Hymotion charging failure -- looking for advice.

I have a four-year-old Hymotion PHEV conversion. Two nights back, about 3 hours into the charging cycle, it blew both the household electric circuit breaker (20 amp circuit) and the circuit breaker on the pack.

Pack seems fine, based on resetting the breaker and driving it the next day.

Decided to try to recharge it. Plugged the extension cord into the car socket, and got a big fat spark and blew the household breaker. Pretty sure there's a hard short circuit there. (In hindsight, I realize I should have put a meter on it first to test for continuity, but this worked.)

I've read the threads here on Hymotion problems and am not enthused about taking this to my local dealer, Fitzgerald in Gaithersburg MD. They're great people, but given the situation, it's hard to expect much. Based on what I read here (and thanks for posting it), options appear to be $1500 for a refurb pack of unknown quality or ship my pack to some general electronics repair firm in Michigan, then wait and hope.

Before I toss another dollar at this thing, I'd like to test whether it's just a short in the charging cord, from the bumper to the pack. I can't quite figure how that would blow the pack breaker, but it still seems worth a try. We've already had several failures on that charging cord -- broke off the ground prong, had the cord replaced, broke it off again, broke off the cap that covers it. Clearly a weak point in the system, and ours has had more weather exposure than the manufacturer intended. All things considered, seems like the first thing to try.

I understand that replacing the charging cord required removing the bumper. And if that's the issue then that's what I'll do. But for now, I just want to test by bypassing the cord, i.e., just plug another cord directly into the Hymotion pack.

Can anyone here:

1) Tell me where this plugs into the pack? I look at the left side of the pack, and I see what are clearly data lines and data sockets, some empty, and a great big orange connector that I'm smart enough to leave alone. Nothing jumps out at me as an AC-in line. And I'm pretty much of the "if you don't know what it is, leave it alone" school of electrical repair. It would be a help if somebody could ID the AC in for me, please.

FYI, my plan is to unplug it and test the cord in isolation. If there's no short in the cord, I'll stop there. If there's a short in the cord, I'll plug a temporary replacement in and see if the pack will charge.

2) Offer advice on whether this is risky. Either risky to plug in a temporary replacement, or, if it turns out to be a short in the cord, just replacing the cord and not otherwise having the pack tested.

Thanks for any advice you can provide.

Update:

Looked a little further. Near as I can tell, the 120V line runs into the Hymotion battery case on the right front, via a strain relief. So there appears to be no option to unplug that line, and to test it, I'd have to open the battery casing. And, I vigorously tugged on the loose section of the 120V line (between the bumper plug and the Hymotion battery case), and got no change in continuity between hot and neutral prongs on the 120V input plug.

In short, looks like:
1) I can't test that 120V line without opening the battery case, and
2) It's not the 120V line anyway. The only part of that subject to weather and motion is the portion outside of the trunk cavity, and no amount of wiggling that section results in a break in continuity between hot and neutral.

So it looks like the short is in the charger.

If I had to bet now, given this was probably manufactured in 2007, and given what tends to blow in power supplies, I probably had a big electrolytic capacitor fry inside the charger.

Not sure what my next step is going to be. Of the two standard options -- swap for a rebuilt at $1500, or ship to Michigan for repair -- neither seems appealing. Again, any advice is welcome.

 

Well, here's an update. I looked into getting it fixed, or seeing what salvage value the pack had if not.

To get it fixed, $2400 or so, total. Fitzgerald Toyota will handle the entire transaction. The one place in the US that handles these (Sybesma Electronics) apparently won't just fix the problem -- my sole option is to "refurbish" the pack, which means fixing the problem and checking the cells and replacing them as needed. Sybesma's share of the cost is an estimated $1500. The rest is for removing and installing the pack, and shipping.

Salvage value or disposal? Zero, and no way to do it. Sybesma will not accept packs for salvage, and says there is no salvage value. A123 has no program in place to recycle the battery packs when they are dead or otherwise accept them for disposal. I guess, if I want salvage value out of it, my sole option would be to disassemble the pack and sell the cells on Ebay. I'm not going there.

The biggest eye opener is that there's no way to recycle the cells. Based on what I've read on the 'net, there aren't any lithium battery recyclers in the US, because the materials in these batteries (the non-cobalt formulation) are not worth the expense of recycling. This I gathered from a variety of publications. Apparently, with DOE subsidy, one such facility is planned for the US, supposed to open at the end of 2013.

So, as of right now, when the pack dies, it's a 200 lb piece of trash. I'm not even sure I can get rid of it -- not clear the Fairfax County transfer station will accept it, in one piece, should I choose to chuck it. So it might be a 200 lb lawn ornament when it dies.

For the record, the folks at Fitzgerald Toyota have been very good about this. If they hadn't been willing to take ownership of the problem, I don't think there was anything I could have done.

