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Originally Posted by retepsnikrep
You want to avoid taking the ends off IMHO. It's a right pain, time consuming and easy to damage the ptc ends especially if the process needs doing every couple of years to keep an old pack in shape.
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That's why I suggested a plate be installed with no battery-to-battery interconnects, but with the PTC strip connections installed. It would be done once and left there. Then you could slap one of two plates over that. One would form the normal interconnects and be left on. The other would have your tester.
Quote:
Originally Posted by retepsnikrep
I think it's best to do the sticks individually or you can't isolate a bad subpack without doing further work. This system will show up bad subpacks without extra work. I want it super simple to connect and operate.
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I'm finding that the most critical bit of information is the individual charges on the batteries after use but prior to charging/reconditioning.
Quote:
Originally Posted by retepsnikrep
I don't know about your experience but are there actually many bad subpacks (dead cells etc) or is it just they have gone out of balance.
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I'm finding that they don't go out of balance without a reason. Either a cell becomes diminished in it's capacity and then takes less and less charge as it death spirals down, or it is forced to under or over charge by the batteries next to it. Also, it's almost never more than a few cells.
I'm receiving another pack for rebuilding in a couple days. I'm going to try working on it as pairs where I recondition the pairs that seem good and individually the cells that don't. This is to try to reduce the 18 hour per cell cycle to something a little smaller (cut 3 weeks down to 2). Alternately, I'm going to have to get a second charger so that I can do two cells at once. I've also decided, similar to your extra packs, that I'll have to pre-test and match up sets of batteries to allow me to do a swap-out for customers that don't want to wait three weeks for their pack to be fixed.
FYI, I've settled on the name "Northeast Hybrid Battery Repair" as I'll probably branch out into Prius batteries later.
