John,
I haven't been on the list much lately and I have not read this entire
thread. If I am following right you have a good quality battery pack of
Optima's but your commute is running too deep of DOC.
You may want to consider building a small secondary battery - 10Ah or
so, out
of high power batteries. There was some talk a while back on the list about
dual packs and the configurations. I would think you could build a small
10 - 15 Ah battery out of Lion, Hawkers or some other battery. Whether you
used a direct connection through a relay or some sort of load controller
would be a matter of discussion. You could build it into the Sparrow or make
it portable in something like a tool box with a quick connect. This way you
could build multiple, have various configurations, swap them out, or connect
several at a time.
An example would be a laptop battery I have sitting here on my desk
that's 2.7 AH at 14.4V. 4 batteries in parallel is 10.8 AH, 10 of these in
series is 144V. I don't know what voltage the Sparrow is so I am guessing at
144V. Size would be about 5" x 7" x 30" and would weigh about 35lbs. I
know this would be expensive but its just an example.
This way it would extend the range of your Sparrow and lengthen the life
of your Optima's by reducing the DOC.
Todd Hunter
