I've bought and upgraded my grid charger with apc 35 dc supplies. Just waiting for a good window to do my next charge/discharge.

The car is still driving good but started doing regular recals a few weeks ago. Hopfully an upgraded charger and a proper discharge will get it in better shape.

@S Keith maybe you could give me the lazy man's answer to my next project? I'm looking at a 2010 Honda Insight as a second car. Is it a generally more reliable car than the civic hybrid?

 

G2 Insight is fine. A couple years have piston ring issues, but not the 2010.

 

Heh,
Glad you approve because I already have one.

The acceleration compared to the civic is noticeably better.
It also has more features with auto lights and wipers as well as aux input. Very happy so far.

No issues with the ima that I can see. I repeatedly drove it hard during the test to see if I could get the battery level down low but it just kept providing and after 5-6 hard accelerations it was only 50%. I don't know if this car even has recals?

Can I use the same grid charger for this ima system? 200v peak?

Some minor issues noticed so far :
Wet below trunk floor after rain /wash. Likely due to next issue.
Door gaskets are damaged. Front and rear, don't see anything wrong with trunk gasket tho.
Drivers seat adjust bar is broken. Known issue with Hondas of this period.
One rear window not working.

All these issues I should be able to fix myself. Will put out requests for parts in breakers yards.

 

G2 insight only has 84 cells with 101V nominal voltage. Your 54-90V PSU will not work. 2X APC-35-350 should.

 

So back to the HCH2 I've been giving its second grid charge over the long weekend.

This time I gave it 36 h on the initial balance charge with it reaching 190v. During the day it could not go over 186v while 20*c outside. 10*c the next morning was 190v. I also noticed that with these new apc 35 350s the current remained constant over the whole charge.

Also discharged this time aiming for 100v, I was dropping slowly to 150v, then left for some food and 50 mins later it was at 50v. Not to worry, I turned off the discharge at it bounced back to 100+v in 1 min.

Doing a full charge again now. Interested to see if it will go to 195v.

 

Once you're below the 158V nominal, the drop can be precipitous.

The bounce is mostly normal. It's recovery speed is possibly indicative of an imbalanced battery. The fact that you had less than an hour between 150V and termination @ 50V means you likely didn't reverse too many cells for too long unless you were using 500W bulbs.

Very important to repeat a full charge with 8800mAh minimum input.

 

Thanks for the info,

I did a full 24h charge after, wanted to do 36h but the missus needed the car. I took it for a spin and it seemed to talk a while to go from the top bar. So I'm guessing it was close to full.

Is it best to give it a regular balance charge, once a month?
Previously I noticed it did its first recal ~1 month. I probably left it too long after that. But it's just been too busy with this being our only car. We have the insight now so regular 24h top up is doable.

 

24 * 350 = 8400 - below the 8800 minimum, but pretty close.... you're likely full.

Frequent grid charging causes capacity loss thus necessitating discharges, so it should only be done when necessary.

Assess how it performs and charge accordingly. Discharges don't need to be done every time - about every 3-4 charges assuming you can go 1-3 months between charges.

 

Again thanks for the wealth of knowledge.

It's been running great, next on the diy to do list is transmission fluid change.

Also insight going great, but needs a service and cvt fluid too.

 

Hello Kevinmce, I have a 2007 Honda Civic European and I would like to try Building a HCHII grid charger but I needed the construction scheme, step by step.
Please help me with the scheme.
Thank you and sorry for my English