North Texas Electric Auto Association

Monthly NTEAA Meeting

Date : Saturday, April 9th, 2011

Time : 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM

Location : Half Price Books at Northwest Hwy in Dallas

Address : 5803 E. Northwest Hwy. Dallas, TX 75231

Website : http://hpb.com/001.html

All monthly meetings are free to attend and open to the public.

We met under the Half Price Books for a while showing off the cars.  We had a lot of passer byers checking out the cars asking questions.  Neal brought his brand new Nissan Leaf, that was the surprise that Neal gave away early.  I (Jared) brought my Fiero, Mike B. brought his plug in Prius, and Mark brought his NMG.

We eventually went inside of Half Price Book and had our monthly meeting.  We heard from Neal and Paul about the NRG launch event of their eVgo Charging Station.  We passed around Neal’s phone to look at pictures, they are posted up on this website.  It sounds like NRG’s event was a big success.

We worked out details for the Plano Living Green Expo and the Texoma Earth Day Festival.  I (Jared) brought print outs of the layout for the Plano event to show everyone.  The layout looks like we will be right in the center of the parking lot where all of the action will be at.  We will be setting up between 7 and 7:30 AM at the Plano Event.  Mike didn’t have enough details about the Texoma event so the setup time will have to be figured out.

We talked to some new people that showed up, but one in particular we talked more about.  He runs his own landscaping company and he brought up the idea of doing all electric on the equipment.  We discussed a few electric riding lawnmower options and mobile dump charing capabilities.  He already has an electric trike that he uses to get new business and he was telling us about how he has to swap his batteries to make it last all day.  It sounded like he was a great candidate for an electric work truck and work tools to mow with.  Doesn’t that sound like a business you would want to hire!  You can’t ever mow the lawn with a gasoline mower and not smell like gasoline and exhaust.  I hope he will come to more meetings and maybe we can sit down and work out on some calculations and plans.

For the last part of the meeting we discussed officer elections.  No one sent any emails for people interested in running for office.   So it was decided to keep the officer positions the same for the most part.  Paul would like for someone else to be the Secretary for our group so we will be looking for someone to fill that position.

I (Jared) also updated the group on Joel’s progress on his Electric Train that he has been updating this year.  He has the frames of the new carts welded and made the majority of the wood side covers.  He still has lots to do, so if you would like to volunteer you can get a hold of him by email or phone.  His contact info is on his website.  While I was there, he told me about his plans to get into some parades this year like when we were in the Jaycee Parade a few years ago.  He would like to get into a few parades putting his train on a low trailer and having a few kids rid in the newly designed carts.  We thought it would be a neat idea for us (NTEAA) as well to be in the parades with the electric train, maybe even try to get one of the electric trucks to pull the electric train trailer.  So we need some help finding and coordinating some parades, if you know how to get us (NTEAA) into some parades this year please contact the NTEAA Officers.

Mike B. still has lots of the NTEAA patches.  A lot of people who ordered the patches still hasn’t picked up them.  He needs to have people pick these up, he has a list of who wanted them and how many they requested.  He has extra over the order amount for sale.  I believe that Mike B. said they are $3 for 1 or $5 for 2.  Please get a hold of Mike if you want to buy some.

After our meeting we went back outside and we talked to more people about the cars.  Half Price Books location always brings in a lot of people to see the cars.  A lot of people were stopping by to take pictures of the first Nissan Leaf in the DFW area.  So the Leaf was a big hit at Half Price Books, unfortunately the level 2 Coulomb charger didn’t work.  But because the Leaf has such a large range it wasn’t needed, it was just fun to park and charge the Leaf.    Doesn’t really speak well for the Coulomb charger…. to our knowledge this would have been the first time it would have been used and it didn’t work.  Mike was plugged into the level 1 charger and it was working so at least one of the charge ports were working.

