Have you ever wanted to own an electric car? or have you ever wanted to drive a Porsche 911? I wanted both, so I decided to build one. This blog is here to document my journey as I convert a 2002 Porsche 911/996 Carrera 2 from a gas guzzler to a completely electric vehicle - not a hybrid!

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Heat related trouble

The weather is hot this week (92F, 80% humidity).  Today I drove the car about 25 miles at speeds between 60-75MPH.  When I got close to my destination, I noticed I couldn't send any power to the motor when I pushed the accelerator pedal.  I down shifted so I could get off & up the exit ramp with some speed.  As I pulled away from a stop light, the car was crawling even though I was in first gear with accelerator pedal floored!  I barely crawled to my destination a few blocks away.

The issue was the motor controller was getting too hot, and it was self limiting the power to the motor so it didn't cook itself.  I let the car sit for a few hours while I was at my event.  When I returned to the car, the motor controller was still a bit warm so I put some leftover ice from a cooler on it to cool it down.  Then I drove home.  I got home just fine while driving high speeds.

I have the Soliton1 setup without any additional cooling.  If you live in a warm environment, you should probably consider forced air or liquid cooling or you'll likely suffer a similar situation on a regular basis.  Now that it happened to me once, I'm going to look into further cooling, but no promises yet.

1 comment:

  1. Hi Kurt. I was wondering if you decided what to do with thecontroller cooling (probably not a big issue this time of the year)? In the summer, my Soliton cuts back after about 15 minutes with just air cooling, and I ordered a small radiator, reservoir and circulation pump, but haven't installed it yet.

    Have you driven much in the cooler weather? I'm getting about 10 to 15% more sag on the battery voltage with average temperatures around 35 deg F.

    ReplyDelete