Enginer Plan B

Pacific EV has another product that is specifically tailored to Enginer system. It's not shown on their web site.

 

Pacific EV has a BMS tailored to the current Enginer system with RF batteries. If interested you can send an e-mail to Cory at [email protected]. They have a draft user manual.

 

miniBMS works very well for the enginer system, not sure how theirs would be better. certainly their ittyBMS looks virtually the same, but with 1.5A of shunting rather than 750ma.

 

From the information I just received from Cory at PacificEv. There system is a plug and play system no need to hack your enginer kit to make it work.Which I think is a big plus also there system top balances and still uses your bms to bottom balance.

 

Here is the manual for the PacificEV BMS attached. I got the OK from Cory before posting it.

 

As far as the original post is concerned, if enginer goes out of business and the DC-DC converter fails, what do you do? Well, my suggestion would be to repair it. I've looked inside the converter, most of it is just off-the-shelf components. I would suspect that a failure would probably be with the areas that handle high voltage or high amperage. Any of those parts are going to be off-the-shelf. The hard part would be figuring out what broke. Once you've done that, just desolder it and solder in a replacement.

 

When mine went bad, the most visibly damaged component besides the little (0.5A ?) fuse was a component pack on the input side. Unless you know what it contained, chances are you would be out of luck on a simple swap and solder....what with Murphy's Law and all....

 

Yes it's difficult to read the component part number on a charred molten lump of toxic crap.

Hopefully they -won't- go bust, but if they do they could release the design info a least.

 

In my opinion instead of trying to figure who makes the poorly made components we need to look for alternate manufacturer with compatible product made of superior quality. We know system is proven to work and that it is just a quality issue . We have found 2 replacement to the sometime faulty Bms we just need replacements to charger & converter.

 

Cp I just switched to the PacificEv bms do you know if it has the same limitations?

 

Since I am not to familiar with this stuff yet can you guys tell me if this converter would work with our kit? A bit pricey but told they are bulletproof

Analytic Heavy Duty 22-45V In, 48V Out, 20A, Isolated DC/DC Converter

http://zahninc.com/su1.html they seem to have every kind of converter made in usa and again pricey.

 

too much money. requires too many batteries

EVs require high current. series connected batteries provide higher voltage, parallel connected batteries provide higher current.

because of this, higher current is the desired trait. so no matter what the voltage, if you do not have the current you will be basically accelerating from zero to 60 in minutes, not seconds.

basically its like taking a garden hose to fight a house fire.

 

Any charger which operates off a 120V 15A plug is limited to 1440W (which is 120*15*80%).

Our BMS is limited to 15A max on the AC input.

I'm working on adding our Enginer BMS to the website.

Thanks everyone!

Cory

 

If you bought 5 and put their outputs in series, it'd work. Of course, it'd be cheaper to buy the plug-in-solutions (or whatever it's called now) 10kwh kit which is way better anyway.

 

The advantage of the ittyBMS is twofold:
1. With just a fault signal, you can't be sure every cell is full. So we added a second line indicating every cell is full. In combination with the EVCM, you can use any charger with any algorithm to charge your batteries (provided it goes to a high enough voltage) and the EVCM will turn it off at the right time.
2. It has a two low voltage limits, the higher one allows you to exceed the limit for 15 seconds (changeable on order). This lets you accelerate hard for a limited time, but still prevents slow drains from taking your batteries to a very low SoC.

But, as you know and the others mentioned, this isn't for Enginer kits but for EVs. It makes lead->Lithium conversions so easy, not to mention new installs.