Home Power magazine article on hybrid battery refurbishing

[BillR]

If you're interested and can still find the June/July issue of Home Power magazine on store shelves, they have a good write up on how to take the battery pack apart, test each 'stick', and replace those that are no longer any good. I just found a copy this past weekend while looking for something else.

It's a long and tedious project with the DIY equipment used (a couple of months!) but the author makes one good battery pack out of two not so good ones. This might be a good winter project for the more adventurous Insight owners out there whose battery packs are aging and beginning to fail.

The car used is the Honda Civic Hybrid, but the basics would be the same for the Insight.

Enjoy!

[Hybrid-Battery-Repair]

Originally Posted by BillR

If you're interested and can still find the June/July issue of Home Power magazine on store shelves, they have a good write up on how to take the battery pack apart, test each 'stick', and replace those that are no longer any good. I just found a copy this past weekend while looking for something else.

It's a long and tedious project with the DIY equipment used (a couple of months!) but the author makes one good battery pack out of two not so good ones. This might be a good winter project for the more adventurous Insight owners out there whose battery packs are aging and beginning to fail.

The car used is the Honda Civic Hybrid, but the basics would be the same for the Insight.

Enjoy!

Bill,

He got a few things wrong in the article, but his method will find about half of the problems out there. The main thing he's doing is rebalancing the pack while he thinks he's testing it. I would estimate that he'll get about a year out of what he did. The biggest problem is that he's only discharging at about 1/3 C. Also, if you do this yourself, there is no need to completely disassemble the pack. Just take one endplate off. You can find a step-by-step disassembly of an Insight pack on my DIY page.


I'm a bit annoyed that he didn't give me any credit in the article at all:

From: Mike Lamb
Date: 9/25/2009 4:22PM
Subject: Re: replacement Civic battery sticks

Hello again (I would use your name but have no idea what it is)

You mentioned that I could get a little advice from you as I went along, so here goes:

I have removed the pack and all cable&etc some days ago and have been reconditioning the sticks the last few days. I have a few questions I hope you will help me answer.

I am using a iMaxB6 charger (you use something different I assume?) The reason I am using this device is because the guy who sold me the car already bought it but never got around to using it like I am now.

Here's what's going on. After I have sent most of the sticks through the preset program on the iMax for five cycles of D then C at it's max rate (which took about 10 hours for each stick) I still only get about 2500mAh as a final charge for some sticks, one stick got to 4500, but most were peaking out at 2800 then dropping after the 4th cycle to 1300-1800 (due to heating resistance increasing maybe?) The instruction booklet for this thing really sucks!

I noticed that the sample spead-sheet on your excellent website had mAh numbers of 5000-6000. I have a hard time thinking that my 6 year old battery pack has lost more than 2/3rds capacity, even after some reconditioning.

Questions: What do you think is going on? Should I get a charger like yours instead? The iMax has a max charge rate of 5 amps and max DisC of 1 amp. I was reading online that higher amp rates are desirable for reconditioning. What sort of rates do the chargers you use have? I have also been reading up on "zapping" batteries with a capacitor to break up the crystal structures more. Any thoughts on that? I also have access to an old fashioned battery load tester that will discharge at 30-100 amps. How about I use that for D and then the iMax for C?
Thanks for all your advice!
Mike

[MN Driver]

I remember reading that article and spotting different things wrong with it too.

I didn't remember that he did a full pack with one of the B6 chargers though. I don't envy that guy, no wonder why his results just ended when they the capacity was still rising and he didn't continue cycling after the second or third cycle on a quickly improving stick.

I wouldn't have the patience to do what he did. The B6 discharges at a maximum rate of 5 watts and only gives you a full amp of discharge at 5 volts or less. There are folks on the RX forums who've had them fail in short order and they don't come with an accurate voltage calibration either. There is a reason why they are the cheap $20 special on ebay, complete junk for everything but the most patient RC plane guy or someone was trying to see the capacity on single AA cells or something.

I originally thought the Turnigy Accucell8 charger that I have was decent but just working through a dozen sticks and waiting for a 25 watt discharge rate of just shy of 3 amps isn't something I'll be doing with a full pack ever. Its 150 watt charge rate(which is really 125watts) is good enough to require extra cooling during a charge, it's not fast enough in the discharge though.

[JimGnitecki]

Originally Posted by Hybrid-Battery-Repair

I'm a bit annoyed that he didn't give me any credit in the article at all:

Hybrid-Battery-Repair: That WAS a low class thing for him to do, but those of us who visit this site often know the contributons you make to it, and we do appreciate you. Thanks for all you do.

Jim G