48v 20ah Mr. Lau Chan / Lifepo4.hk pack arrived (May '09)

it doesn't matter if it is 18650 or prismatic or pouch, the fully charge voltage for lifepo4 is about 3.65V and the resting voltage usually drops to about 3.35V. some cells like the a123 will hold onto 3.6V for a long time.
 
I have a bit of 18 gauge wiring I recently put onto my BD36 controller. The original SAE connector plug in pin bent off and I have one on it that's 18 gage instead of 16 or 12. Nothing has happened at 36v or 48v recently.
It is such a short wire run. Odds are worse with a longer wire run. An electrician told me to feel wiring. If it's warm, you might need thicker wire & better insulation. Alot of those ratings for wiring seem based on 10 or more feet.
I'm not an expert, but a 2 inch or 3 inch wiring isn't what shut down your bike, unless wiring is weakly installed.
Check your battery wiring because a hard bump will knock loose battery tabs/contacts. This will shut down bike.
 
jimw1960 said:
This thread might give insight into controller cutout due to heating on an overvolted BD36. The reason it tripped AFTER the hill is because it works on temperature, not amps.

http://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=9915&p=153131&hilit=+BD36#p153131
Click to expand...

Thank you for finding that for me!
I didn't know the BD36 had a temp sensor in the motor, that is a good thing.

Since I never experienced rolling hills before I that must have really cooked it, glad it protected itself.

Air temp was 85 (humid) so I guess that didn't help either.

I want to invest in a Duratrax Infared thermometer so the next time it cuts off I can check the motor temp directly. Harbor Freight has a clone of it for $10 - 20% = $8 so that's great. Just too broke right now :(
 
lyen said:
Can you take a picture of the EMS label from the shipping box? This way, I can give you a more accurate answer regarding the shipping cost. There are tricks Chinese people used from the mainland to delivery either quickly and/or the most cost effective way such as carry this battery with them and go across the border from the mainland (Shenzhen) and ship it out in Hong Kong since the currency exchange rate in Hong Kong is lower than it is in China. Also, export tax rates & delivery speed are potentially better depending on the weight, size, and type of the item(s).
Click to expand...

Shipping label attached. I think it shipped from China because of the CN postfix vs Hong Kong gets HK ?

I find stuff like this fascinating. Wish they threw some Chinese currency into the box LOL, I used to love to collect foreign coins when I was little, my mom's friends would give them to me as little gifts when they visited and I would study them like they were some kind of insight into the unknown world :)

I bet it took several months to get something from China 100 years ago compared to several days today.
 

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I would have occasional controller cutouts on my bd 36, hot or cold, if I pulled too big an amp spike. I would also get cutouts if the controller got hot. One day it had me puzzled since I was going downhill, but I had been going uphill, and when I turned and went downhill, I had a tailwind, and lost the cooling breeze to my controller. On a heat test I did one day last summer at 111F I tried to climb a hill, and as the motor and controller got hot, the cutouts came quicker and quicker, so a hot controller is going to cut out sooner.

The BD 36 has no temp sensor in the motor, the motor will give and give till the smoke pours out. Belive me on that one. With my infared thermometer, I found cover temps of 140F were very common on the BD 36, while the brushless runs cover temps around 110. I have a ten buck auto thermometer sensor in my Aotema, and when the cover is 110F the inside is at about 160F. So the BD36 may have temps inside of 170 all the time. No wonder the magnet glue loosens on em.
 
According to the shipping label, it was actually shipped from Shanghai, China. Therefore, the shipping cost of ¥ 2190 or around $320 USD is legit. It really do costs that much to ship an item with such weight by air. The seller must have located a better manufacturer around the Shanghai area. Hopefully Mr. Lau Chan acquired his new "revision" batteries from the same manufacturer that Pingping acquired from since Pingping is also ships from Shanghai.

Do you have any laptop computer adapters at home? If you do, you can daisy chain them to charge your battery too. Let's say you have 3 x 19.5V Dell or HP power brick, daisy chain them in series & you get 58.5v which is perfect to charge your pack. The BMS should stop the charge once the voltage is reached. Just my other 2 cents. :)
 
That scares the heck out of me if it really was $300+ in shipping and not a declared value, because I only paid just above $400 for the pack and then talked him down to $25 for shipping because it was all I had left (he wanted $125). The charger and BMS alone are worth the $100 difference (but of course the charger doesn't even work so it's worth zero right now)

There's either some kind of shipping/billing weirdness going on or the quality of my battery is very very suspect.

Note the pack build date is from September 2008 and it's only marked 2C instead of 3C. It's old stock. It may have even been returned previously, there's no way to tell. If I just had a $400 auction that cost me $300 in shipping and then the cost of materials, I would not be sending new, quality proven parts. I would be sending whatever I had laying around that I couldn't resell. Maybe that explains the charger.
 
a Hong Kong ebayer is selling 48 v 3 amp LiFePo4 charger @ 29.99 free shipping. vedors name is yuejinya88168
 
Thanks for that, but the point is I am completely broke and in debt for awhile just to buy the lifepo4 pack (I had to borrow just to buy it). At $20 I can just ship the old one back to him and wait for the slowboat delivery of a replacement. But I don't even have that right now so it will have to wait. I hope I don't blow up my SLA charger from the constant use.
 
