Has anyone installed the enginer PHEV?

Actually, I have purchased two 4kwh kits, just waiting on the remaing batteries and balancers. I will have four 2kwh strings in parallel behind two converters in parallel. I will use one converter normally and turn on the second if I have some heavy EV need. I have the 52 MPH High Speed Stealth (HSS) mod also.

 

Well they can (and do) refuse your warranty any time they choose to, but if they violate Magnuson-Moss, they have opened the door to litigation. Most contracts in the US seem to be upheld by the THREAT of suit a lot more than they are enforced by suit. There's a long thread about Toyota refusing a warranty claim because of an EV button mod (much smaller mod than this). They later recanted and honored the warranty but REQUIRED the removal of the EV mod before they would honor the repair. I suspect they also got kinda pushy about... "Thou shall not put the EV mod back" type of declairations.

So in this example they did what they wanted first (deny warranty) and only followed the law under appeal.

References (second hand):PriusChat thread chronicling the ordeal.

Heh.. me either

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Kinda curious, did you already try running the two converters in parallel to the traction battery?

Did the car throw a DTC? What happened? Does it work? How did you wire the second converter to the existing switch panel in the front? Are you using two different switches and LEDs?

I don't think anyone else has tried this yet. If yours works, I'll be picking up a second converter(after I replace the faulty one in my car).

 

Will that application of the second 12A (totaling 24A) fire any current monitors or voltage balancers or anything. I remember Hobbit talking about how it was cool that Enginer found out the magic current (12A) that could be added undetectably. Seems if 12A is magic, that 24A would be a bit less magic make the ECU wise to our little scheme.

I don't know this to be true, I'm just referring to other's knowledge of the system.

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so the lithium batteries are small so the dont make BIG boom if something goes wrong??

 

Beat you to it

 

I wouldn’t like to be the first one to cross daggers with Toyota in order to set a precedent.
For a far as I know there is nothing comparable to the Magnuson-Moss case in this country. Problem is there is no unified European legislation; for example, some laws in Italy can be completely different to those in Sweden. Well… problem, in this case it could be an advantage. So I have to depend on the Dutch laws only.

You may have a good point there eMileage. I’m not a lawyer either but I know a little about ‘consumer rights’ as we call those laws here.
1.) The manufacturer has to obey to the terms as stated in the warranty.
2.) If he objects to that, for instance by claiming the damage has been caused by improper use of the product he can object to that claim. But;
3.) Rule of thumb in Dutch Consumer law is: ‘He who claims, has to provide evidence to substantiate his claim.’
The lather is a very powerful argument that is often used and was reinstated to protect the customer as much as possible. In effect this would mean the dealer and/or Toyota would have to prove that the damage had to be caused by the Enginer kit. Without any reservations. And that the problem could not have occurred had the modification not been executed.
So basically that means the law here is the same as eMilage said; I just needed more words for it…

And yes, they would notice the 4 holes in the bottom immediately on the lift. Maybe there is another way of attaching the box firmly?

Basically it comes down to this: What are the chances that the Enginer modification will damage the OEM battery or any of the circuitry in any way? I am glad to hear that Jack was allowed back on the forum again, maybe he can shed some light on this. Or anyone else for that matter, all suggestions are welcome.

Thanks for responding to my question, I appreciate it very much!

Floyd

 

Size of the battery doesn't have anything to do with how safe they are should something go wrong.

Additionally, there's dozens of "lithium" chemistries out there and they all vary in how "safe" they are.

I don't know how safe the batteries used by the Enginer kit are, but typically many types of Lithium batteries must never be fully discharged (you'll never get them charged again - your typical lithium pack in a laptop has internal circuitry at the cell level to prevent this from happening) and can be very sensitive to thermal runaway if you over charge them. It is absolutely critical to use BMS for Lithium batteries.

Again - none of this information is specific to the lithium batteries used by the Enginer pack, but at least some of those characteristics should apply.

 

Hey,

I have the know how to do something like this; it's really easy in terms of installation. However, my problems are defective/unreliable componets. I be getting a new set soon. I hope it lasts me longer than 6 charges. I guess I'll be the only one running a 2kw kit. Ttyl.

 

No, I'm running a 2kwh kit now. If it does the job for me on my regular commute I'll leave it at that. If I need more range/power I'll upgrade to the 4kwh size.

 

Well, I think I've read the whole thread now. I have to say I am certainly intrigued. I haven't quite made up my mind whether what they are doing is brilliantly simple, or cutting too many corners yet ;-)

 

Comments removed to the technical discussion thread, meant to post it there

 

Jack assured me that the converters were designed to be run in parallel. They also tested them in parallel and found no problems.

 

I don't know if this is helpful but the data sheet that I am looking at shows that the operating temperature during charge and discharge is -25C to 75C.

 

miscrms, I haven't heard of anybody seeing error codes from their Prius with this mod.

 

Hey everyone,

I got my 2kw system last weekend. I had a very minor problem and have been in contact with Jack about it. He did a great job of getting back to me.

My problem was that when I drove the car at night a few days after the install, the digital speed display when blank when the lights were turned on at night.

Well, turned out my problem was that I bumped the dimmer switch while doing the install.

Dahhhh.....

Basically, I have not had any problems with the system other than waiting to see if all the cell balancers eventually work out.

Below is a portion of my recent email to Jack. I hope there is some useful info in it for others...


Hi Jack,

I received the kit last Saturday morning and basically had the box assembled and charging by noon. I did not assemble the kit in the car so that I could quickly get the battery pack charging and more importantly balancing.

