Charging Up

Due to the unpredictable weather this past week, I spent a bit of time each evening after work to wire all the battery cells in series and connect the cell balancers and Pak Trakr BMS. This was not a very easy task because the space was tight. I connected each Pak Trakr remote separately first and all the remotes flickered ON except for one of them that stood out from the others only flickering OFF. I am not sure if this is a problem but will find out after I interconnect all remotes to the display.



Here is the spaghetti. It might look a little messy but the wires will soon be neatly tie wrapped.



Here is a look at things up front.



Today, I plugged in for the very first time to charge up the battery pack.

The charger LED light flashed red at one second intervals indicating that the pack was less than 80% charged. I started charging at 1PM and kept a close watch to see how the charger and the cell balancers were behaving. The charger heated up fairly quickly telling me that it was drawing close to max current (approx. 15-20 amps). About four and a half hours later, the charger LED light was flashing yellow at one second intervals indicating that the pack was more than 80% charged. Many of the cells (approx. 22) had reached their set voltage and the cell balancers were in shunting phase (green and red LEDs lit). Slowly but surely, more cells began to catch up and only twelve had still not reached their set voltage by 8PM. At 8:30PM, only seven cells were lagging behind. By 9PM, there were four cells left and by 9:45PM the charger LED light was flashing green at one second intervals indicating that the pack was at 100%. The cell balancer lights at this point were only green so I did not witness those last four cells' balancers go to the shunt phase. It had also gotten dark outside and the mosquitoes were biting so I called it a day.

Tomorrow (Sunday), I hope to take the car for a test drive after I pick up some power steering fluid (ATF) to top up the reservoir. I will also interconnect all Pak Trakr remotes to the display and double check the voltages of each cell manually with my voltmeter. My grin is getting bigger. More to come soon...:-)