will a coleman 2.5w solar battery maintainer give me enough power to ride it and keep the battery charged at the same time.
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In a perfect world the panel would plug directly to my bike’s battery. I have not found a way to easily do this (send me an email if you know how I can). So I have to plug the panel into an inverter that then goes to an inverter which then goes to the bike’s inverter and finally to the bike’s battery. The power is going from DC to AC to DC. This likely results in a 20 percent-plus efficiency loss. Also, the battery and inverter and bike charger add another six pounds and a lot of cables to the system. Not ideal, but it works.
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No, it is not powerful enough, the wrong voltage, and uneconomical. The solar battery maintainer you refer to is only for 12 volt batteries, and ebikes typically have 36, 48 or occasionally 60 volt battery arrays. A plug in charger typically consumes about 2 to 5 amps, so that is about 240 to 6 watts to charge the batteries in 4-5 hours. A typical charge would be about a kilowatt-hour, so about 10 cents. To get a kilowatt hour from your charger, assuming it was the correct voltage would take about 4 days, and assuming 10 hours sunlight per day, would take 40 days. Since it is not the correct voltage, one would have to clip the maintainer to each individual batter in turn, so 3 or 4 batteries, it would charge the whole lot in 120-160 days, hardly a useful riding schedule. If you paid the usual 29.95, at 10 cents a charge you could charge from the mains for a whole year almost for what you paid for the panel, even if it did work.
You need at least a 60-1 watt panel to even begin to make solar charging for an ebike to work for commuting, depending on your travel distance of course. Lower wattages can work for occasional riding schedules.
Unfortunately, no. A typical battery for an electric bike might be 2 to 5 watt-hours. Coincidentally, a typical electric bike motor may be 2 to 5 watts or so. That means that a 2.5 watt panel, if you really got 2.5 watts from it, would supply 1% or less of the power needed to run the motor. Also, without special circuitry, the panel is too weak to charge the battery at all.
To keep up with the needs of an electric bike, you’d need a panel more like this one http://pididu.com/wordpress/solarbike/solar-panel-… . Quite large and unwieldy.
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