I then did the car connection on Sunday afternoon and was able to use the kit immediately.

My first trip was actually quite long as my average 1 way commute for errands and work is 5 miles or less. This initial use of the pack was 34 miles. (17 miles to a mall, then 17 back.) I did NOT get a low battery level (red LED) on this trip
My mpg was about 68 . The normal for this trip without the pack probably would have been about 48 mpg.

I am currently averaging about 63 mpg. Before the install, I would have probably gotten about 44 mpg without the Enginer pack.

I have had 1 full recharge this week from when I got a low battery alarm and then charged overnight. This used 2.84 Kilo watt hours of electricity for a full charge from low level. I figured about 25 cents per charge. I will eventually get you some exact costs after I look at my electric bill and find out the $/ kw hour my utility charges.

I am also recording my electricity usage for charging the pack and I should be able to give you some really good info when I send you the 30 days of data for the beta test.

I figured that I would document the month of September and send it to you. Does that sound good?


As of now, I have not completed the install yet because I am considering re engineering the mounting because of the spare tire access problem. I will be getting together with some of my mechanical engineer friends soon on that one. (I am an Electrical Controls Engineer).

Can you give me any guidance on breaking in and balancing the Thundersky batteries? A lot of the things I am doing are based on info from the thread in the Priuschat.com forums.

And yes, I will gladly share photos when the installation is completed. (Only functional installed now) I thought that I could complete the install this weekend, but it is supposed to rain all weekend here in Hershey, PA.


Again, Hope this is helpful to others here @ Priuschat.


I am happy so far with the Enginer system




20 years ago I couldn't even spell ENGINER, Now I ARE one...

 

Yeah, I saw that. What I am talking about are discharge curves vs. temperature. In general the curves for the same discharge rate at different temperatures would look something like the three curves for different discharge rates.

I realize that. Thats what I find interesting. People have been trying more or less this exact same method for at least five years, and could never get it to run clean. Sometimes it would seem to work for a while, but then throw DTCs under certain conditions. I'm curious why it seems to work in this case.

Rob

 

Could you elaborate on the different things that people have tried? Several years ago I added six 216V nominal 3Ah packs in parallel with the OEM pack. I bypassed the hall sensor. Since I had no way to spoof the Prius BMS, I wasn't able to see much benefit. My Aux Packs were limited to the same 40% - 80% SOC as the OEM Pack. I kept them for about 3 months before scrapping the idea. But not once did I get a DTC or MIL.

 

I wish I could give more details. I've followed a lot of the PHEV and EV discussion groups with great interest for a number of years. A lot of whats gone on has never really been well documented, but I suppose exists somewhere in the depths of the mail archives. I haven't had a chance to catch up on the PHEV mailing list in a few months, I'll have to see if there has been any discussion of this kit there. Sadly I've never been able to get the time/money together to really get involved in the projects myself beyond helping out with some engineering calculations and battery analysis. Funny how much of both time and money are consumed by a 1 year old and a 3 year old

What I can say is at least every few months someone new would show up on the lists and say "hey this is way too complicated, why don't we just inject current through the front door and let the coulomb counter do its thing." Everyone would explain to them how they had tried that but it didn't work. Usually they wouldn't believe them and would go try it for themselves, only to eventually run into the same problems and give up. The one brief reference I can find is this:

From that explanation it is possible that this works because the current difference is small, and/or doesn't allow sustained EV for a long period. If that is the explanation, it would not bode well for being able to improve that situation by adding converters. Its also interesting to note that just after this comment it is confirmed that both the Prius+ (contactor based) and PiPrius (PFC dc:dc converter based) conversions use this connection arrangement. As I mentioned before I'm pretty sure Rich Rudman of Manzanita Micro was working with Ron Grubman from Cal-Cars in the early days and both arrived at the same conclusion that either a contactor connected or dc:dc converter connected secondary pack had to be connected to the OEM pack through the back door. I believe his converter is a lot stronger than this one though, so that could still be the difference.

There is not really any mention of this early phase of experimentation in the Prius+ development history page. Most of this early work was going on in 2004, a few years before I started following things closely.

PriusPlus History - EAA-PHEV

You can however see that the original pack was 18*12V (~216V+), while they eventually went to 20*12V (~240V+). The change was the result of needing a higher secondary pack voltage to initiate SOC drift. This is a consequence of first figuring out you can't come in though the front door, and if you come in the back door you have to figure out a way to get the BMS to revise SOC. That required >242V to trigger the recalibration routine referred to as SOC drift. Using the higher voltage necessitated being able to dynamically connect and disconnect the pack based on CAN paramaters (SOC, CCL/CDL, speed etc) to both protect the OEM pack and convince the HV controller to make efficient use of the extra charge available.

Rob

 

Are you (or they) saying that if you EV for one mile without drawing from the pack, it will shut down the HSD drive? It should be easy to test.

The kit is spec'd to deliver 2880 Wh per hour, or 48Wh / min. At 15 MPH (or .25 mile / minute ) the the kit, at 48Wh/min, provides 192 Wh/mi. A careful driver on a flat road should be able to hold the PHEV Prius well under 192 Wh/mi when creeping at 15 MPH. After a mile they should know whether or not there is a "one-mile-without-current" DTC.

But on the other-hand, so long as the PHEV driver isn't too efficient, or going down a long slow downhill slope, the trigger may never hit.​

Was this kind of configuration what the EEA group were experiencing? Anyone able to confirm?

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