You have decided you want to ride with a 345.6 Wh battery. The board’s efficiency is now 49 Wh/mile according to the chart. Now let’s go a little heavier and suppose you weigh 270 lbs and you are riding an All Terrain electric skateboard. As an example, a 100 Watt light bulb on a 400 Watt Hour battery (like the Yeti 400) would last, on paper, 4 hours. One Watt over four hours would be four Watt Hours of power. One Watt-hour is equal to one Watt of average power flow over an hour.
Ampere-Hour (Ah): The amount of energy charge in a battery that will allow one ampere of current to flow for one hour.In brief, voltage = pressure, and it is measured in volts (V). Voltage (V): is the pressure from an electrical circuit’s power source that pushes charged electrons (current) through a conducting loop, enabling them to do work such as illuminating light.It is named after André-Marie Ampère (1775–1836), French mathematician and physicist, considered the father of electromagnetism. Ampere (A): Often shortened to “amp”, is the base unit of electric current in the International System of Units.Getting to know the vocabulary of Eskate Batteries The trick is to find a happy balance of power and range for your personal needs. There are plenty of batteries currently available that meet both of these needs while allowing you room to customize the features you want out of your ride.
So to sum this up neatly, a battery with more cells in Parallel will have a longer range, and batteries with more cells in Series will have more power and speed. What this means to you is that more cells in series mean MORE SPEED!!!! This increases the voltage of the cells and therefore provides you with more power. Series (S): Cells that connect via one positive of one cell to the negative of the next cell.What this means for you is that batteries with a higher count of Parallel cells can store more energy and have a higher range. The connected cells then essentially become one larger cell balanced with the same voltage but double the Ah. Parallel (P): Cells that are connected positive to positive and negative to negative.All the cells are either arranged in Parallel or Series It helps when you finally decide to build your batteries (yes, a lot of people do that), and you need to know whether a battery pack will fit in your enclosure.
18650 cells simply mean that each cell in the pack is 18mm in diameter and 65 in the length in mm. Lithium-Ion battery cells come in a few different configurations but all can be understood when you look at the numbers on the cells. If you think of a cell, like a single AA battery, it helps you visualize how these are configured more easily. Most Lithium-Ion cells look like real plain AA batteries, but individual LiPo cells can come in all shapes and sizes. A cell is an individual battery in a pack. So what does that mean? They are the two different configurations of cells in your batteries. You hear a lot about Series and Parallel batteries in electric skateboarding. These batteries are still evolving and are ones to watch. Of course, these are incredibly expensive as of writing but hopes are that these will eventually hit the DIY market at a rate us mere mortals can afford. Commonly used in solar arrays, these batteries feature the high discharge rates of LiPo batteries with the stability and long life of a Lithium-Ion. There is a relatively new technology out there known as a Lithium Iron Battery (LiFePO4). So you have to treat them with respect.Įlectric skateboarding is constantly evolving and batteries are no different. LiPo batteries are incredibly sensitive to puncture and can get all burny and explodey if handled improperly.
They fit nicely in almost any enclosure setup and are great for a custom AT or race build where you are trying to get a lot of power and ground clearance at the same time.
These batteries do not have onboard Battery Management Systems (BMS) that help balance the charge across the batteries and must be recharged using an external battery charger with a BMS system built into it or a small portable onboard BMS. LiPo batteries have a solid reputation as a cheap power source for most electric skateboards.