Scooter Electricity Cost

To determine the total amount of electricity used in recharging, which also includes the inefficiencies of the charger itself, we hooked a Kill-A-Watt meter up to the charger and recorded how many watt-hours of electricity were used to recharge the batteries after various different amounts of driving our Zapino (3000w motor 60v-36ah batteries).

Cost

The cost worked out to just about 1 cent per mile (c/mile), at an electricity rate of 11 cents/kWh. (Our highest rate is 33c/kWh so it could cost as much as 3c/mile.)

Electricity Used

Another interesting figure that comes out of these charts is that it is taking about 900Wh of electricity from the wall to go one mile. Since the charging process is only about 80% efficient, this would mean that the batteries need to provide about  720Wh of electricity to drive a mile. This corresponds well to the range figures we have observered.

Data

Here is the actual data I recorded to get this information. I am planning on keeping this for the first few weeks, and then periodically recording it again to see if the battery performance goes down.

Date	Odometer (kilometers)	Distance (k/0.621 = miles)	Recharge power (kWh)	Cents/charge (at 11c/kWh)	Cents/mile
Aug 29, 2007	1
Aug 29	19.9	11.7	1.21	13.3	1.14
Aug 30	43.6	14.7	1.37	15.1	1.03
Aug 31	60.8	10.7	1.12	12.3	1.15
Sep 1, 2007	111.2	31.3	2.68	29.5	0.94
Sep 2	141.6	18.9	1.64	18.0	0.95
Sep 3	176.5	21.7	2.08	22.9	1.05

 

Other Data

These numbers correspond to what PJD found, that his XM-2000 scooter cost about 1c per mile too.