He has been around for a number of years with the SunHorse Gardening System, the walk-behind deal. I had requested a video of it for a workshop I was doing on electric tractors, back in the days of VHS. The video arrived the day before so without time to preview it, I showed it to a bunch of farmers and gardeners. Suffice it to say no one was impressed, particularly with stability or ruggedness.
I can't seem to find as much detail on the tractor as others report (pricing, PWM controller, etc), but from what I do see there are some odd details: To be at all useful for real farm chores with real attachments, it would need a big battery pack (along the lines of a basic on-road EV conversion... 25+ KWH) (an Elec-Trak pack is 7-8 KWH). I'm not sure I see enough space for such. Moreover, a 200 watt solar panel would take close to forever to charge such a pack. Even a 120 volt (110?) would likely take 12+ hours (assuming a 15amp outlet). For farm use I'd want a beefier 240 volt charger so could get a useful boost over lunch and a full charge in the 6 hours that defines overnight at peak season.
The battery gauge picture looks like a Curtis unit... if it is the one I think it is, it does not count backwards. ie it will not register partial charges; it will only reset to full at the end of a complete charge cycle.
I'm also curious what federal rebates/credits apply to tractors rather than cars?
Basically for the price, it should be nice, but I'd want to know a /lot/ more first.
On 5/21/11 10:06 AM, Kim Petty wrote:
Have you seen this one yet? I came across this electric tractor today in the Farm Show Magazine. I had not seen this one before. It appears to use cat 1 3pt. attachments and has a PTO. I like the pto! The base price is$13,500, the price with the solar roof option is around $16,000. They say with state and federal rebates and tax credits it should cost $10,000. I hope they make a go of it. Kimball http://www.freepowersys.com/index.htm _______________________________________________ Elec-trak mailing list Elec-trak cosmos phy tufts edu https://cosmos.phy.tufts.edu/mailman/listinfo.cgi/elec-trak