Working on the car today so had a chance to test this. Procedure was:

1. Battery was discharged to 120V, from 144V down with a 60W+40W in series.
2. Battery was allowed to sit for a while and it rebounded to 129V.
3. Battery was grid charged at 0.5A for 90 minutes, at which point it was reading 159V. (This in order not to start the car with no charge in the IMA.)
4. Pull fuse 9 for 1 minute.
5. Turn on the car, foot on brake, not touching the gas (idle). It did start using the IMA.

The SOC was no bars, after a couple of seconds 3 or 4 charge bars came on (sorry, I wasn't wearing glasses so it was a bit fuzzy). The car continued charging in that state until the third SOC bar appeared, at which point the charging bars disappeared. I waited a couple of minutes while the car idled and they didn't reappear.

Repeated steps 4 and 5 and it did exactly the same thing again. Who knows what the SOC was really at that time, but it showed the same number of bars as on the first attempt.

To charge the car to 1 bar less than full SOC I had to sit there for 28 minutes with my foot on the gas keeping the motor over 3K RPM the entire time.

It is grid charging the rest of the way now, current limited to 300mA.

 

Dear Pasadena,

I'm copying all of your stuff here and will undoubtedly have questions.
I'm on vaca in a couple weeks and hope to refurb the batt during that time.
time . I got the voltmeter and the MeanWell psu shipping out Tuesday, ill grab the light bulb fixtures and 115v plugs tomorrow.

Where did you find a 150 watt bulb? They arent allowed to manufacture them in usa or in Australia anymore

 

IIRC, it's only California that has a hard ban on incandescent.

My local Home Depot carries up to 200W.

IF you're in Australia, you only need 1 bulb.

I don't recommend mixing wattages when discharging from full. Due to the surge current, the higher watt bulb can pop.

 

The bulbs I use are 100W, 60W, and 40W. The two higher power ones are standard light fixture incandescent's which were sitting in my closet unused since we went over to CFLs and LEDs. The big box hardware store still has 40W, and maybe 60W, incandescents marked for use as fan bulbs. That's where the 40W came from.

I have never had any problem using bulbs in series.

Push comes to shove you can buy big power resistors. Say a 500Ohm wire wrapped, rated for 100W, so it won't be operating anywhere near its rating. Those cost around 12-15$. If you go that route be sure the resistor is up and away from anything you don't want melted or scorched. One big advantage of light bulbs is that the ceramic holder positions the bulb in just that manner. They are also nice because you can tell at a glance that your circuit is working.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United..._energy_policy
https://www.energystar.gov/ia/produc....pdf?6bd2-3775

It was planned but later defunded it appears, or perhaps most of the bulbs are halogens just not so obviously marked.


Why did you run two bulbs in series?

 

Because it limited the current to a safe discharge level even if one cell was already all the way discharged, ie, the pack was wildly out of balance. The data was posted in a different forum.

http://www.insightcentral.net/forums...arge-data.html

 

Halogen or incandescent doesn't matter as long as you are using the POWER rating and not the equivalent rating, e.g., 40W halogen "high efficiency" uses about 27W of power.

 

I grabbed 2 60 watt appliance bulbs. Closest I could get to the 150 watts recommended by HA
https://hybridautomotive.com/pages/sd#wattage

Shame I can't do this in winter and use most of those watts to heat my feet while I watch tv.


You have the fixtures wired in series? How do you step it down to a single bulb when you go down to the single 60watt?
On a related note: Kudos on using the same 2 bulbs the whole thing though... my dumb self didn't think of that. My question was supposed to be "why use 2 in series instead of a single bulb?" Though I guess it does save you from buying a single 100 or 150watt bulb.
I will probably try the spotlight halogens in my outdoor light... if I blow them, I;ve wanted to replace them with LED's anyway.


Like I said, I'm copying the photos and wiring from earlier in here. I do wiring in my home (add circuits, replace outlets, easyish stuff) and have a small amount of education in electronic engineering, have read up on batteries somewhat also.... but I admit this is still a little of a stretch for me (installing an aftermarket grid charger would have been the same as the trepidation I feel is related to messing with the battery itself).

I remember Steve said to hit each of the volt taps before starting to get some baseline. I also plan to drive the car and have the battery at the highest possible charge while inside the car to save time on the initial charge -- unless there is a caveat about doing it this way.


I do remember the way to prevent battery memory in much less complex devices was to always run them down to near nothing and let them sit for a time before recharging. Crystals forming and dissolving and whatnot... seems to remember the HA site saying to say give it an hour to cool off between flipping current flow direction.

 

Is that "you" me?

I never use less than two bulbs. If there was only one bulb and it happened to short out for some reason the current surge would blow the 1A fuse mounted next to the battery, and then I would have to pull the back seat again. Blech. If one bulb shorted the second bulb is probably going to blow too, but 99% probability it would do so by the filament breaking from too much current.

The current path goes like this:

IMA+
emergency switch (under a cover)
bulb 1
bulb 2
power FET
IMA -

If I turn off the computer power supply that drives the fan and fan controller it also turns that FET turn off, resulting in essentially infinite resistance. So at that point when the plug to the battery is pulled no current will be flowing in the circuit and no pitting of the connectors in the plug/socket.

The emergency switch looks like the one in the right in this picture:

https://www.cnascientific.com/wp-con...04/97-1101.jpg

and it is just there as a last resort, since throwing it when the circuit is live would probably arc and pit the contacts. Better to burn up the cheap switch though than the PITA to replace pins and barrels on the ends of the wires in the plug/socket.

 

oh snap! that looks like the switch from frankenstein's monster!!

Sorry about lack of clarity on "you".

I have come across two questions.
A. What gauge wire is sufficient? (the amp meter leads are quite small)
B. Is the amp meters only function to be sure current is flowing? I haven't seen anything which talks about current measurement, only voltages. I think Steve explained the current can be mathed out also... if we can estimate the bulbs resistance

I'm working on wiring everything up right now, I have some 12/3 romex which I plan to use for most connections but the amp meter portion of the circuit has be a tad worried.

Without the amp meter I could just use the single 125v electrical socket to bridge everything (though I'm also considering putting in a switch for safety which would toss this out the window)

Hoping to pull the battery from the car later today after I have everything else wired up and secured......should I start a sep thread for this? Its in the same vein as OP but I'm not trying to hijack either.