Big Bertha is on the job

**Hybrid-Battery-Repair** · 06-29-2010, 02:40 PM

Say hello to the newest member of the Hybrid-Battery.com family - Big Bertha.

Mike Dabrowski of Genesis One has built us a custom charger. During the repair process, batteries must be charged several times. Doing this the old way:

involved hooking up 40 clips, 21 connectors and configuring and starting 20 chargers. All told, it took at least 2 man-hours per battery just to hook it up. The new charger has only 4 connections. It outputs 170V at 4.5A and tops up a battery in about two hours.

The new charger is detailed here. Mike named it "Big Kahuna", but we decided to rechristen her "Big Bertha". "Big Kahuna" sounded to laid back. Bertha is big, ugly and complicated, but she works very hard and accomplishes what nobody else can.

Here are some pictures in operation.

**Hybrid-Battery-Repair** · 03-24-2011, 11:49 AM

Bertha's siblings are here "Sybil" and "Sybil Too".

These are the juiced-up versions of Mike's new grid chargers. These two chargers run at 5.5Amps (the max I can get out of a 15Amp wall socket) and will adapt to the battery terminate their charge based on feedback from it. This is important to us because we are dealing with many different batteries in all different conditions and while some will charge up to 172V or more, others will overheat if we try to force them past 169V. We're still enhancing the software and working out the bugs, so it'll be a while before it all trickles down to Mike's final products.

**Hybrid-Battery-Repair** · 04-19-2011, 04:50 PM

I just realized that I didn't post a picture of both:

Cobb · 04-20-2011, 12:38 AM

I bet when all of that is turned on your electric meter spins like a top and you have the windows open wearing shorts and short sleeves.

**Hybrid-Battery-Repair** · 04-20-2011, 02:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cobb

I bet when all of that is turned on your electric meter spins like a top and you have the windows open wearing shorts and short sleeves.

Nah. THIS makes the meter spin:

But at least it cools us down by making a breeze:

Cobb · 04-21-2011, 12:34 AM

Wow..... What is that? Is that the cell whacker?

**Hybrid-Battery-Repair** · 04-22-2011, 03:38 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cobb

Wow..... What is that? Is that the cell whacker?

No, it's a tester. It can charge and discharge 8 cells at up to 100A. More importantly, it's computerized and it can be programmed for:

CC charge
CV charge
CCCV charge
CC discharge
Power discharge
RI discharge

It can be set up to run cycles and to break out whenever a threshold is crossed.

I don't know if you can see it in the picture of the back, but it has a standard Ethernet port and is controlled from a PC.

Interestingly, last night the computer I was using to control it (and is also the MySQL server for it) rebooted due to an automatic update. The tester kept running its' scripts and then updated the server database with all its' results this morning when I reconnected the server to the network.

It stands about 5 feet tall and it weighed 650lbs in the crate.