Enginer PHEV Technical Information

Hello, I am new to the board and am installing a 2kwh system in my 06. I can not get the enginer system to turn on. The LED's will not light up. I checked t the connections at the computer, everything is fine. Any help would be greatly apprecieated. By the way I have a small round fuse that came in the kit. Anyone know where it goes.

 

Did you turn on the circuit breaker near the charger? The fuse should be an extra one.

 

Yes the circuit breaker is on.

 

Are these the LEDs on the converter or the ones at the switch ?

 

After speaking with Jack it appears that the converter might be bad. He helped me trouble shoot the PHEV plug and narrowed it down to the converter. The lights on the switch will not light up, but the converter will have the green light on. I have 50 .5 volts coming into the converter and nothing coming out.?

 

On mine, the green LED up front at the switch rarely lights, if at all, but if the green LED on the converter is lit the converter is working...

The red LED at the switch does light when the unit shuts off but it isn't as bright as it could be either....

The switch assembly needs to be replaced w/ brighter LEDs...

Jack B

 

That means you have a defective switch panel PCB(most likely). It's supposed to light. It's not the brightest in the world, but when installed properly, it's visible during the day.

 

This is good info to know. Thank you to all. One more question, after connecting my battery bank, all I can get on a charge is 50.6 volts. I am going to use four Hawker SBS 38ah batteries. Could this be the problem on why the converter will not put out power. It might be to low on juice. I read that the batteries I will be using will charge to 1.8 volts per cell? Anyone know what this means? When I spoke to Jack he seamed to think that the converter might be bad. Back to the batteries don't know why I can't get more charge into them? Any ideas? Thank you once again.

 

Could be, but I'm doubtful. Is this 50.6 while on charge, standing idle, or on load?

I'm not completely convinced that small lead acid batteries will work here. 38 Ah lead would be rather marginal, I think.

That makes no sense. However, discharging to 1.8 VPC (per 2V cell, i.e. a sixth of a "12 V" battery) isn't uncommon. That would be a total of 43.2 V at the end of a cycle, which would be like 2.7 VPC for Lithium. That could work.

50.6 V is 12.65 per "12 V" battery, which is about all you'll get from lead acid once the charger is switched off. (With the charger on, you'll get between 13.6 and 14.7 V or even more, depending on the charger). That should be enough to get the converter working, unless the batteries sag to under about 11 V under the ~80 A load.

 

Well I came home early today and diconnected my batteries. I charged each one of them indivisually and they took a 13.5 volt charge. I am hoping that my charger is not bad, as it will only charge up to 50.6.

 

Give it time. It can take a week or so to get a new system balanced out completely.

 

I recently watched an on-line video by an EV builder (Jack Richard) who argues that balancing Lithium Ion batteries in this type of way actually is very bad for the batteries and is likely to lead to dead cells. In this video he explains why he believes this and details the testing that he performed to confirm this. It might be worth watching and deciding yourselves. This is the 11/13/2009 video on this website: ev-tv.me [I don't have 5 posts yet, so I cannot add the direct link. :-( ]

If nothing else, it is food for thought concerning management of fairly expensive batteries.

 

Amazing if true. Anyone??

 

In his video, Jack Rickard is right, the dangerous zone in LiFePO4 ( and other chemistries too) it is NOT the ceiling charging voltage but reaching the low voltage of your DOD, this is the culprit for unbalancing cells that could lead to destroy the internal cells forever.
Practically, it is very difficult to power balance at the "low end voltage" of each battery module while at use, but an alarm circuit that will monitor and activate when a set voltage is reach will be very useful and a necessary tool, this is found only in very expensive "Battery Management Systems", unfortunately not provided with this kit, tough

 

That was a good video. Way to long but some good information.

I did not know of EVTV. I get to have this week off and I'm not going to get anything done now.

 

It is very informative video. Jack Rickard got a point. Never charge and balance a pack at 4.00V per cell. And use the cells with very close capacity in the same pack.

Our battery supplier carefully tested and grouped cells in each pack. And our charger only charge the cell to 3.625V instead of 4.00V. I think we can even lower it to 3.5V so that we can avoid the top 5% of the steep slope.

On the low end of the SOC curve, we limit the discharge to 2.875V/cell. (20-30% DOD)

We emphasize on break-in during the first two weeks of usage so that the cells can be cycled lightly and balanced well before heavy, normal usage.

 

It's good to hear about the precautions you're taking. I'm not clear, though, if this will address the problem that Jack Rickard has identified. Is there a way you would recommend that Enginer kit users could balance the charge "at the bottom" as he recommends? Thanks!

 

I'm trying to think of a mod that would allow the balancing to be manually shut off so that the cell alarms are still functional. A further mod would be to get the alarms displayed at the drivers position.

Jack B.

 

I don't know if the function is in the Enginer balancers but a discharge cycle balancer would be nice. If we can balance to the discharge point of 2.9V for each cell would be very good. Then we can charge till all cells reach 3.5V. The last two times I used my system I noticed that my cells rarely reach 3.4V. Most would balance out overnight to 3.30V. Is that normal.

 

Yep, the Mottcell batteries are different from the Thunderskys in terms of charging.

It'll take a while for it to hit 3.4V.. Just keep lightly discharging the batteries and charge them back up. You'll see the balancers throw a HIGH cell volt error. That's normal.