ECO CHARGER SERIES 1 - A WELCOME EDITION ON TRUST FOR NATURE CONSERVATION FARM

New customers, Byron and Rosina recently purchased the Pioneer Series 1 4WD quad bike and are very happy with its performance. The bike is used as a general work horse on their farm at High Camp, which is a small town in rural Victoria and is located approximately 71kms from Melbourne

The property is a 153 acre conservation reserve of box grassy woodland. It is fully protected by a Trust for Nature covenant to preserve its biodiversity significance in perpetuity. The bike is used in the day to day management of the property which so far has included moving around to monitor the habitat, carrying tools and equipment for activities such as weed removal, thinning back excessive Eucalypt regrowth, planting of shrubs and grasses.

Byron explained what he likes most about the bike, “we love the fact that we charge it from our off grid solar system. This is a big system that produces more electricity than we need on all but the cloudiest days of the year. As the system isn’t grid connected we can’t export excess power, so having “optional” demands like the quad bike mean we can find uses for solar potential that would otherwise not be used. That’s better than free energy! It is energy we generated but otherwise couldn’t access.

Other features we really like are the very controllable power delivery including regenerative breaking. We also like the quietness of it. It does make sufficient noise when moving to drown out the bird calls yet it doesn’t seem to disturb the birds close by very much. However as soon as we stop moving it is instantly silent. If you were monitoring with a petrol engine you wouldn’t turn it on and off as often as we pull up on the Eco Charger and just listen. The petrol engine would idle away while we were stopped briefly and so all of those bird calls would be missed. The importance of this instant silence can’t be underestimated for monitoring and is very comparable to monitoring on foot.

We have also noticed that we are doing more monitoring and even short trips just for a few weeds we spotted that probably would have been put off for another day. 153 acres is a lot to walk over where the quad makes it all much closer and a more manageable size”.