Electric Snow Blower used with non-stock 52V battery?

[The Stig]

Hey ES,
its been a while since I posted, but i think this is up your alley: How do I hack my snow blower to accept my 2 wire ebike battery of the same voltage? Details below.

Snow blower: Toro "60V" cordless 2-stage
Its like a giant tool, with giant tool batteries.
I don't know what kind of 60V this is... the stock chargers take the stock batteries to 60-61V
only 1-2V away from my 14S ebike batteries that charge to 58.8V, i have plenty of these batteries so it would be a huge help to use them.

Stock battery: 4 wire (4 blade connections):
| - | Ω | C | + |

so that is:
"negative", "Ω", "C", and "positive"
I don't really know what Ω and C are, but between Ω and Negative, is 0.000V or 20 κΩ
(the other identical stock battery is 18.3 kΩ)


Snow blower has 3 wires (3 blade connectors):
| - | Ω | | + |
It doesn't have any markings but these are the connectors that line up with the stock battery. Negative, "Ω", ("C" is missing, no connector), and Positive.

I tried making an adaptor that had a 20kΩ resistor jumping between Ω and Negative, but the Snow Blower did not accept it. it gave an error or empty light for that battery, and only drew power from the stock battery.

I'd like to avoid having to cannibalize a used battery to make an adaptor, because the space is so tight already with the ebike battery fitting like a glove.

Anyone have any ideas?

 

[calab]

Communication wire/port so they protect their liability and protect their customers.
Its a pretty common practice for consumer grade battery products.
Just means you have to hack their safety protocols and hack their communication protocols, which is hard to do.

What you could do is rip out their controller, use your own controller to power their motor and hook up your own batteries.
That is probably the easier route to take.
Their motor probably generic and nothing custom or fancy, off the shelf type motor from china, the usual thing companies do. Even Dyson uses generic off the shelf motors, marketing is a wonderful thing.

 

[The Stig]

As I feared. Thanks for chiming in! Hacking the protocol (a bit out of my current skil set) and replacing the controller sound a bit too time consuming. But I do have a few ideas...

Jumpers
There are 3 battery slots in the blower, I might try and and put a stock battery in 1 slot and then run jumper wires to the next slot to trick the blower into thinking it has 2 identical stock batteries in it. Then I would also connect the ebike battery with "Jumped" slot, but I might need a battery parallel device(diodes).since the stock battery and ebike battery will be in parallel(prevent BMS damage)

Piggyback on a stock battery.
Buy a small used stock battery and connect the larger ebike battery in parallel with the Cell pack. So connect the ebike battery to the positive and negative but "behind" the BMS. So the BMS and Controller would just see a cell pack that is 3x higher capacith than normal. Hopefully they dont count Wh, probably not. There may only be diodes on the ebike battery to prevent the stock cells charging the ebike battery. The stock cell pack may be OK with a bit of bulk charging from the ebike battery, but they would always be connected, so small V differences. And I won't care about the health of the stock cells, but will have to be careful about charging them every time. If it looks possible to put diodes on one of the power wires of the stock cell pack, I will, e.g. if it has separate charge wires.

Any thoughts or input much appreciated!

 

[spinningmagnets]

Crack open the stock battery pack and see how its configured.

They obviously have some type of "handshske" to ensure you use a same-brand battery.

One thing they are very likely to add is a surface temperature probe attached to the skin of one of the cells.

Since it would be incredibly rare for anyone to open the battery, its likely a less protected interface.

I suspect the exposed cell-group could have alligator clips attached to provide a constant "read" of more than 3V per cell (*lets say 57V from a 14S pack) which would prevent a "bad cell" signal which might brick the controller for liability reasons.

If yes (*and thats a big IF") you could then cut away the stock cells bundle and permanently attach the 52V pack.

Id prefer identifying all the wires going into the motor and cutting away the stock connectors to add a generic controller.

Two fat power wires, and five skinny wires for halls. A 5V positive, plus a negative (ground) and three signal wires for each of the three hall sensors.

Hopefully they are color coded. There might be a sixth wire for a motor stator temp, and sometimes a tachometer wire.

 

[The Stig]

Thanks SM! and Caleb. Good to see you all going strong on ES after so many years. I went to the darkside to reddit/ebikes but only problem with that is reddit's home page is too addicting for most people, and me. (Source: Social Dilemma documentary)

I'll tel you all, the reason I don't want to touch the blower is because I really need the warranty to hold up. And running longer range batteries, slightly lower voltage, and top maintenance based on my mechanical engineering side, with all that and long range batteries, this should not wear the machine down faster than it would have with 3 stock max capacity batteries.

I'm out of town, when i get back I will open a stock battery ASAP

P.S. I posted this in EV section because the thing is so large and heavy, i realize now that electrically this is more like a power tool. Is there another section for power tools?

 

[The Stig]

hack test 1 successful!

I jumped a stock battery to the next empty slot and the machine recognized 2 batteries! Turned on, spun up, so far so good.



Next Step:
figure out a way to make a rugged and removable adapter that will jump between 3 slots. (Pics attached)

Considerations:
- will need to use, swap and charge 1 stock battery at a time. Out of 2 stock batteries. This probably just means the jumper may be connected to the device, and not to the batteries.
- the gap between the stock battery and the dock is very tight, hard to fit even small wire. Any type ribbon wire that is safe?

I imagine if I go to thin on the jumper wires, they may melt from cross charging...

Any potential problems from a fully charged ebike battery charging the stock batteries?

 

[EkBuZ]

Did you ever get this figured out? I just picked up a Toro 60v mower w/o a battery and was hoping to do a similar thing and use my own battery or maybe just piggyback off a dead one/whatever I can find cheap.