cost

Posted by Max Dunn Sun, 22 Aug 2010 16:25:00 GMT

Thundersky battery package I have been putting off this post about the cost of converting my Zapino electric scooter to lithium batteries because it was certainly more than I would have liked to spend. But anyone that is considering doing the same conversion should know about the cost, so I am going to bite the bullet and put out the numbers.

Whew, that wasn’t as bad as I thought!

I considered saving $300 by not buying the charger, but I am glad that I got it. Besides being 3 times faster than my current charger, it also works great with the battery balancers by providing pulsed charging at the end to equalize all the batteries.

Also, with care these batteries should provide about 60,000 miles of use, which works out to about $0.03 per mile. So even though the purchase price was high, the lifetime cost will be about 1/3 that of the cheaper lead-acid batteries all while providing higher performance.

Posted in  | 4 comments

Comments

  1. Gregg Meyer said about 12 hours later:

    Do you suppose the performance boost is mostly due to reduced mass, or do they put out a slightly higher voltage?

  2. Max Dunn said about 12 hours later:

    The lower weight definitely hopes with acceleration (and to reduce bottoming out the shocks!), but I think the real performance boost is because the voltage of Li-ion batteries don’t sag very much.

    For instance, with my old AGM lead-acid batteries, the first few miles it had a lot of pep as voltage stayed above 60 volts. But then it would start to drop to 55 or even 50 volts and performance suffered.

    With Li-ion, the voltage rarely goes below 60, and usually stays above 62 even with hard acceleration. This means that performance stays peppy all the time.

  3. Petehansell@excite.com said 36 days later:

    Hey Max, Just purchased a Zapino. New, but two years on sales floor. I have problems covering 11 miles at 25-30 mph. Do you thin that is acceptable, or are my batteries failing? I was really hoping for 20 mile range at these speeds. When charged, batteries show appr. 13.2v. Afterward ride, the voltage drops to 12.1v. Thanks for any assitance.

  4. Max Dunn said 64 days later:

    Pete, 11 miles is not good and means your batteries are getting near their end of life. Unfortunately, once it drops to that range it will start dropping fast. If you have the skills, you could take it apart and charge each battery separately. Sometimes one battery can get weak and pull down the whole string.

RSS feed for this post

Comments are disabled