How are food trucks built and powered?
by admin on Saturday, August 27th, 2011 | 2 Comments
I plan to create a massive food truck. I would like to know if it would be possible to power a food truck completely electrically. I would like to power several electrical appliances, commercial stoves, ovens, and refrigeration units, lights, air conditioning, water pumps and heaters. I have seen a converter system with sealed, deep cycle batteries on a massive motorhome/rv that plugged in to recharge, so i feel it may be done on a larger scale. I am just looking for a simple explanation of how this all works and what would be needed to power a massive food truck. If any electricians are viewing this please provide an explanation of how this could be done, thanks for any help…
what you’re asking for isn’t really possible given the technology that currently exists.
take the new Nissan Leaf for example; it’s a small, basic car that runs completely on electricity, however, the Leaf only has a range of 70-100 miles and i’ve read a variety of reports that this figure is greatly exaggerated. a food truck is a commercial vehicle, you’d be driving this thing around to multiple places on a daily basis. any truck big enough to house all your cooking equipment is going to take a LOT of power just to get moving, which is the reason why just about any large truck is powered by a diesel engine. if you have a vehicle that weighs over 3 tons, you’d have to fill the damn thing with batteries just to move it down the road for a short period of time(let alone saving enough power to use the appliances for making food, as well as get you from place to place throughout a given workday).
my honest opinion is that this is a really bad idea. if you’re out to make money by starting your own business, this is a HORRIBLE way to do so. even if it’s possible, building a truck like this will break your bank and it’ll be a long, long time before you break even and actually start making a profit.
there’s other alternatives here. you sound like the environmentally-conscious type(who the hell else would conceive something like this?), and you need to understand that all that electricity has to come from somewhere. yes, an electric car has no emissions, but most of this country relies heavily on coal, natural gas, or nuclear power for electricity. your truck might not be polluting, but you’d still be sending waste into the environment just by charging it up. areas with hydroelectric and wind power are an exception considering their nature, but the majority of the country lacks this technology and still pollutes. honestly, can you imagine what would happen if everyone started driving electric cars? coal exhaust pollutes a hell of a lot more than carbon monoxide, at least the latter is invisible. imagine all that black smoke spewing into the ozone, not exactly a good idea for the environment.
have you considered bio-diesel? it’s still impractical, but given the nature of your concept, you could probably create your own fuel supply. as a former diesel mechanic, i can tell you from experience that bio-diesel vehicles can(and will) clog up your injectors and virtually the entire fuel system. however, if you’re willing to pay for the maintenance, it sounds like a much more feasible option compared to your original idea.
No, because of Einstein.
In order for you to power it 100% off of electricity that electric motor needs to be a certain size and weight to put out the amperage needed. Because of this size and weight you’ll need to make it larger than originally thought because you did not account for the weight of the motor itself.
As we increase the output we cause the size and weight to increase, and need to increase the output to account for this.
If you intend to use battery storage as part of the supply power then you’ll also need to account for that weight and size also.
If you use solar panels you’ll be converting and storing that elec for later use .. see above.
I do not think you can do it all on electric only with no other helping source. I do think, you can use elec as a secondary source or for some of the items onboard.
Maybe looking into fuel cells is something you should consider before going down the 100% electric route… look to the future and not past ideas revisited.