164: Saturday 16th October 2010

I knew it was a mistake to say that Sparky was behaving himself. The Probatron was all charged ready for its first trip to football training. We set out with 18 miles done, arrived at the normal time at football training with 125v still reading on the tester, all was well. 2 hours later we set off to come home and once we were on the main road it seemed to be constantly uphill all the way home. I was watching the battery voltage going down and down until when we was about 6 miles from home the controller started cutting out. I limped it into a lay by and just let the voltage build up again. when we were back at 120v I set off again, but I knew it wouldn't last long. We got within 2 miles of home and it was cutting out again. I knew we had a hill to go up, so we stopped for another 5 minutes or so to let the voltage recover again, and we managed to limp home. After about 4 hours of charging a quick local trip out and all was back to normal. It is clear now that the Probatron cannot maintain a long period of higher current. I could probably try again using up to 3rd gear only so as to keep the current lower and drive at a slower speed, say 50 mph. I also believe that having my daughter and my wife probably added over 100kg of weight and this affected the range. So for now I shall set a 30 mile limit for our journeys when we are all in the car as we got to 31 miles when it cut out first time today. I just hope this hasn't affected the life of the batteries too much. I can't believe my test runs gave me 40 miles with maybe a couple more to spare. However this was done in several shorter journeys. I learnt something today. It is good to know the Probatron is back to normal just for a charge though.