Charge Point by Coulomb Technologies

North Texas Electric Auto Association held the March meeting at Half Price Books at Northwest Highway in Dallas. There was 7 people in attendance.

Before the meeting Ron Salsini announced he is selling his Fiero Conversion.  The car has the motor and adapter plate mounted but no controller or batteries.  He is asking a very reasonable price of $2500.

Bob Pflughoft was a new guest and he was interested in converting a vehicle.  Neil Farris and Michael Harris drove their conversions so we had two fine examples to show Bob after the meeting.

During the meeting we discussed the presentation given to UNT last month during engineers week.  Although the turn out was disappointing, we now have a presentation to use at our upcoming events.  The presentation is on the yahoo group site.  Neil reported on the North Texas Council of Governments EV infrastructure meeting.  He reported that the council is enthusiastic about getting the infrastructure going.  Signage was discussed with the probable conclusion of using the same signage as Austin.  Neil reported that an EVGo representative was there and gave a presentation on their system.  There was also a representative from a startup EV maker for commercial vehicles using a sodium sulfur battery with a range of 100 miles.  We also discussed the upcoming events.  The Plano and Sherman events are both on April 16th.  There is also a car show for the North Texas food bank on the 16th at Renner and 75 in Richardson.  Neil, David and Jared have committed to having vehicles at the Plano event with Norris’s Eclipse also as a possibility.

We also discussed an invitation to Landmark Bank in Denison TX.  They have a solar “tree” that is connected to the grid and on March 28th, they will have an electric vehicle charger.

Michael McCabe of EVGo charging had requested email information on our members in order to invite them to the installation of the first charge in the Dallas area.  Although we will not provide him with our members email addresses, we will contact him to find out more about the event in early April and report that back to our group.  The April meeting was asked about and I offered that we usually don’t have a meeting in April with the events acting as a meeting.  Neil’s daughter’s school is interested in building an EV.  This is an all girl school in Dallas, TX.  So we can see that EVs aren’t just for guys.  Neil and Michael gave rides in the parking lot after the meeting.

Sincerly,
Paul
Secretary of NTEAA

Monthly NTEAA Meeting

Date : Saturday, February 12th, 2011

Time : 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM

Location : EV Tech in Addison

Address : 4310 Wiley Post Rd # 217, Addison, TX 75001

This months meeting was a smaller head count than normal (12 people) but none the less we enjoyed seeing new faces and got some good questions asked.  This months meeting was a very open discussion about many aspects of the Electric Cars.  A lot of it was dealing with the electric grid and a lot of “what if’s”.  We covered a lot of info from the electric generators,  grids current capabilities, transformers in neighborhoods and housing power panels.  Eventually we broke out into smaller groups and Paul gave his presentation off of his laptop which will be the presentation for the UNT Engineer’s Week in Denton, TX later this month.  That was the first run through his presentation, I hope you all learned a lot from it.  It will eventually be posted to our Yahoo Group file section.   We talked about buying electric cars and EV Tradin Post was brought up as a good source to pick up an Electric Vehicle.  That is a place that individuals can post their EVs for sale.  Later on, everyone went to the parking lot and checked out Neal’s EV.  After that Doug took us to EV Tech’s work shop and showed us some of their chargers and EV Bikes.  We still need to figure out where our next months meeting will be located at.  We will post that as soon as that is figured out.

Monthly NTEAA Meeting

Date : Saturday, January 8th, 2011

Time : 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM

Location : Half Price Books in Dallas off of North West Highway

Address : 5803 E. Northwest Hwy. Dallas, TX 75231

Website : http://hpb.com/001.html

All monthly meetings are free to attend and open to the public.

We had our monthly meeting at Half Price Books today.  They were generous enough to let us use their community room and their charging station.  Their charging station is a Level 1 (110 Volt) and Level 2 (220 Volt) by Coulomb Technologies.

