General Electric

ElecTrak E-15

It turns out I was not the only one to have the electric snow thrower idea... not even close. I just had the idea about 30 years after General Electric. The electric snow thrower I built, The 600-lb. Cordless Electric Snow Shovel, is now disassembled. This is because, by chance in the summer of 1998, I wound up with another electric tractor, a GE ElecTrak E-15. (Thanks Miriam Aubrey and Dick Slade!) And Rob Vasichek sold me a snow-thrower attachment for short money (thanks, Rob!). The snow thrower is about 44" wide.

44" Wide.

Keep hands and feet clear, please.

An extra raft of batteries on the "back porch."

In the picture above, note the platform (the "back porch" as I call it) on the rear which supports another six 6v golf cart batteries. The benefits?

• provides added work time (the batteries that came with this machine are pretty old...)
• a nifty counterweight to the massive thrower attachment (when it is lifted, steering gets hard, especially on dry pavement)
• the >400lbs adds weight to the rear wheels which improves traction (no need for chains so far; knock on wood)

Tips for those of you who might do something similar:

• running two battery packs in parallel seems to be a fine, even though the batteries have very different capacities (owing to the big difference in their ages)
• I charge them in parallel if it's only a light charge
• I charge them separately if it's a deep charge(otherwise the draw is >25A, and that's past the spec for both tractor's own charger and my old golf cart charger)
• I have never run two chargers in parallel, even though the voltage between negative terminals is negligible it still gives me the willies
• The disconnect I use is this big battery-post-mounted quick disconnect terminal I got down at ADAP for about $7. It is high current, and with its big plastic knurled knob, you can even disconnect with gloves on. Nice in the cold, eh?

When spring comes 'round, I'll take the back porch off and set it aside for next winter, and put the 6 batteries in my little electric commuter car until the snow comes around again! It is overkill for mowing use, and the added length would diminish the ElecTrak's already less-than-perfect manouverability.

There's four gears on this thing: D2 (up to 6 mph); D1 (up to 4 mph); and L (up to 2.5 mph); and LL (a mere 1 mph). The motor still turns at the same speeds, even in LL, the consequence is the usual benefit of higher torque to the rear wheels. In LL, this thing is more like a bulldozer. It's beautiful.

Throwin' snow, February 1999.

A schematic of the second battery pack attachment. (Click to enlarge.)

The auger looks like this:

Just because it's tangentially related...

This is a Craftsman conversion to electric... 6 6V batts, Craftsman riding mower to electric with a 36VDC golf car motor and a Curtis 36-48V 275A PWM. Worked ok, including as a mower, of course. The one thing I would do differently is gear up the linkage between the motor output shaft and the rest of the guts. I think the ICE on the original turned a little faster than the ~2000 rpm that the series-wound motor gave at 36V.

Don't mind the light saber. Episode One had just come out, and the student in the pic is a big fan.

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