Cleaning bus bars

So I'm about to start working on possibly replacing some of the battery modules. However there's a post in the forums about the worry on replacing the original copper bus bars with nickel plated bus bars. There's a video on Youtube where a guy talks about using sulfuric acid and I am open to that (seems to be the fastest way to get rid of the corrosion). However, it seems that the closest thing to getting sulfuric acid is by using a drain clog of some sort. My biggest worry is that this won't get all of the corrosion away from the bus bar. Has anyone tried using some form of drain clogging liquid to get rid of the corrosion? Also just fyi I did see a video where someone used a mix of vinegar and baking soda, but unfortunately I'm not good on conversions for that.

I'm open to ideas.

 

So unfortunately I had to stop early for the day as one of the bolts to the back seat just refused to come loose, so feeling a little defeated by that. However I got most of the work done in terms of trying to get the battery itself out. I guess if anything, I just don't understand why they have to machine tighten it so much that even a regular drill can't loosen the bolt. A little annoying, but at least I'm able to take care of it on my own in the future, once I get this last bolt.

 

Hey PriusCamper, so I did a little bit of research and Google said that getting an impact socket set with a impact drill will help to get it taken care of. Since it's already dark here, I'm gonna get after it first thing when I wake up tomorrow. But aside from that, the majority of the bolts can off like regular clockwork. Also to my knowledge, no one has ever worked in the interior of the car before me. After all, im the only other owner of the car (my mom being the original). I also just learned in a Youtube video that its a really good practice to service the hybrid batteries every year, but I find that to be way too soon. So I'm going to service the batteries every 5 years, especially since I should have the money to get myself a quad battery charger at that point.

 

Hey Primetime Paul, so yes in this case I ended up learning the hard way that its best to loosen it by regular arm strength. Apparently all of mine was zapped when it came to loosening 3 of the seat bolts yesterday. Thankfully today I was fresh and it took maybe 15 secs to get the final bolt loose. So now all the bolts are removed and the battery is able to be picked up. Now I'm just waiting on my neighbor to become available so that I can borrow him to help me carry the battery pack to the backyard and begin removing the bus bars and getting them cleaned up. But also I can begin to test the modules to figure out which ones are really bad.

 

Hey all, small little update: so I have the battery pack on the bench in the backyard and have been working on it. Right now I'm trying to figure out which settings on my multimeter I need to use in order to test the voltage. Unfortunately all videos seem to use those high price Fluke meters & all I have is the cheap ones from Harbor Freight. So just need to understand which setting I need to use to figure out which battery modules are bad.

There was a video on isolation fault testing and I wish I could do that in order to avoid testing all the modules, but I believe my multimeter isn't so advanced and thus I'll have to test them all. Just for reference, I just want to fix the initial issue and them later on I plan check them all and charge them all up when I get my hands on a quad battery charger (however if someone knows of a good solid dual battery charger similar to the cq3, then I'm open to it).

 

So update #2: so I finally found a video that helped me to test the voltage on my modules. Unfortunately the voltage told me that all the modules are good in terms of voltage, all reading anywhere from 7.2-7.5v. Now I'm wondering if I need to go to Harbor Freight and buy a load tester to see how each will do under load tests or wondering what should be the next step? I currently have the bus bars soaking in vinegar as I don't see the need to go to Home Depot and buy a whole gallon of muriatic acid for just one small task & probably never use it again (we don't have a pool, which is the most popular use of muriatic acid in our area).

 

Ok thanks for the idea PriusCamper. I'll work on that tomorrow.

 

So I just learned a rather quick homemade hack in terms of the bus bars. So using boiling water with salt and half a cup of vinegar gets majority of the corrosion off with about 10-15 minutes.

 

Hey all so here's the latest on my bus bars. So I ended up using a mix of 2 methods to clean mine. First was the boiling & after I dried them, I ended up using 2000 grit sandpaper to polish them up to where they're at now. Anyways I'm gonna go get myself a load tester now & focus on testing the modules to see if any of them are really bad or not. I'm happy with how the bus bars came out though.

 

Ok so latest update: I found 2 modules under load testing that started under 7v. They did start at 6.9, but like the rest of the pack they held under the test. So I'm thinking that they're gonna be possibly questionable for now & just order 2 modules just to be on the safe side until I can get enough $$ set aside to get myself a dual battery charger & then get them back up to their proper range.

Any thoughts on this by chance?

 

So the interesting thing in my situation is that both modules are just separated by 1 module. The one module between them is perfectly fine, which I find very weird.

Also yes I am considering reconditioning the pack, but not really sure how well the reconditioning will help, despite the fact that only 2 modules are bad.