Charge Point by Coulomb Technologies

We started our monthly meeting a little after 10:00 AM.  We talked about the extra NTEAA Patches that are still available.  If you are interested in getting some, contact Mike Barkley at koibuff@yahoo.com.  He is selling them for $3.45 a piece.  These are nicely made and can be sewn onto hats, jackets, shirts, etc.  Just check out the picture to see how great they turned out.

We also discussed the Nissan Leaf Test Drives in Irving, TX next weened (1/14 – 1/16  7AM – 5PM).  Several of use will be going to this event.  The website to register is www.drivenissanleaf.com, you don’t have to register but your wait time should be significantly shorter if you do.  Ron went to the test drive in Austin and said it is a good presentation where they show you details of the car and have a break away of the car.  Plus you get to drive an actual Nissan Leaf.  So if your interested in checking that car in person, be sure to make some time next weekend to make it to their event.

We also discussed our next months meeting.  We are planning on it being at EV Tech in Addison, TX.  We still need to make the final plans for that meeting but that is the plan right now.  We also talked about the UNT Presentation at the end of February for Engineer’s Week.  Neal plans on sending Paul pictures of his conversion that he is going to throw into a presentation for that event.  Mike H. brought up a good idea for our group.  He just bought a new charger for his EV Truck and he was asking about possibly coming up with a standard plug for our group so that everyone could recharge at any NTEAA place.  I (Jared) think this idea has some merit so we will bring this up again for next months meeting to discuss further.

After the meeting we adjourned to the parking lot to look at the EVs and the charging station and talk to the people gathered around the cars.  Once Mark brought his Meyers Motors NGM (Corbin Sparrow), it really brought a crowd like usual.

We had 4 EVs at our meeting this month.  I (Jared) brought my Fiero, Neil brought his Golf, Mark had his NMG, and Mike H. was finally able to bring his Ford Ranger EV.  Here is a few pictures of Mike’s Ranger.

Half Price Books is at a great location and gets a lot of attention!  We look forward to having more meetings at this location.  We’ll try to put this location into our normal rotation of meeting locations.

Monthly NTEAA Meeting

Date : Saturday, December 11th, 2010

Time : 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM

Location : Joel Occhiuzzo‘s House

Address : 156 Hidden Circle, Richardson, TX 75081

Website : Holiday Express Riding Train

We had our monthly meeting at Joel’s place this month.  We had a good turn out at our meeting, we got really lucky and had gorgeous weather.  I (Jared) brought my Fiero and Mike brought his Plug-in Prius 1st Gen.  We had a hand full of new people and asked a lot of good questions.  Some we hadn’t gotten asked before on the Plug-in Prius.  We talked a little bit more about the charging stations in the DFW area.  We decided we wanted to try and have our net meeting at the Dallas Half Price Books because they got a new charging station.  Also going to try and set a monthly meeting at EV Tech.  We eventually got an update on everyone’s projects.  The meeting dispersed into smaller groups and everyone talked about different aspects of EVs until everyone left.  I (Jared) stayed behind to work on the electric train.  I fixed the train sound system to get the choo choo working again and we also installed a fan and shroud over the electric motor.  It was getting extremely hot at night pulling 25 people on the train all night.  I’ve gone back and volunteered a few times at night and checked on the heat of the electric motor and it is running a lot cooler.  With the improvements Joel has done for 2010, he is able to run all night even with full loads on the main battery pack, he doesn’t have to tap into secondary pack.  So he getting a lot better performance out of his train this year.

Please visit Joel’s website to learn more about his train and what he does for the public.  He runs his Xmas Display every year and has 1000′s of people coming to ride the Holiday Express Riding Train.  At some time or another everyone should see his display at night because it is very impressive.  He can always use volunteers to help people on and off the train.  Also in January, he could use volunteers to help tear down the display for the year.  Please visit with him if you would like to help.

