Yes, 20 miles with a fresh 3x12v X 12ah pack. That is a slight up hill the entire way, throttle full open, about 1 hour and 10 minutes travel time, no pedaling. This is with the 500w (peak 700w) golden motor in a cruiser with slick, high pressure tires and me being a 200 lb man. I only now got around to getting a speedometer (I wanted the old fashion dial kind to go with the cruiser look, but they are incompatible with the front hub motor, so I finally settled on a newer looking one), so I'm assuming I averaged 18mph.
My controller kicks out at 30 volts, not 36... did they change the controllers?
From what I've read (and info is pretty sketchy on lifepo4), the lifepo4's only real issue is out of balance situations. I'm cheap, so for my experimental lifepo4 pack I'm wiring each cell to a terminal block and every so often I'll pull the wires and redo them all in parallel to even out the voltages. One thing that bothered me about the golden motor lifepo4 is that it's rated amperage is only 15amps(by the
BMS), while the controller can pull 22amps going up hills... I would like to see a higher continuous amperage on the pack then the controller could feasibly pull (I go up some long hillls). On the RC forums, I have seen many people use the lifepo4's in highly abusive situation (like 30C pulls, draining the cells to nothing, etc...) with spectacular results (meaning 1000's of cycles), even without
BMS's. Most of them use balancing chargers though.
I think the confusion about range there comes from a few issues. The first one is that the goldenmotor motor is brushless, and quite a bit more efficient then the brushed motors (which I've read about getting 10 miles or range). The controller is also a slow start, current limiting type, which will add a great deal to range (many of the other controllers out there allow 35-50 amp pull from the battery, the goldenmotor one is only about 22 amps max). The efficiency of lead acid drops dramatically when abused, and from what I've read, the non-current limiting, non-slow start controllers 'spike' the batteries, so every time you start from a stop, your taking many 100's of feet from your overall range. If I keep the speed to 15mph, and recharge with solar in between the trips, I get the full 40 mile range with two minimoto batteries in a trailer(two 36v X 12ah). I'm discovering that the minimoto batteries are still conditioning, and they only have 10 or so cycles on them, so I'm not sure what they will do when fully conditioned. I had hoped for more, like 18mph, 40 mile range. When I wire in the small lifepo4, it should take the abuse of the higher current draws (I'm considering anything above 12 amps to be high here for the sake of lead-acid efficiency), especially when the voltage is low, and should add to range considerably.... We'll see, like I said, the info on lifepo4 is sketchy as far as specifications.
The only real complaints I have about the golden motor kit is the low quality of the connectors on the controller. I would recommend replacing them with waterproof connectors, like the kind used for trailers on cars, you can buy them at auto parts stores everywhere. Another thing that irritated me what the there were no connectors near the motor so that you can remove the front wheel without pulling the whole wiring harness. I used a trailer harness for the power, and a 5 pin AT style plug from allelectronics.com. It's quite bulky. My wife says that the bike looks like PeeWee Hermin was assimilated by the Borg, but a small connector capable of handling 3, 10 amp power lead and 5 signal lines in a waterproof design is pretty expensive. My solution was less then $10.
I think I've gotten off subject, we were discussing solar charging. So sorry--Dave
