Saturday, July 12, 2014

Problems, of course!

Due to crazy schedule the car hasn't seen too much action, but a few things need to be attended to at this point. I drove the car a few times and noticed the current limits much sooner that it had before. I checked the controller setting and connections to no avail.
I drove the car for a while and it got a lot worse, the range is down to about half as well. I drove until out of power and checked all the battery voltages, and as expected I had a few very low cells.
I had never balanced the batteries and am not running a BMS so I was not overly surprised.
I decided to charge the car and see how many amp hours that it charged, the next day I check the meters and discovered the amp hour meter was no longer working, so much for the information I was hoping to gain. Plan B was in effect, I used my powerlab 8 and discharged the previously low cells to check capacity, it looks like 8% loss from new. This was not too troubling as I bought the batteries used and they have some age. I decided to charge every battery with the powerlab and note the charges.
After a week of moving charger leads, I found that on average I was able to put 9AH to 9.5 AH in each battery.
I had ordered a new meter assuming the old one was a goner, I should have done some troubleshooting first, seems the dc/dc converter isolated supply had died, meter ok. I now have a spare meter..oops.
The next mission is to drive the car and check the range and current, to see if anything has changed.
I will have to bottom balance the batteries as some point or buy a BMS system to take care of things.
I have yet to get the chargers swapped out, I have a Vectrix conversion I am working on as well and have the batteries for the quad to replace as well.

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