Enginer Feb deliveries are much better

Dan,
I just did an install in a PriusChat member's car on Friday.
8khw. Hopefully he will chime in on his experience. I'm especially interested in the charging behavior.

 

Dan,

Can you snap a picture of the new switch? I really want some switches that I can actually see in the day light.

Thanks

 

Attached is a pic of the new switch.
Of course this install has two of them since I installed it so the kits are running in parallel.
The switch on the left is also wired to enable EV mode.

And here is a link to the entire album of 14 photos.

 

Yikes...I wouldn't want to ride in that car =P. Isn't there a better way to bolt that extra box down?

Are they still using the same Chargery balancers as before? Can't really tell from the pictures...

Andrew

 

There are other ways for it to be done. (And I'm always open to any creative ideas anyone else has.) This mounting strategy is what this particular owner requested so I obliged.

It is the exact same balancers as before.

As for the overcharge protection, the owner has plugged in his pack several times now and has not seen any high alarms caused by overcharging. Definitely different than the prior-to-February-2010 kits.

 

This better kit seems to be what I have been waiting on. Is there any other improvement you would like to see? By the way is that a 52 Desoto fire dome v8 in your picture? I had one and pulled a 39 ft mobile home to Washington state and back to Indiana. Blew the trans. showing off on a quick start. Loved that car. I would like to read more of your experience with enginer. don

 

There is always room for improvement with any product. So I expect we'll continue to see differences in theses kits as time goes on as well.

My avatar is a 52' De Ssoto. Good eye! Officially it is a 6 cyl, but man, I would've liked it to be an 8! 1952 was the first year they put the Hemi V8 in them.

 

Thanks for the graphic confirmation of what my customer has said about the latest batch of batteries. No more cells maxing out at 4.0, 4.2, or higher! This will save some cells and help keep customers happy.

 

This new internal cell cutoff--is it some sort of mosfet that turns the cell off when it reaches a certain voltage like in a laptop battery or is it some sort of internal discharge circuitry? If it's the later, you still could over-charge the batteries if the charger can overpower said discharge circuitry.

Does it have any similar protection on the low end?

Andrew

 

I'm still waiting on the installer to finish getting everything tested & working on my pack. I ordered last year, and he's still been having issues with cells, balances, chargers, etc. Hopefully, it's almost worked out. He wants to install it in his G1 first, and see how it performs before he installs it in mine and sends me off.

I believe Dan, you may have spoken to him on occassion - he's Pat in PA. Either way, I've been a little frustrated with the quality aspect given how many things have failed. I've said to Pat, that'd I'd have preferred to spend a few hundred $ more to have more reliable components. Hopefully I'll be ready to go soon and can provide some input into these.

Dan - are you using anything to monitor the pack in your G3? I'm not too technically inclined into how all this stuff works together (I understand the basic concept, but not technical info), but possibly once I'm up and running you can enlighten me on some things you do that maybe I could also do in order to provide an extra point of data.

 

Hi Dan,

As best I can tell from the graph you posted earlier, yes the cells do not shut off so that means they probably have a massive internal load to offset the charger current (that is, burn it up as heat). I would expect that to cause the batteries to heat up and still wouldn't guarantee overcharge protection...

Do the batteries that are higher than others seem to heat up as they near the end of the charge?

Andrew

 

Hi Dan,

Forgive me for asking, but why are some of the cell voltages going /down/ while charging? I can't tell from the picture which ones, but it looks like a few of them are peaking downward while the charger is still active...is that related to the overcharge protection?

EDIT:
I just noticed the scale was much larger than I previously expected so the voltage drop isn't as large as I thought, but still...any idea what the current drop was throughout the last portion of the charge? Even with a steep charger current drop I wouldn't expect the voltages of the cells to drop that much...At the very least it demonstrates a rather big difference in capacity (since the higher voltage cells are further along the curve).

Andrew