What's the going price people are paying for salvaged HCH1 battery? I'm seeing them listed at the core price of ~$500 + shipping on ebay which seems unrealistic for a pack that is in unknown condition or has triggered IMA light already. Anyone know how much salvage yards charge for these packs? Saw a couple civic hybrids in a salvage yard and their IMA batteries were already pulled, so there must be a market for them.

 

Yep. Definitely a market for them. People have to buy 2-3 of them to build a lasting repair. many just buy one pack and are back into them every 3-6 months chasing the bad sticks.


There's a demand, but the reality is that people are paying good money for total junk because that's all that's available.


Your best bet would be to go to a local salvage yard and check the voltage taps at the orange connector. You can demonstrate that they are totally out of whack, you can try to argue that this is an "untested core" and is only worth a couple hundred dollars. If they insist on more money, make them stand behind it with a warranty. Take them up on that warranty... then take it back to them when it codes. Keep repeating that they're selling a junk core battery. Eventually, you'll wear them down and get it for $200-300 after you've had a chance to see how the taps respond to operation.


If you luck out and get a pack that actually works, then you know you have a good pack you can muck with after the warranty.


Good luck,


Steve

 

Thanks, that's great advice.

I want a spare one to play with, I understand that it's not likely to have enough good sticks to make a good pack. Unfortunately the one I ordered suffered previous shipping damage before the new seller even packed it, and the listing was inaccurate. Started return process, we'll see how that goes. Hopefully I can get my car to pass smog especially once the mean wells I ordered arrives Friday. Then I can take my sweet time to get a good deal on a spare pack for fun fun fun!

Do you know if the 20 pack untested from bumblebee for $150 is viable purchase to get maybe 5 good sticks in there? Talking about these ones

Finally, what's your view on mixing new 8mAh with old sticks if your pack is already throwing IMA light, if you were going to grid charge say once a month or so anyways? Has anyone ever tried this? Seems to me this isn't that different from having already unbalanced pack, and has higher chance of getting useful life out of your pack than putting in used unknow condition sticks in there.

 

I've purchased a couple of boxes of untested sticks from BB. REsults are basically the same as a salvage yard, and it's completely random.

You could get a box full of **** or a box full of gems. Again, it's no worse than a salvage yard pack. My last pack was 100% usable for grid charging. 14 of the sticks were very good and 6 of the sticks had great capacity, but they self-discharged notably faster than the others. Probably a 2-3 month grid charge requirement for a car that's driven normally.

The one good thing is the untested sticks may have sat around for many months and self discharged themselves to very low voltage. If that's the case, then reconditioning isn't needed. Simple balance charging and discharging a couple times is enough to "wake them up."

The 8Ah sticks perform differently than the Honda sticks. If you have detailed knowledge of how they perform, you can mix them, but it needs to be done on a tap-by-tap basis, i.e., on each of the 10 taps, you want to put one of each stick to minimize the voltage shenanigans the car sees. You really need full range voltage curves at high current discharges of both the new and old sticks to have any confidence they will play well together. Simple capacity numbers don't quite get you there.

 

Cool. Do you know a source for the 8mAh sticks? I believe bumblebee wants $1800 for a set of 20, which seems absurdly expensive considering fully assembled tested pack with warranty is $2100, and the DIY sticks have no warranty or minimal warranty. I haven't found a source to buy from the factory making these for a reasonable price.

 

No. The sources for the 8Ah cells are locked up by the pack builders, or they will only entertain orders of thousands.

They're priced like that to encourage you to spend the $300 extra and get a 3 year warranty rather than a 30 day. If you haven't figured it out... they don't want to sell them. I have a decent idea of what they do to the sticks before they are ever installed in a pack. They test them down to the cell level and match sticks to build optimal packs. They don't just ship them off their shelves as received from China, and they have a lot of test/touch time into them before they ship to you. Basically, the price difference is the amount of time to build, charge and ship a pack. You're still getting all the goody in terms of the stick quality. Since they're not doing the build, they're only warrantying for 30 days in case you muck it up...

You can order 6.5Ah sticks from China for about $1300 shipped. It will cost you more to ship a bad stick back for warranty than the stick costs, so discard the idea of the China warranty meaning anything.. If you're going to spend that kind of money, you might as well hand off the liability to Bumblebee.