Monthly NTEAA Meeting

Date : Saturday, November 13th, 2010

Time : 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM

Location : REI  (Guadalupe Peak Room)

Address : 4515 LBJ Fwy, Dallas, TX 75244 Map It

Website : http://www.rei.com/stores/45

ECOtality came out and did a presentation on their Blink Charging Stations (Blink Network Website).  They brought a demo Level 2 charging station with them and documentation on level 3.  We were really impressed with their equipment and how knowledgeable they are about their product and other competitors products.  We actually learned some neat features of some of his competitors that they themselves didn’t tell us about.  But this Blink Network really looks cool and sounds like they really have listened to EV drivers and are looking at business opportunities to really be in it for the long haul.

We then just generally talked about EVs in a group discussion.   Mike told us about possibly donating a vehicle to NTEAA.  We will have to discuess this further as to what we could do with this vehicle, but it presents some good opportunities for some educational purposes.  We heard a little bit more about Mike H.’s new EV truck and went and looked at Mike B.’s Plug in Prius in the parking lot.  He has made his own version of a plug in prius that looks really great.  Hopefully Mike B. will put some pictures of his prius on his website shortly.

We will need to schedule more upcoming meeting.  We are open for suggestions for a location.  If you have  a suggestion please email us at nteaa.org@gmail.com and that will go to the NTEAA officers to review.

Monthly NTEAA Meeting

Date : Saturday, October 9th, 2010

Time : 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM

Location : University of Teas at Arlington (UTA) Nedderman Hall Room 105

Address : 400 S Pecan St, Arlington, Texas 76010  MapIt

We had a good meeting today.  I think we had 10 people during the meeting, not as many as we had hoped.  Bill gave his presentation on PWM devices.  He brought several examples to looking at.  He also had a chart of elements that showed potential energy that was interesting information.  It was interesting to see that information and where some future batteries may come from.  Paul also sheadded some light on what the J1772 standard. We got to hear an update Neil’s EV.  I got to see his new controller and it is really impressive.  I can’t wait until his EV is up and running again, its going to be awesome.  He is also taking advantage of this down time doing some upgrades to his car.  We got to hear about Mike’s (S10) and Steve’s EVs (Ranger?)  Afterwards we were out in the parking lot and checking out Shawn’s Fiero EV.  We had several college students pass by and was checking out the car.  It was interesting to find out that one of the student’s class was building a formula hybrid racer and they had some great questions.  I think we need to come back to UTA to check out this Formula car some time.  I can’t quite remember but I think they called it FSA.

For me it was a long trip!  I drove my electric car all the way down there and back!  I even picked up a passenger and he traveled 3/4 of the way with me.  I ended up drive just over 75 miles today.  I was a little worried about getting my car home on the last leg of the trip.  But Neil had two power lines in his garage and I had two chargers.  So I charged my car twice as fast and helped Neil out on his car.  Then I finished the last leg of my drive all by my self and made it home with some mileage to spare.  When I unplugged my chargers, the QuickCharge Charger was extremely warm.  I don’t think that charger liked to be plugged in together with the K&W.  Does anyone know if these charger might not like to play together?  Either way it was cool to see that I was charging at 18 Amps, I even took a picture of it!  All and all, I thought it was a good meeting, had a lot of information presented and hopefully we all learned a little bit.

Jared
NTEAA President

Monthly NTEAA Meeting

Date :  Saturday, September 11th, 2010

Time : 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM

Location : REI    ( Cross Timbers Room)

Address : 4515 LBJ Fwy, Dallas, TX 75244 Map It

Website : http://www.rei.com/stores/45
This month we met at REI in Dallas.  It was really nice to have our meeting inside.  It was a little warm out and the air condition was nice and had plenty of seating.  We had 10 people at this months meeting.  We discuss the upcoming events over the net two months (Cisco Earth Day, Dallas Green Festival, Dallas Fair, Renewable Energy Roundup in Fredricksburg).  We have people and EVs for just about every show.

