Thanks for the support guys, it means a lot, and maybe I should have looked for it sooner. I just had so much to do, dealing with getting the recovery going.
I'm getting through the PTSD, as is my wife and the dogs. I'm not waking up at night having the dream about it anymore. That ended after a month. But typing out the story yesterday I still went fight or flight, got all shaky and had to take several breaks to finish it.
I don't think I'm gone for good now, or done completely with e bikes. A few ride shows me that. But I want that 90mph scooter back too.
What to do about a battery I can trust is a dilemma. I just don't see myself owning 3000 wh anymore, or running 2000w energy hog motors much, once my current 48v 20 ah of lipo dies. Its just going to be too expensive to get a lot of capacity that is UN certified.
For sure, my cheap ass battery was a very bad choice. No idea what bms was in it,, except it surely was the cheapest they could source. What would I like to see on the e bike battery of the future? At the very least, a cell monitoring port, a 14 pin plug your local bike shop tech can use. Better, low voltage alarms that let you know if the bms is failing you. That thing starts beeping,, DONT CHARGE IT. Best of all, frock that cheap bms for charging. Get truly smart chargers, and charge each individual string separately. Get a real balance charge each cycle, along with a display that tells you,, hey,, this cell group is not within a small % same as the others.
Currently, your warning that your battery is about to burn your house down, is,,, it just did. Not adequate, and I'm certain hybrid cars, and teslas, have much more sophisticated protections built in. Our bikes do not.
But really,, I just got lucky again. I hit the bad luck lotto again, just as I did with the west nile virus. Something like .1% of people with the virus get as permanently sick as I did. and likely about .1% of people with a lithium battery in the house have it burn. Likely even less, for bms protected batteries. Hell, those odds might be more like .0001%, but I won that lotto.
If only I could beat odds like that on the real lotto, it would be great.
My lesson is this though,,,, just don't charge the thing so close to your coats, your motorcycle full of gas, etc. I could have put that fire out ( the garage, not the battery itself), if the bike had been at least 2 feet from so much flammable shit. Others have,, we've seen it here. drag the thing out the garage door, and you have some nasty lithium smoke damage, but the fire can be put out once the damn battery is out the door. This was always my plan for a disaster charging in my fireplace. Get the battery out the door, then hose the room. Fire extinguishers were close, but not so close they'd be in the fire. Only a few months a year did I charge in the garage, the months I wanted to use my fireplace for, you know, a fire. Lipo would charge outside in winter. BTW,, the garage was not smoke alarmed. We heard the cells popping, which woke up my wife, thank god. Smoke alarms would have got us out of the house in time, but not the dogs, 3 times. Smoke alarm where you charge... in addition to what the house has.
Right now though, not much energy left for recreation, so e-bikes and motorcycles on the back burner for the season. I've been doing a lot of the easier (?) work on the house. It's pretty much cleared of the smoke smell, and all the items on the remove and replace list removed. So not much time for ES still. Kind of funny,, our abysmal hoarder style housekeeping made the smoke cleaning easier. All the soot just landed on a thick layer of dust, so book cases, tops of tall furniture, etc did not get soot penetrating into it. Before any cleaning really began, I hit the house with an ozone generator. Those that say that doesn't work are full of crap. The soot dust remained to be cleaned, but the ozone took all the stink out of it. My attic at present is still full of soot, but hardly stinks at all.
So the kind of long wait for my contractor to start has been good in the end, all the dust to be stirred up soon will not stink. I will not have to strip the house to bare studs to get it odor free. Once the contractor gets rocking and rolling, it should not take all that long to be back in the house. Once he gets started, I'll have more time, just taking care of two yards all summer. He might hire me to work on the house more, but I think I did enough already to cancel out the cost of the extras we want. ( the new garage will be fully insulated)
The house will, in some ways be much better than before. Funds to replace our garage sale junk will pay for a few remodels I had been wanting to do for years. The kitchen was always a but of a kludge. When we moved in, it was the worst kitchen I've ever lived with, including shitty apartments and campers. Originally built by some short people, cabinets were improperly installed, and a normal size person would whack bloddy knots on their heads daily. We changed that immeditately, but the kitchen was still a dark cave with a very poor layout. Later we added cabinets pulled from a dumpster and at least had a decent amount of space and counter. But we had 5 different brands and styles of cabinet in one room.
The new kitchen will be MUCH better. The door from kitchen to the garage will be moved about 5 feet, fixing the layout problem. The kitchen work area will no longer be the path to the garage, so the cook will not have to dodge the other person passing through. Adding 5 feet of wall to the other side of the kitchen will concentrate the cabinets and counter in the work area, and allow the fridge to be 5 feet closer to the food prep area. A new door opening to the living/ dining room will let natural light into the kitchen, and shorten the walk from stove to dining area by about 20 feet. And lastly,, all the cabinets will be new, and match, and all have doors.
We are going to move a poorly located closet, and replace some crappy doors too. If enough cash is left at the end, we'll finish a bathroom remodel I was half way through. We'd been working gradually on making our house handicap ready. lots of grab bars, changing doors to make wheelchair access possible, etc. Last thing on the list is swapping a tub for a shower. When we need all that handicap stuff, it will be in place. My dad taught me that, when he got back from his broken hip and stroke, we had to scramble to fix his house.
We are using the new appliances already in the rental. It came with a 20 buck microwave, an abysmal stove, and a trailer trash grade fridge. All those are shoved in a corner now, and our huge new fridge, new stove, and microwave are in the rental kitchen. Enjoying those a lot, after a month or two of the crap appliances.
And while I work on the house, It is kind of nice to have a complete set of all new tools. NOT worth it, but nice now that it happened.
If your insurance does not cover full cost replacement on the house and the contents,, fix that NOW. Not that much more on the bill, but worth it. And park vehicles without comprehensive insurance outside. :lol: Bikes inside, underinsured cars out.
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