In the first day of our fundraising drive to fix the BioBus engine, you’ve blown me away with your support: 46 of you gave $4375 in less than 24 hours!! We’ve received donations ranging from $10 to $1000, and everyone is playing their part in getting the BioBus back on the road again. Please donate if you have not yet:
Several people have asked me if it makes sense to put this kind of money into an old bus. I’ve thought hard about it, and it does. Thanks to the blessed weather of the Bay Area (its former home), the body of the BioBus is in fantastic shape, as confirmed by multiple mechanics. The transmission was rebuilt after driving East in 2008, which should last a million miles with proper care. Then there is all the work that’s in the BioBus: paint, insulated walls, rubber floors, woodwork, electrical system, ceiling fans, plumbing, solar panels, microscope stations, wind turbine, roof garden, sky lights, and the list goes on. Sure, we could move some of that stuff to another bus, but it would take three months of labor at least, and would probably end up costing $10,000 or more on its own. And, even if you buy another old bus (trust me, we can’t afford a new one), you never know how long its engine is going to last.
So, if you haven’t donated yet, please help us get the BioBus back on the road, helping kids make movies like this one:
How about converting it to a pure electric bus. Might cost less to install a good electric motor and nickel sodium chloride battery’s and bigger and more efficient solar panels.
Hi Gabriel –
Thanks for your post and your ideas!
It would be a dream to have an electric vehicle completely powered by solar panels. Sadly, for most vehicles, and particularly large, heavy vehicles like busses, this is not yet possible. For now the best bet for the BioBus is sticking to the waste vegetable oil that powers our Diesel engine.
Why wouldn’t our solar bus work? Well, we need a motor that can produce 300 horse power, which is equal to to 223 kilowatts. Our current solar panels take up one third of the space on our roof and produce 300 watts in full sun. So in order to drive the bus with solar panels, you would need nearly 1000 times as many solar panels on the roof as we now have, which wouldn’t even fit!
But what if we got more efficient solar panels? Sadly, we’re still stuck. The sun’s light transmit 1.4 kilowatts per square meter on the surface of the earth. Even if our solar panels were 100% efficient and could convert that solar power perfectly into 1.4 kilowatts per square meter of electrical energy, and we covered the entire roof of the BioBus with these perfectly efficient panels, we’d still max out at 42 kilowatts, less than a fifth of the 223 kilowatts needed to drive the bus.
But there is hope! Check out this wikipedia article for lot’s of inspiring examples.
hey hows it going when are we gonna see ya again!