electricmonkeygarage said:
I am building a trailer to extend leaf range(prototype)
I would love to see what you have planned!
I have been thinking a lot about this concept.
My goal is to build a battery for my house. Owning a Leaf made it apparent that I didn't need a big battery for my house, but to also tow with my car. I want to build a 360v pack able to connect to the Leaf's battery with a system like
this
The pack would live in a trailer that has a pure sine inverter, and possibly a "12v" 4s lithium pack to power 12v appliances while camping/emergencies. 12v pack would be trickle charged by the large pack and/or solar panels on the top of the trailer. During power outages I want to be able to plug the pack into my house and switch my breaker panel to draw from the inverter. Then when needing to travel longer distances with the leaf (Or whatever electric car I have in the future), tow the trailer behind and recharge it as needed. It could have a built in charger that accepts a J1772 input so it can charge practically anywhere.
Some quick "back of the napkin" calculations.
I would want to use LifePo batteries as they are "safest", could use 15ah headway cells, nominal voltage 3.2v.
360 / 3.2 = 112.5, so maybe go with 113 to be safe.
Assuming each cell has a bms, and are all chained in series (no parallel), the pack would store about 5kw. At 25$ per cell, the lithium alone would cost $2,825.
Let's say you add 1 more cell in parallel, 226 cells with the same 360/363 nominal voltage. It could store over 10kw for $5,650.
Then there's of course the cost of the system that charges the Leaf pack. At pluginsupply.com their parts to link to the prius battery are $1,600. That consists of two controllers that read the car's obd2 and a charge controller that monitors both packs (stock + aftermarket) and uses "high voltage contractors" to transfer current to the stock battery/to the drive train.
However
this site claims their addon pack (looks like a leaf pack) is connected to the leaf with no additional controllers or charging connectors?