First Enginer PHEV install in the Portland Or area, Gen2

Hi everyone,
I get up later than you guys on the eastcoast so I just saw this.

I am wired a little differently than you are. I started with the origional 4kwhr system that did not have buddy cells but did have 4 balancers. I then put in 15 "buddy jumpers" from the back string to the front string. One for each cell. So now I have buddy cells and redundant balancers. Because of the redundant balancers I almost always get a good reading on one balancer at the same time that the erronius reading happens.

I beleive doax. The balancer is sometimes just "buggy".

I do not beleive it is tempurature. I am in the 0-40degC range all the time. If you are below 0degC outside, the heat generated in the charger and converter and batteries bring you back towards normal temperature. Measure it and I expect you are not to far off from 0degC when running.

I also have measured with a DVM several times and matched the balancer readings. After an erronius reading, many times it goes back to the correct reading. On occation a balancer gets completely lost or gives multiple false alarms. That is when I reset it with an un-plug/plug cycle.

Thanks,
Dan

 

Yes, This is very possible. Have you asked Jack about this? I expect that if he gets many warranty failures for balancers he would want to get Chargery to improve the vibration robustness of the DB8.

I did send my bad balancer back and he said he would get a failure analisys done.

Thanks,
Dan

 

Jan 15th 2010
Hello Everyone,
First, in the interest of full disclosure. Jack has now added my name to his list of Installers. If you go the the Enginer web site you will see that Enginer is now listing the 2kwhr kit at $1995 and the 4kwhr kit at $3995. He is including a coupon for $500 to pay for having the kit installed. I am not sure of all the details of this, you will need to ask Jack if you have questions. I am assuming that Enginer feels that they need to have experienced installations so that they can provide a more reliable product. I expect that if you ask anyone that has done an installation they will tell you that it is worth the $500 to have someone with experience do the install.

Today I drove 25 miles and got 68.1 mpg.
Total 65.2mpg for 262 miles. I am at about ½ tank so I am tempted to fill the tank and check the computer vs the actual.

This morning I put the system back on the charger the way doax has done. The charger pumped high current into the system for 5 minutes and then got sinked into where it had been when the alarms went off last night. It finished the charge with no alarms. It put in 700 watt-hours.

I am now into the next charge cycle and we will see how the alarms go in the next couple of hours.

By the way, I do plan to take my 2005 with the Enginer Kit to tomorrows Portland Area HSD January MeetupIf you are in this area, I hope to see you there.

Thanks,
Dan

 

Jan 16th 2010
Hello Everyone and a special Hello to those of you that I met at the Portland HSD Meetup.

We had about 30 people and had a nice lunch. After lunch several people came out to my car to see the Enginer PHEV system. We had a good discussion.

I drove 61 miles round trip to and from the Meetup. It included a steep climb and drop over the Sylvan hill I turned off the Enginer system going over the hill because I did not want to overcharge coming down the hill. I was sure that I could not do the full 61 miles with the batteries on all the way anyway. I did get home with the 4kwhr kit not yet out of power. That surprised me.

Anyway, it was 61 miles at an average of 59.5 mpg. I may have gotten over 60mpg if I had left the kit on longer but I do not think I could have gotten 65mpg. So my total is 323 miles at an average of 64.1 mpg. Again I was getting 45 mpg before the kit. This is a 42% increase.

I had turned on my car last night and hit the EV button so that the ICE would not turn on. Then I turned on the Enginer system to get the Prius HV battery up to seven bars. After a short time I returned to find the ICE running. It was in the garage so I immediately turned it off. The battery was at 8 bars. After I turned it off, I checked the tail pipe and it was cold. So I think it had overcharged and the Prius was spinning the ICE to burn off electrons. I really need to turn down my DC/DC converter.

Also I had put an extension cord in the boot (I was brought up on British cars) between the Enginer box and the antiskid power supply. I got the VSC again. Then I moved the cord to the back seat and no longer got the light.

Thanks,
Dan

 

Jan 17th 2010
Hello Everyone,
Someone had posted pictures for the Portland HSD meetup. Thanks to them for the pictures. Here is one of the back of my Prius with the Enginer Kit installed.

Last night I did a 4 hour charge with an alarm at the end. Then this morning, I did 4 minutes with the car and Enginer system on to get 7 bars. Then I did a 18 minute top-off charge with no alarms. It looks like this may be my normal process until I swap some cells so that the top half #5 does not give me an alarm at the end of long charge cycles. It took a total of 3.37 kwhr of charge. So I had not used as much out of the Enginer batteries as I thought.

Today I drove 33 miles at 71.9 mpg. Much of it in town. So my new total is…
356 miles with an average of 64.8 mpg.

Now I will go out to do my daily charge routine.

Thanks,
Dan

 

Hello mrbigh,
Thanks for your comment. However, I am sorry, I think that I may not understand the intent of your message. Therfore I will chose to respond to it in a constructive mannor.

If you have something that you think I can improve in this thread, please give me more detail in how I might improve my communications. Please no negative comments, just comments that will help improvements.

When I was first looking at PHEV, I found a lot of useful data and information on Priuschat. However I also found that when things were going well with the PHEV running, the threads tended to stop. So we had a lot of information about it initial installation and then some about the initial excitement of a working system and after that much less communications. There were always communications around problems and solutions, but very little around ongoing seccessful usage of the Enginer system.

I see many questions from people wanting to know how much "babysetting" the Enginer system needs. and asking how technical you need to be to be successful with the Enginer PHEV. These questions can not be correctly addressed in a post or two. To properly adress these questions requires and discussion that is ongoing over time.

In this thread I am attempting to give information that fills this gap in the data. I am hopeful that this is what is happening and that others are finding value in this thread.

Thanks to those of you that have supported and encouraged me in this.

Thanks again,
Dan Lander

 

Jan 18th 2010
Hi Everyone,
I have found that Spreadsheets are great tools for organization and for keeping data but poor for communications. Charts and graphs are better for communications. So I am putting my mileage data into a chart so that you can see it in one place.

As you can see, today I did 78.7 mpg for 12 miles. Great mileage because I did most of it in town.

Last night I had a normal process of a long charge with alarm and then a shorter top-off charge with no alarms. I did have the alarm on a different cell and another cell that was very low before charging. Then today after my drive I found a balancer clearly bad. This one is not intermittent. I have tried to reset it several times and it will not reset. It was drawing 400 ma out of cells so if I had left it plugged in it could have eventually drained a cell.

I am now charging with 3 balancers.

Enjoy,
Dan

 

Hello mrbigh,
Much of what you are asking is detail that has little impact. The things that do have impact are written in the thread where they apply. I will continue to include this information when I feel it is important but I do not intend to list all this becuase it would make the posts too long and people would get lost in the detail. You can not have it both ways. So if you want more information, read the thread.

I was getting 45 mpg before the install with all the same stuff.

Portland weather is mild but not warm. 40-50degF for the dayly high. We do get an ocational cold spell but have not had that since the install. I do grill blocking so my ICE temp runs from 120degF (with a lot of EV) to 190degF (long runs above 50mph).

Hope this is helpful,
Thanks,
Dan