I live in a condominium in Vero Beach Florida and planning on buying a car with plug in such as Mazda.
I cannot plug it in where I live and want to know can I buy a portable battery and charge it in
my condominium then bring it downstairs and use it to charge my battery in the car. We only go less than 25 miles a day to shop, beach and buy food so want to use the electric only and save money.
Frank
just get a hybrid. On such short trips, it is going to use mostly the electric motor anyway. You'll barely ever need to fill it up. And you'll never need to charge it.
The Hybrid will only kick the electric in when it wants to. You cannot control it for example. And you have to drive miles on gas to recharge the hybrid battery. I went to Toyota and they explained it to me. The Mazda has both hybrid and Plug in capability and you can choose electric only. What battery does Scotty have for $6,000.
what's the problem with that? It sounds a lot better to me, than schlepping around a 50lb appliance that only gets you 20 miles (on a good day and forget about AC), and then you then have to store it somewhere.
A Prius hybrid will go approx 170,000 miles on $6k of fuel.
I don't know what Scotty uses, but there are plenty of results in a web search such as the "Zipcharge"
lol 600 lbs!
planning on buying a car with plug in (...) I cannot plug it in
Well, then don't buy a PHEV.
portable battery
This is a bad idea.
Let's say you buy the biggest portable battery there is, a $2,799 "Jackery Explorer 3000 Pro".
Charging a Mazda would require over 21 hours and 6 trips...
(2.4 kWh delivered per battery according to their calculator, so 7.4 battery capacities.
So let's say you start with a full battery, this means you'd have to charge it 6.4 times during charging.
The total time it's charging to car (at a 3kwh rate) is 5.9 hours.
And to charge it 6.4 hours (at the rated change speed) 15.4 hours.
This is not including the time spend carrying it, connecting it, at any time - so like realistically, running around and trying to catch it, it would take a few days)
A more reasonable way is to get a Toyota Hybrid,
Or a check that the PHEV you're looking at has an option to self-charge (and really reconsider if you wanna pay for all of that additional equipment that's useless for this use case anyway!)
If you really want that specific… Look around the vicinity of your neighborhood. See if there is a charger easily accessible. Or a spot where you go to regularly that you can charge your car.
I know some folks where I live, with no charger at home, but use the charger at work.
It takes a little planning. Depending where you live, it can be done.
Well there are batteries you can buy but they are super expensive. They have enough power to charge up an electric car. I have one here at my house and it's a $6,000 battery
