IMA Battery Cooling
 

Has anyone come up with a way to provide additional cooling to the IMA battery? I'm in the process of recharging my IMA battery pack stick by stick (I'll post the details when I'm done). What I've noticed so far is that almost all of the sticks which are very discharged (some to less than 1% of capacity) are located in the middle of the battery pack. This is making me think that if there is a way to provide additional cooling to the battery pack, it might extend the life of the IMA battery.

Re: IMA Battery Cooling
 

How are you checking and recharging it?

Are you doing something like this http://www.homepower.com/articles/re...e-battery-pack

Re: IMA Battery Cooling
 

Yes. I'll post a step by step how to when I get 1,000 miles on my reconditioned battery pack.

How to Cool your IMA Battery Pack
 

One possible reason for the most discharged sticks being in the middle of the battery pack is that they get the hottest. Honda uses a baffle design to get air to flow from the top of the battery pack to the bottom of the pack. When needed, a fan sucks the air out from behind the rear seat, circulates it through the battery pack, then past the IMA electronics and it exhausts in the trunk. Perhaps it doesn’t cool the battery as well as it should, so I mounted 3 12 v computer fans to the bottom of the battery pack to make sure lots of air was flowing around all the sticks.

I used silicon seal to attach the fans to the battery pack. Make sure you mount the fans so they are SUCKING air out of the battery pack, NOT PUSHING air into it. (Usually, that means the decal on the fan should be facing away from the battery pack.) Otherwise, your new fans are going to be fighting the factory fan when it turns on. Also, make sure the fans are over the openings in the baffles, otherwise they won’t do any good! Finally, make sure you don’t put any silicon seal inside the fan housing. Check that the fans spin freely after the silicon seal has dried.

Wire all 3 fans up in parallel (connect all the red wires together and all the black wires together). I inserted a plug in connector so that the battery pack could be easily removed in the future simply by unplugging one more connector. I suggest using a big enough connector so it can’t accidentally touch any of the bolts on the battery pack when it is fully assembled.

For power, I ran a fused 22 gauge wire under the rear carpet to the connection for the rear accessory socket which is just ahead of the gear shift. This results in the fans running whenever the key is on. Doing that uses 0.5 amps, but I felt the certainty of knowing the fans were running whenever they might be needed made up for the extremely small power draw. Make sure you use a 1 amp in line fuse as close to the connector as possible. The accessory socket is protected by a 15 amp fuse, which means that if there is a short, you could melt the insulation off the wires going to your fans before that fuse blows!

Re: IMA Battery Cooling
 

Awesome!

Is there a charger you recommend to get?

I tried searching for some recommended one but it seems no one have them in stock.

Re: IMA Battery Cooling
 

I posted my experience, including the charger I used, on a new thread https://www.greenhybrid.com/discuss/...10/#post247096

Re: IMA Battery Cooling
 

Well, once I found a charger and get started, I can answer your first question. I have a 2008 model though.