Well gents after way too much research and not wanting/having $200 to $300 to spend on an ebay grid charger I picked up an electrophoresis unit off of eBay. So I ran some wires through the trunk and connected them to the battery. All great at this point except that for my "harness" I did not install a diode thinking I might want to also do a full discharge as part of my attempt at restoring my sons 2005 Civic Hybrid performance. Of course the trick is that now you have these wires in your son's trunk with 170 volts on them waiting to discharge on something. I've already devised some slip on protectors to use when not charging but he still has to touch them when connecting to the charger(banana leads). My other concern is the 1 to 2 inch sparks that go flying when I connect the charging harness positive lead to the eletrophoresis unit(yes the unit is powered off when I am connecting).

In addition after a brief 7 hour overnight charge at 300 ma I noted today that the side airbags light is now coming on almost in perfect synch with the Green charge bars coming and going.

 

Charging for any length of time without battery cooling is a perfect way to destroy the pack.

Most electrophoresis units are not equipped to be used with anything but a simple resistive load. NOT having a diode in the line is likely going to destroy the unit (with this "1 to 2 inch sparks that go flying").

 

S. Keith:

Thanks for the input. The pack was at 160 volts when I connected the charger. For all your aforementioned reasons I won't be attempting any further charging until I can get a 12 volt supply connected to the fan.

 

You will need a 12V/10A supply and a PWM controller. You can't just force the fan to run by applying 12V to the (+) and (-). You can short the PWM wire to ground to run the fan at full blast, but some have reported this to be a permanent change, i.e., the fan runs full blast even after the harness is disconnected.

Search this site. Someone recently found a suitable controller.

Alternatively, you could put a 10A charger on the 12V and turn the car's ignition ON (engine off). The car will manage the battery temperature as needed.

 

Put a >200V diode in the positive lead at the power supply so that current will only flow out of it. When you attach the leads the diode will prevent any current from flowing into the power supply, because said current could damage it.

You should not see sparks at all, let alone 1 to 2 inch ones. A spark like that at connection (when the wires draw close together) implies an impossibly high voltage for the battery, in the many kV range:

https://hackaday.com/2016/12/08/meas...-probe-tricks/

It is possible to get sparks that long when breaking a connection if there are large inductors (coils) in the circuit.

I used an electrophoresis power supply and it was very unstable when attached directly to the battery. They are designed for resistive loads, not loads which are in any way reactive. Placing a 30 ohm drop resistor with a big heat sink on it in series with the battery resulted in a 10V drop across that resistor and stabilized the power supply. This is described somewhere in a series of posts I made on InsightCentral.net

If you really saw sparks as large as you indicated it could easily have fried any number of components. That said, I think it is more likely that you now have a short between the car's frame and the battery ground. Normally the battery is floating with respect to the car frame. Probably your harness is now grounding it to the frame, intentionally or otherwise. You will want to fix that ASAP. Be extremely careful, if that is the situation and one hand is on the frame and the other comes near the positive side of the battery you could receive a lethal shock.

 

Update(2095 Honda Civic Hybrid):

After attempting to grid charge the original battery that came with the car(many times) I could not get the IMA light to go out. Then the winter would come and it was totally useless... you know like when you have a bad 12 volt car battery and the temperature drops and it just dies overnight.

Bought a hybrid battery off ebay. The guy said he pulled it out of a car with the IMA light off. I put it in the car and after doing the remove the battery cable three times to reset process the IMA light is now off. It likes to stay 4 bars short of full. I've done the charge in park at 3k rpm 4 or 5 times but it goes down 4 bars from full really quick when driving.

I took it to a long road with many steep hills and drove it hard to see what the battery would do. It took a while to get it down to two bars. Brought it home and it showed 152 on the voltmeter.

I started a grid charge at 300 ma in the evening with an electrophoresis P.S. The next morning at the 17 hour mark it was at 165 and still pulling 300 ma.

Wondering if I should bother going ahead with a full grid charge/regen process?

 

Were you providing active cooling of the pack during charge, or did you do it with the IPU lid off in the car? If in-car with no effective cooling, you cooked the **** out of it.

 

Yes. I noted absolutely no heat behind the rear seat when I put my hand up there (trunk panel is removed) as opposed to lots of it when grid charging the previous battery. I have an extra fan drawing heat out of the fan duct work. But no heat noted from the duct work or back panel after 17 hours. Still drawing 300 milliamps after that length of time left me a little confused.

Again the pack was at 152 volts and I set the charger at 165. Should I charge at a higher voltage? From what I've found it seems the 2005 civic packs should peak at 8.1 max per stick. That comes to about 162v volts.

Mark

 

Under no circumstances should you charge the battery in the car without robust cooling active. A 120 cell pack will peak north of 170V.

 

For mr1997. Let's say it is being charged at 300mA. 170V* .3A = 51W. Imagine putting a 50W bulb into a box that size and turning it on. The heat has only a small path for escaping and the temperature will rise rapidly. Still, you will not feel any heat coming through the rear seat or on the rear deck. When I did it the IMA fan was always made to run (separate controller) and the air coming out of the exhaust was quite warm. I do not know where you are but never grid charge the battery on a hot day, especially if the car is in direct sunlight. Even with the windows down and the IMA fan going it is too much and the temperature gets very high.