First Enginer PHEV Installation in Portland Or Area

Still running and no maintenance issues for a very long time now. I am running a BMS16D v4.0 with balancing disabled. It does fine, but I do see it losing some balance after 2 weeks or so with no attention.

I am getting 99.9mpg. My wife gets 80mpg. I am happy with it at this point.

Thanks,
Dan

 

Hello Everyone,
I now have 22K miles on the car and about 15K miles on the Enginer system. Everything is working well.I have not looked inside the Enginer box for a couple of months. I do a full charge and then about 10 topoff charges (on a timer) a day and the overcharge protection in the mottcells balance the system at the top. I have not done any manual balancing for months.

I still get 100 mpg but it is winter so my wife is down to 70 mpg.

Thanks,
Dan

 

Hi Dutch,
I was manually balancing because the earlier Enginer BMS's put the system out of balance faster than the top balance could easily correct. The BMS16D V4.0 is much better.

I may be miss-understanding you, But I am thinking this is a question about capacity over time. It is hard to tell because winter vs summer has so much effect. But I do believe I have at least one cell that is degraded in capacity. In addition I think I clearly see that the pack capacity is more susceptible to discharge rate. That is that the pack shows less capacity if I discharge very fast. When this happens I can let it rest and then get more capacity out of it.

Thanks,
Dan

 

Hi Everyone,
As soon as I brag on the system working well......

The green light would not come on and no power. So I opened it up and plugged the phone cable into a known good converter. No Joy. So then I used 12v from a power port through a known good switch and phone cable. WahLah! It worked on both converters. So then I dug into the dash and found that a connector on the back of the dash switch had come loose.

It was a 15 minute fix that took about 2 hours because for the time and effort needed to get to the converter end of the phone cable and the time to trouble shoot with known good parts.

Enginer has no locks on any connector, so vibrations can loosen them up over time. This switch has been installed with no one touching anything under the dash for more than a year.

The plane truth is that Enginer did not design this system to stand up to the automotive environment.

Thanks,
Dan

 

Hi Everyone,
Working well again. 2 weeks with no problems. My wife is getting 70-85mpg and I am over 100mpg.

My last two full trips were 95.4mpg for 42.4miles and 105mpg for 35.7miles.

Thanks,
Dan

 

Hi Tex,
Sorry for not replying earlier.

So it is clear that you do not understand the Enginer history. I was one of the first to get a 4kwhr Enginer system. Enginer started with a 2kwhr system with thunderskys. Almost all of those 2kwhr systems are no longer operational. Then they made the 4kwhr system with Mottcells. The Realforce cells did not come out until much later. As a result you will never see a Realfoce system that has as much usage as my system has.

Enginer has made lots of changes over the years. Some of them were good, some of them were not as good.

Thanks,
Dan

 

Hi Dragon,
If you are ever in my area you are welcome to come by and see both of my systems.

You do not need a flat road to have the system be usefull. In actuality you very seldom regen more than the Prius HV battery will take. Until that happens it does not matter if the add-on system takes regen. So my Enginer cells never take Regen, but I still get full usage of the energy that gets regenerated.

Thanks,
Dan

 

Hi Flan,
I am sorry to disagree with you but I don't think the Prius will regen much into a Pluginsupply pack. Did you realize that the Pluginsupply kit has 76 cells. That means that the Pluginsupply kit needs to be 3/4 depleted before it gets down to 240v.

Thanks,
Dan

 

Hi J,
The AV cars need to do a much better job of engineering the system than Enginer does. Of course better than Enginer is not a very high bar to get over. But clearly this does take a lot of good engineering.

Thanks,
Dan