Between the likely economic life left in the pack (if it doesn't break again), and the fact that I have no responsible way to get rid of the damned thing prior to 2014 or so, I guess I'm leaning toward having it fixed. It's stupid to chuck 5 KWH of perfectly good A123 batteries, and there's no place to chuck them anyway.

Just for grins, if any of you hard-core DIYers wants to buy this pack for the cells, let me know what you'd pay on an as-is basis. Charger is blown, battery pack was performing to spec the last time I used it.

So, win some, lose some. Stuff breaks, that's the way it goes. I'll probably chuck another $2400 at it. But had I known about the recycling issue, I'm not sure I'd have done this in the first place.

 

Local solid waste agency takes "household" lithium ion, no problem. Those are typically cobalt based chemistry and presumably somebody down the line makes money recycling them. I haven't asked whether they'd take a hundred pounds of lithium-based car battery, but everything I've read says no. They don't quality as "household" batteries and, from what I can read, battery recyclers don't want them.

 

Oh, yeah, I'd been following that for some time. Bankruptcy was not unexpected.

So here's the latest. I got the quote to fix the pack, an estimated $2400. Thought about it, did the pros and cons, and decided to do it.

Emailed yesterday to set up a time.

Today -- that's all on hold. Sybesma (the one place in the US that fixes these) is in negotiations with A123. (Not with Johnson Controls. So I'm guessing this didn't convey with the rest of A123's car-related business. Which is a pity, because, I think that means that Johnson Controls now effectively owns all the cells that can be used as replacement cells for the Hymotion packs. And if I were Johnson Controls, I would want absolutely nothing to do with the legacy Hymotion packs.)

Obviously I don't know details, but, apparently, there must be some question about whether or not Sybesma will continue to fix these packs, or, at least, at what price they will fix these packs. Or something.

All I actually know is, my repair is now on hold until Sybesma and A123 reach agreement about something.

 

Thank you for all of that.

As of today:

Fitzgerald Toyota thought it was worth trying the cord before shipping the pack. At this point, I didn't think it was the cord but thought that was worth a try, all things considered. (As in, the fitting was broken anyway and we're talking $2K and up for the round -trip to Sybesma.)

It wasn't the cord.

The word now is that Sybesma will take out-of-warranty work on these packs. I did not understand the "out-of-warranty" part until I read your posting above. I guess warranty work is still under negotiation.

Luckily (?), my pack is out of warranty, and so they'll look at it. Monday (11/12/2012), Fitzgerald Toyota pulled the pack and shipped it to Sybesma for repair.

I'll put up one final posting when the repaired pack is re-installed.

 

Yes, I saw that, and I interpreted that to mean that when that US facility gets built, then you will be able to recycle your car batteries. The Canadian facility is described as recycling lithium batteries from electronics. Though, to be honest, I didn't start the process of asking Toxco if they'd take my batteries.

 

Conclusion:

We got the Hymotion pack back and re-installed last Friday. It appears to be working correctly. The depleted pack took 4.46 KWH on the first charge. So I guess that's within spec for 3 years old. Total cost was about $2800. Thanks to Fitzgerald Toyota and Sybesma. All's well that ends well.

 

Sorry, but I don't know. I don't track the performance of the pack, I only check if it I think there's an issue. If it performs roughly to spec, good enough.

I've also read that if cells were replaced (I don't know whether they were or not), it may take a few charge cycles to get adequate equalization. So the initial charge may understate the usable capacity I'll have in a couple of weeks.

The only written record I have of a charge is 5.1 KWH. But that wasn't this pack. That was the pack I had originally, which A123 replaced due to the overheating and "short charge" issue common in the earliest packs. (As I recall, at least 3 of us on PriusChat had that issue early on -- there was a thread about it.)

So it's hard to guess where this stands. I'm betting that the cells are in dandy shape. The cells have never been the issue. It's that the rest of the package is fragile.

In a little over four years, I've had one replacement and one repair, both due to the charger. Plus killing the 12V battery -- guess we'd call that a software issue, but it's really more of a "what were they thinking" issue. And replacing that marine power cord socket twice. (This time, I'm using electrical grease on that, as suggested here.)

And the biggest fail: I bought this to support a US technology ... that now belongs to the Chinese.

Anyway, this is clearly a case of the chain being only as strong as the weakest link. What I own is some absolutely dandy cells, whose use is totally dependent on the customized electronics they are packaged with. If the electronics package isn't robust, it doesn't matter how good the cells are, the device isn't robust. In hindsight, I'd say that you guys who took the the open-source approach to PHEV were smarter than I was. You can replace the broken links.

So I'll take whatever additional use I can get. It's a sunk cost. I've made my mind up that if it fails again, I'll sell it for parts.