EVMaine: Batteries are a big expense. There are new types of battery chargers that claim to refurbish old lead-acid batteries. Do they work? And could a person get some old batteries and refurbish them for their electric vehicle, instead of having to always buy brand new batteries?
Tom: I have used a lot of different de-sulfators to try to refurbish lead-acid batteries for electric vehicles. You can bring a set of batteries back, but they’re not necessarily going to be for starting the car. I’ve used the desulfator on cars that have sat for a while and the battery has gone flat and I have brought the battery back. However, that’s not a high capacity battery like an electric vehicle battery.
EVMaine: Is there any particular battery charger that you like better than the others?
Tom: I like the Lester charger. Its cheap, its rock solid. I‘ve got one that has got to be 25 years old. I called up the company and the guy gave me all kinds of service and he faxed me the whole manual, just delightful. If I want to get it fixed he’ll obviously fix it for me, but they’re very reliable they’re fairly efficient and you can shop ‘em new and used on ebay and other places. They’re still kicking around because they’re long-lived. The other battery charger I like, and you see a lot of them online, they’re called ‘Bad Boy’ chargers, which are kind of scary devices because there’s no transformer, just a rectifier so a lot of people will use a ground fault interrupter with it to make them safe, and they do a fairly decent job of making a cheap charger. The catch is with lead-acid batteries, probably any batteries, you can really do a lot of damage. We like to have the things we can plug in and forget about, and you can’t do that with these chargers. With a Lester charger you can, but with a Bad Boy charger you have to turn it on and off at the right time.
EVMaine: Do you have any future plans for electric vehicles that you can tell us about?
Tom: Yeah, always, ah, trying to find big old forklift motors, for one. I would like to do a rear wheel drive conversion differential and make something that moves real fast because it has a big motor. I’ve had a Kewit that has no motor or transmission and I want to get that on the road.
EVMaine: And those are still being made in Norway, is that correct?
Tom: Right, and it’s a nice car. Actually, it has no VIN number. The guy I got it from was a toolmaker and he wanted to make a hydraulic drive car. He never did, and I bought it from him, and its basically a new car. So that’ll be a fun project - some day, and I’d like to do another vehicle that was sort of like a kit car with a fiberglass body. There are some people who are working on do-it-yourself composite body cars that would be built like boats basically, plywood with fiberglass and maybe they sell the car unassembled and that way they get away from a lot of the liability, and with just three wheels it’s a motorcycle. You could register it in the State of Maine, I think. You might have to have it inspected by someone, but you could do it.
EVMaine: What do you think about ‘Peak Oil’, and how do you think that will affect electric cars?
Tom: Its going to make electric cars more attractive because its just a matter of time that we’re going to - well we’ve already seen oil prices going up. Oil for heating used to cost about one fifth as much as electricity for heating, but that’s no longer the case. Electricity now costs only twice as much as heating oil, instead of five times as much. I suspect though that it will catch up, but you have the luxury of being able to, if it’s a lightweight vehicle like a motorcycle or a bicycle, you could certainly solar charge it. That way you don’t plug it into the grid at all. Certainly with an electric car or truck we’ll have to plug it in. That’s unavoidable, unless you’re just scooting around town covering five miles per day, or something.
EVMaine: Do you think that Global Climate Change will affect which vehicles people drive in the future?
Tom: Absolutely. Yes I think that we have this great opportunity of electric bicycles. They were expensive five, ten years ago but the price has come way down because they are now a simple, commodity item. If the economy ever tanks and we all go into a worldwide depression we can still ride around on electric bicycles. It won’t be as joyous as riding around in electric cars , but we’ll be able to ride an electric bicycle and be able to afford to get into those easily. If somebody wants to get into electric vehicles they’ll pick up an electric bike, or even a scooter (I prefer bikes) and see how it all works. Its pretty simple stuff.
EVMaine: Well Tom, thank you very much for your time, and is there anything else you’d like to say about electric vehicles.
Tom: Ah, not really. If you’re interested just get online, there’s tons of stuff online. Your web site (EVMaine.org) has a lot of great links, most of the best ones. Just get out there and you can spend hours searching the Internet and just reading up and like I say its not hard to find it. And if you’re not scared of electricity it’s a lot of fun.
EVMaine: OK, well, thanks again.
Tom: Thanks.