We had a new EV owner at this months meeting.  He purchased an EV Pickup Truck.  He hasn’t driven it very much just yet, but it sounded like he was really enjoying it.  Hopefully he will be able to drive it to one of our upcoming meetings or events.  It is always fun to look at a new EV!

Paul is building a bill board to display at events and functions.  So if you have an EV, please send Paul a few pictures of it along with some information about your EV.  You can send those emails to nteaa.org@gmail.com, and he will get those pictures together for a billboard.

We got a good update from Doug Canfield on EV Charging Stations.  He discussed some of the challenges of installing EV Charging Stations.   It was interesting to hear about some of the challenges that they are facing.  Its interesting that they have charging stations in stock ready to go and other places are trying to invent a charging station or get companies that don’t have them to install them.  Anyways, it was good to hear some of the information Doug told us about.    We just need to get Doug to finish his EV!

All in all, it was a good informative meeting.  We learned a lot and got a lot scheduled for the upcoming meetings.  We hope to see more people and EVs in the upcoming meetings.

Jared

Monthly NTEAA Meeting

Date : Saturday, August 14th, 2010

Time : 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM

Location : Paul Schaffer’s House

Address : 430 Ridge Crest, Richardson, TX 75080    map it

We had our monthly meeting at Paul’s place.  Thank you very much Paul for opening your home to us for the last minute meeting location change.  Sorry everyone for such a late notice on the location.  We had a last minute location change due to circumstances outside of our control.  But fear not for next month, a location has already been chosen.  REI has some great meeting rooms in their store that they will allow us to use for our monthly meeting.  So we will be meeting at REI of Dallas next month.

We discussed several things at our monthly meeting.  One of them is the Fredricksburg Event.  We have interest from several NTEAA members for going down there.  We believe we can get two EVs down there if Mike can get approval of the trailer usage.  So we will discuss this further online to make out the details.

Even though we still haven’t had a first EV race yet, there seems to still be interest in it from several people yet.  So we will try to continue these events and hopefully at our next months event we can have our first EV race.  Paul picked up a scooter that was thrown away that we will tinker with that in a work shop fashion, it was a little warm to work on it this weekend in the garage but a few people expressed some interest in seeing how these scooters work.

We got some updates on projects of Mike and David with plug-in Prius’s.  Mike has cobbled together an interesting addition to his Prius, he has taken some old laptop batteries and capacitors and built a pack equivalent to the Prius battery.  He has also added a small charger to charge the original Prius battery pack to a full charge state.  So when he first start driving, the Prius see’s its battery pack out side of its programmed window so it burns off the extra energy right away, making the first part of the drive as EV as possible.  David has installed the EV button on his and awaiting the rest of his plug-in kit to arrive.  Hopefully we can hear some great updates for next months meeting about both of these Prius’s performances with their plug in enhancements.

Near the end Jared was giving EV rides to some people that hadn’t ridden in an EV before.  At the end of the meeting David and Jared went off for some EV rides and did some videos that will hopefully turn into some great EV Episodes.

We hope the new people learned some good info and have a greater grasp about EVs.

Thanks Everyone for coming,

Jared

Monthly NTEAA Meeting

Date :  June 12th, 2010

Time : 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM

Location : Cresson Motor Sport Ranch

Address : 9012 Performance Ct.  Cresson, TX 76035-4360 MAP IT

Website : American Solar Challenge

Well there was only 4 of us that showed up at at the event.  So there was no point in doing a meeting.  We spent most of the time walking around to each of the solar race teams asking them questions and seeing what changes that have done for this year.  There was still a lot of building going on Saturday.  They were testing out parts of the car to make sure they passed inspections.  Their track times are some time this week.  I think they said Wednesday.  They had to complete so many laps in 1 day or another set of laps over two days.   If they pass those final test, then they get to do the whole race.  I learned some interesting things from them.  Just wished more people came out to talk with them and see how much effort they put into these solar race cars.  I took a few pictures so you can see a few of these solar cars.