First Enginer PHEV install in the Portland Or area, Gen2

Jan 5th 2009
I am starting this thread in the Gen2 plugin area because yesterday I put my kit into my 2005 Prius. This is temporary. When I get my Gen2 Kit then this one will go back into the 2010.

I took apart the car like Doax did on his video. I installed the Pig tail onto the HV terminals.


Black wire closest to the seat, Red wire closest to the back bumper.

I put the box in the car and loaded the batteries into it. I did 8 cells at a time and hooked all the wires up on the forward bank before putting in the second bank. I put them in with the terminals that connect to the cables from string to string toward the top so that they could be easier to access.

I put in the hold down bars and reconnected the balancers. I put on all cables and reconnected the buddycell jumpers. Note that I did the buddy cell with jumpers rather than with copper bars. The jumpers are the white wires in the following picture.

These jumpers allow me to easily check individual cells and also let me check the current levels flowing back and forth between the two banks of cells. The jumpers carry 1 amp or less during charging. They carry up to about 5 amps during discharge. I see more cell differences with measuring this current in the jumpers than I can see with the cell voltages. Note that I still used the Enginer provided red and black cable at the end of the bank because they carry 20a-30a.

I installed an orange SB50 Anderson connector on the pigtail.


This is so I can easily move the box from car to car. This connector is the same as Enginer uses on the charger except I chose orange to match the HV color used by Prius. Note that Anderson plugs are keyed with color so that you cannot plug an orange into a grey.

After reconnecting the Prius batteries. I put my DVM on the Prius side of this Anderson connector and turned the car on. I got between 200v and 230v with the red wire positive. I then turned off the car and put the DVM onto the Enginer side and turned the Kit on but got nothing. After an hour of frustration I was reading the Enginer instructions and found that I had not checked the 100a breaker. Did it again and got 245v with the red wire positive. Then I turned it all off and put the Anderson connector together and turned it on and it worked. 10a flowing through the cable to the Prius HV battery and 55a flowing from the engineer batteries to the converter.
More later,
Thanks,
Dan

 

Jan 5th 2010 Evening
Hi Everyone,
I drove the car in pure EV mode for a mile with the headlights on last night. The Enginer system charged the Prius HV Battery from 5 bars to 8 bars. All was fine. The converter fan came on. But all temperatures were OK. This discharged about 3/4 kwhr from the Enginer battery.

The batteries were then left to balance overnight. The cells had a rest voltage of 3.331v to 3.351v in the morning.

In the morning I charged the system a second time. Here is the data.

Shown is both the 1st charge and the current for the 2nd charge. I aligned the charger shut down points assuming that the batteries had a similar SOC at that point. So you can see this charge took 80 minutes. It put 0.8kwhr into the batteries. The surprising thing is that it still ran for the first 30 minutes at constant current. This means that it was going through constant voltage mode for a shorter time and so the rate of change was much steeper. With no trickle on the end, shorter charges like this are higher risk of damage to a cell. The imbalance from cell to cell was at 160mv just before shutdown. I did not get any alarms.

I left the car to balance for about 4 hours and then took a drive. I drove for 23 miles and got 65.5mpg. I normally get 45mpg on this car doing this type of driving. So I am happy that the system worked as advertised.

The Prius HV Battery stayed at 7 bars. After 3 miles I got a VCS light and did not know what it was. No error codes. I turned off the Enginer kit and drove for another 3 miles. Including stopping and turning the Prius power Off and On 3 times to try to clear the light. I could not clear the light this way. The Prius Battery was then down to 5 bars so I turned the Enginer system back on and drove on. After another 3 miles I was back to 7 bars. I then parked the car for about an hour. After that when I started it again the VCS light was cleared. I drove home with the Enginer kit on all the way and no problems. I did not fully use the capacity of the Enginer batteries. I will see how much charge they take in the morning.

Thanks,
Dan

 

Hi Dave,
Yes, That is my plan. It will not be bolted down because I will eventually move it to my wifes car. But it is in the box and complete. I still need to do a better job of puting the switch in the dash.

Thanks,
Dan

 

Jan 6th 2010
Hello everyone,
I let the cells balance overnight. Then charged in the morning. It took almost 3 hours and put 2kwhr into the battery. I was 190mv away from an alarm. This seems to happen when the charging current is at around 10 amps. The cells tend to have their worst balance at that point. Then as the charging current drops, the cells tend to recover a little and the balance gets better.

I let the car set for about 4 hours. Then I took the car for an 18 mile drive. Again I got warnings lights, VSC and ABS. They came on when I was at 7 bars and had hit the brakes coming into a stop sign. I think my converter voltage is set just a little too high. After parking the car to go into Radio Shack for 10 minutes the lights were cleared.

