On 08/02/2014 09:51 AM, jerry freedomev via EV wrote:
Hi Ben and All,
Both classicautoair and vintageair make period some even stock
A/C units for yours. These are the same car dealers installed on new cars like
yours then.
Just belt it to the EV motor with the clutch to the brakelight
switch though a relay/contactor and a thermostat in traffic you can run it off
braking power a lot of the time.
Or run it from a DC motor.
Or repackage a window AC off an inverter but unlikely to have
the room for that.
Here is a cautionary tale of conversions and air conditioning.
My Hyundai conversion was initially done with the original compressor
driven off the tail shaft of my Warp9. Space constraints resulted in a
belt geometry that wrapped around the compressor pulley only 30-45 deg.
It proven impossible to keep enough tension on the belt to meet the
torque demands of the compressor. After much messing around, a second
geometry was tried a year of two later. This time, the belt wrapped
most of the way around the compressor pulley but the idler/tensioner was
on the tension side of the belt. This, apparently, lead to premature
compressor failure. Well, I wasn't real happy with the belt drive
anyway. The load on the tail shaft made shifting tedious since I had no
clutch.
Next, I tried a MasterFlux compressor driven by the MasterFlux supplied
DC, pack voltage, motor. It ran only a hour or two before failing.
Since the compressor was not of sufficient size, I eager accepted a
refund, losing only my installation costs.
Wayne reported here that he was using a 12vdc driven compressor with
good results. Simple calculation revealed that there is just no way
that a 300w DC-DC can keep up with a sufficiently sized compressor. So,
I did not try that.
Next, I tried (name escapes me; perhaps Steve will supply) pack voltage
driven compressor. It seemed to be of sufficient size/capacity but the
supplier was very difficult to deal with. I would never consider buying
from them again. It eventually took about 18 months to get the thing
that was initially quoted as about 2 months delivery time. I now have
the car loaned out and just received a report that the AC blew up. I
don't know how long it operated, probably just a few hours.
Those are only the high points of my AC adventure. I'm eager to hear of
conversion air conditioner success stories. I suspect they would involve:
1) a belt driven compresson
2) a clutched conversion
3) a generous size engine bay
In around 7 years of use, I have had a working air conditioner for only
brief periods and the cost has been around $10k. Maybe more.
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