Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Battery Watering

Yesterday I checked the water level off all my batteries after getting the suggestion from my PakTrakr to "Check Water in Battery B1". I found that most of the batteries needed little to no water, which is excellent. Nothing was dangerously low , which is quite good after 230 miles of EV driving. I have read that watering is needed every 200 or so miles and it only takes about 15 minutes to check the levels and add new water if needed, so it might become a Friday night thing to do since the EV will be doing close to 200 miles a week, hopefully starting tomorrow.

Also, after my video run I checked my cables to see how they were and I noticed that one was quite warm so I removed it and found that is had high resistance. So I removed all the cables and gave them a good corrosion sanding. The resistance went from 0.4 ohms to 0.0 ohms after some instense cleaning, about 15 minutes per connection and I have 16 connections.... do the math... I watche Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and I still wasn't done with the cables....

I haven't driven the EV since that, but I should expect cooler cables and possible an increase of power. Since that resistance was limiting me to 240 battery AMPs (V=IR) now I should be able to pull more, but I really don't want to in order to preserve battery life.

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