After that I turned off the Enginer system at 6 bars and back on at about 4 bars and did not get the lights again.

I got 62.6 mpg for this 18 miles so that is a total of 64.2 mpg for 41miles, with 2 warm ups.

I still just get this feeling that I need to improve my driving technique even though I realize that These are good numbers.

Thanks,
Dan Lander

 

Hi Andrew,
Thanks for your input.
No red triangle. No noticable change in the way the car drives or handles but I was not driving it like I drive my MGA. No error codes on the OBDII. It will not clear with a quick off/on but does clear with 10 minutes off. It has happened 2 times both at about 3-5 miles from the first start in the morning.

The car is a 2005 I have only had it for a month.

Thanks again,
Dan

 

Jan 7th 2010
Hi Everyone,
This morning I charged and got an alarm. It was still taking 3 amps when the alarm sounded and I manually shut it down. It was very close to the normal shutdown anyway. I am guessing only 3/4watthours. This is less the 1% of capacity. I am guessing that even if I had missed this alarm, no damage would have been done this time.

Then the car sat for about 2 hours. Then I went for a drive. 67.6mpg for 35miles. I was able to do a lot of EV because we were on city streets. At one point I got 5 miles of constant EV. This section started at 7 bars and ended at 3 bars with the Enginer system adding power the whole time. It was normal driving on city streets with several stop signs and stop lights. The stop signs do not make much difference, but the stop lights help keep the EV going because the Enginer system is recharging the Prius HV Battery while we were waiting for the light.

So my total for 3 trips is 65.8mpg for 76 miles with 3 cold starts.

I had the VSC error light on at the cold start up today, but it cleared at my first stop (about 40 minutes off time). It never came back for the remaining 25 miles and 3 stops.

The 4kwhr Enginer system was still running when we got home after the 35 miles. The lowest cell was at 3.190v and the imbalance was minor. The car has been setting for 2 hours and I will start my 5th charge now.

More Later,
Thanks,
Dan

 

Hi Andrew,
Thanks for this input. I had put in the EV wire into H14 pin 27 about two weeks ago but I had not repoened the area behide the glove box since then. I had been running the Enginer 12v input off of the power socket (we used to call this the cigaret lighter).

Anyway last night I properly wired the 12v input from H16 pin 2. everythink looks good there.

Thanks again,
Dan

 

Jan 8th 2010
Hello again,
I did my 5th charge. After about 2 hours I had a scary discovery that one cell read only 2 volts. I pulled the plug on the charger and hoped I did not have permanent damage to a cell. It turned out that the balancer was giving an erroneous reading. I unplugged the balancer and plugged it back in and that fixed the problem. I left the system to balance over night. I have 4 balancers on a buddy cell system so that means I have a redundant balancer anyway. Jack has a new balancer on the way.

The next morning I had that balancer completely dead. I unplugged and plugged it in and it came back to life. I restarted the charging. After an hour the balancer died again. I unplugged 2 balancers and swapped the plugs just to see if the problem would follow the cells and wires or the balancer. Then the system charged for an hour and a half without a balancer problem and then shut down normally. I did have one cell go high at the end. It was within 30mv of having an alarm.

I let the system set for about an hour and then went for a drive. No VSC error at all today. I did a little more driving at 50+mph so my mileage was a little lower.

27 miles today at 63.3mpg
103 miles total at 65.1mpg.

So I am now confident that for mostly city driving on trips of 20-30 miles I have gone from 45mpg w/o Enginer to 65mpg with Enginer.
I am pleased with this result. It is close to what I had expected.

The charge for the day I went 35miles was about 90% of the 4kwhr kit capacity. So this capacity also matches what Enginer advertised.

Thanks,
Dan Lander

 

Hi Banshee08,
I based my 90% estimate on power that I had to put back into the battery pack after the drive. Volts*amps*time.

The pack is not on solid during my drives. I stop at places and turn the car off. Also I some times turn the system off it is at 7bars when the motor is running anyway because of my speed. So it is hard for me to be sure of what the on time was. Also at 7 bars it does not pump 10 amps into the Prius HV battery.

Thanks,
Dan

 

Yes, I am still experamenting. My converter is on the high end. 245v. I got a couple of error lights when at 7 bars with braking. I am told that the two issues are independant. I expect that is true, but I have been running with minimal time at 7 bars so far.

Do you know what happens if regen causes a battery that is at 7 bar to charge too high? I expect that eventually the Prius will find a way to "waste" energy to get the battery back down. So the question is at what level do we use all the energy and at what piont do we start to waste some of it? This is important to understand. We need to set the converter at the correct point to optimize this. I am fearfull that 245v plus Regen will be wasteful.

Hopefully someone can give us the advantage of some Knowlege on this.

Thanks,
Dan