I haven't had a chance to put it through a discharge yet, I live in Michigan and if you haven't gotten the clue yet, I am a grease monkey always have been, but times are changing and I try to keep up, the prius is my nicer car and here in Michigan they are pretty liberal with road salt to melt the snow which we got quite a bit lately, one of my biggest things, is running my older cars in such weather, they are allready rotten from road salt so I am saving my newer ones from it, I went from 50mpg stock prius gas mileage to my old cavalier which I used to think was economical but realisticaly maybe gets half that on a good day, compared to the potential 80-90mpg that this setup has to offer, I have traveled a lot and if you are from the bay area you have no ideea how dirty Detroit is this time of the year, and for anybody like me putting your car ( anything metal for that mater ) through such enviroment, you might as well beat your child, I have worked too hard for this and I might as well take an oxi torch to my rockers, it would do the same as the road salt , so the prius is parked batteries charged and all actually I have the batteries in the house, I know they don't perform well in the cold, not entirely sure how good of an ideea it was to leave them in the cat in freezing temps, go figure took me this long to get a used pack and figure out a way to charge it, and now I can't use it for at leat 3 months, or I will be posting a rocker repair thread soon ( off topic )
http://priuschat.com/threads/just-installed-my-2nd-user-enginer-4-kwh-kit.119495/page-7 this is a link to a thread between me and a couple other stubborned riggers determined to make something happen with this system, the original BMS has a nice display feature/logger, even that is funny, pretty accurate at rest funny under load or charge, I took a picture of the display shortly after the chage cell 19 and 13 I believe reached shunt last and they sagged a bit but the rest were well saturated and pretty dead on.
I was banking that after a few uses they will get int oa pattern like you all spoke of before, it was a trip getting that first ballance, I worked on it alone for a full day, especially with those large 80 ah cells, granted the zephyr was doing it's part, but it was getting hot, so I am sitting there with the wifes hair dryer, cooling it, hooking up carbulbs to the high cells, I interupted the charge several times to let it cool off, hooked up bulbs to the high cells, my rigged up PS to the low ones, mind you I had those bottom balanced manually first like most users of this system do to get by from time to time, but that was not acurate at all couple sells got ahead real fast as soon as I plugged it in,
also I hardly knew anything about my charger ( top secret ), had to dial it in while at it, wont put out without a load ( hooker :lol: ), the EOC pot was the easy one, by the time I got all the shunts to bearly come on I was barely pulling 0.3 amp off the wall, at some point it turned green itself,
batteries have been at rest for a day now, I was debating either throw a charge on those last two cells only, plug it into the zephyr or both, just to equilize them a bit better since I have nothing to do,
either way I am much smarter today, that is the biggest acomplishment here, and I was serious about that fith ( resistors, transistors whatever your cup of tea is ), I don't see a PM yet, I am pretty resoursefull don't make me look you up and mail it, ask Garry he got a call from me last spring when I first got my hands on this system, kindof caught him off side, I had read about the Zephyr years ago by the time I needed one I was a day and a dollar short storry of my life, either way, I look up to all of you's for thaking the initiative and making something happen, I dare anybody to point out a better bms, like all good things this one had to be unsuccessfull, I am no investor but if they ever get out of stock again let me know I may just take one for the team like Zenid just to keep them stocked.
speaking of which, I needed that full 1 amp bleed for this project, but that last one I read of with the resistors arrays, looked rather interesting, you guys had it working before the wifes got involved didn't you? if anything a thought worth considering that may be a bit more feasable these builds are not for everybody, bit too delicate for me, it's a miracle I did not manage to fry one of those components yet, and I still have no Ideea what most of them do.
George