An apt t-shirt & read, a very cool library, and in the “sounds good to me” department…
I’ll go on record that an electric drive propulsion system is as simple as one can get. All you need is a motor, a means of controlling that motor, and a battery.
That’s the easy part.
Where it can get complicated is in the details but it doesn’t have to be.
So here’s the electric propulsion system I put together for “So It Goes”…
Our first system in 2003, had an Etek motor ($200), a replacement controller for a golf cart ($100), an aluminum mounting bracket ($30), and an assortment of sprockets and chain for the actual power transmission ($100). I bought the electrical control bits at Radio Shack ($15) and it worked just fine. The actual motor mount was cobbled together with some scrap plywood I had on the boat.
Hardly an expensive installation at $445.
As far as the battery bank went, we used six-volt golf cart batteries in a 48-volt, 200 AH bank. Which, admittedly, was far too expensive and heavy in my opinion. In real life usage it was also more than needed.
Our real life usage of the propulsion system was never more than a half hour or so and never used past about half of the available RPMs.
Where we did have problems was keeping the battery bank charged. The CAL 34 did not have enough room for a big solar array and charging the batteries with our Honda generator took forever and used more gas than was sensible.
Which brings me to what I’d do today. As our real life needs appear to be about half the original system, I’d roll with a 100 amp hour 24V battery bank and a drive system something like this…
Pretty much everything you need.
A couple of 12-volt batteries make sense. Easy to keep charged with a dedicated panel(s) and don’t cost silly money. Yes, I’m still thinking lead acid. The upside is that if I find I need more power, I can just up the voltage to 36V or 48V.
Anyway, something to think about.