On chargers with no fan, I allways drill some more holes in the cover box. It lets them run a lot cooler. I'm not sure these manufacturers get it that we may have the thing running for half a day at a time. Of course, the guts are removed before drilling.
 
The one thing my SLA charger does have is lots of venting, it's slotted all around, top and bottom.

Only problem with it is that it knocks out my HDTV signal entirely for all stations when it's on,
I also noticed it also takes out wifi signals but I don't use wifi at home fortunately.
It also has lots of plastic chemical stink when that fan is on. But the fan is fairly quiet.

I bought it for $20 with an ebay coupon in March when I thought I'd be sticking with SLA
http://www.endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=9188
 
this guy already had some negative press. What is his total price for 48/15 pack?
 
needWheels said:
By the way, I was right about it being a kitchen-table business. This is where he is:
http://www.housingauthority.gov.hk/en/i ... 70,00.html

Again, nothing necessarily wrong with that, unless of course your drop-shipment contains broken items you can't cover :(
Click to expand...

I was born in Hong Kong and been there for a long while. The address from your link shows the low incoming housing apartments provided by the government.
 
lyen said:
I was born in Hong Kong and been there for a long while. The address from your link shows the low incoming housing apartments provided by the government.
Click to expand...

Yeah I got that impression but again I have no problem with someone trying to work their way up. Apparently he doesn't build these packs himself, he is just an agent getting a percentage for marketing, or has friends in China building them and they share profit. The problem is the lack of good policy for testing items before they ship, packing them well, and then dealing with broken parts. One extra dollar in packaging may have avoided this issue, it's a bad place to save a dollar.

I see some of the factories trying to direct market now on ebay so these kinds of agents may get squeezed out unless they build a reputation for handling problems like Ping does. The problem is Ping tacks on quite a premium for that service level.
 
Unfortunately no, all communication has ceased.

Essentially he has told me twice now to send back the broken charger
and I have no way to do it right now so it's going to have to wait.

I tried to contact the post office about the original box damage and they said the shipper has to file the complaint, and so I told Mr. Lau and he says he checked with EMS who says I have to file the complaint from here. I bet he's telling the truth about that because the post office is notorious for this kind of nonsense.

I guess it could be alot worse, at least the pack is working okay.
Here's hoping I make it past the 45 day mark with no pack problems...
 
Mr. Lau just informed me that EMS will not payout any compensation
for the damage to the package because "no insurance was paid" :!: :shock: :x

Sigh. I am a moron for walking right into this after reading this forum for a year.
Or at least I deserve what I am getting.

Ugh, not going to stress over this, I am moving on and will just use my SLA charger.
I just really hope the pack holds together for a few years.

I am trying to find a cheap 12x7x7 hard plastic box for it to no avail (cheap meaning under $10)
 
Maybe you can fix the charger. Take it apart and carefully tinker. Just make sure you put it back together nicely.
perhaps a new fuse or a little soldering will do the trick. Maybe you can have a friend with technical skill fix it.
sometimes taking a thing apart and reassembling it might do the trick.
 
I've already taken it apart and examined it and took photos.

Keep in mind it already outputs 53v so it's doing something, just doesn't seem to have any functionality even after being plugged into a partially drained 52v battery for many hours.

A fuse change won't do it and there's no visibly damaged components or board cracks that I can see.

I suspect whatever logic chips it uses for the different stages is damaged and somehow it's locked into it's lowest starting stage.
 
usually integrated circuits "chips" have good input protection and are pretty much failure proof. it sounds like your charger just doesn't produce current.

as i remember you could never measure the current that the charger produced by putting an ammeter inline.

if it produced CC as it normally would in the first stage, it would push the voltage of the pack up as the current caused charge to accumulate in the pack.

if it doesn't push charge out initially, it has a real problem, the setpoint for going to CV is not meaningful then.
 
You're right, it's not making current. Is that something I might be able to fix?
I have a half a dozen broken computer power supplies I could use for parts.

Well maybe over the weekend I'll open it up again and study the components very carefully to see if there's any connection that broke on a very fine level. However we're assuming that it worked when it left the factory.
 
you should check continuity from inside the charger to the plug itself. the charger could be working but not making electrical contact inside the plug where the battery is plugged in.

with the battery attached to the charging plug, you should see the battery voltage inside the charger where the wires are connected to the pcb. without turning on the charger!
 
Um, unless I am missing something I can read voltage out of the charger and I can independently verify there is voltage coming of out the battery at the charging port (without the charger hooked up). It's one of the very first things I checked when this happened last week. It's not a case of simple disconnection unfortunately.
 
Personally, I'm not convinced you have a problem. I just checked the voltage on my 36-v Mr. Lau battery and hot off the charger it reads 41.7, or 3.47 volts per parallel group. After settling it will go down just slightly to 3.4 v per group. After about 40 charge cycles, it is serving me just fine. Your cells seem to like being at 3.3 v per group as resting voltage and the charger you got with the battery gets them there. Maybe you should just chill out and try using the charger you got with the battery and see if it gets you around. Even if you charge them to a higher voltage with the L-A charger, it sounds like they'll just settle to 3.3 v anyway. Any charge above resting voltage won't give you many Ah anyway.
 
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