Hi Paul
could I have knackered the capacitors in my controller by discharging them after use?
The car had been sitting for about 10 days with discharged capacitors
This is a quote from Tesseract on the DIY Electric Car forum
That is only true for aluminum electrolytic capacitors; for any other kind it doesn't matter whether you leave them charged or discharged.
More specifically, the leakage current through an "elko" increases the longer it is left discharged, and this current, if abnormally high, can result in the capacitor overheating internally. The cure for this is to bring the voltage up slowly on any caps that have been stored/unused for an extended period of time (weeks? months?), as this allows the dielectric oxide layer to reform gradually and limits heating from leakage current to a rate that the capacitor can withstand.
What is the recommended way to break pack voltage? - DIY Electric Car Forums
I have my pack apart - one cell had failed giving me a 43S 2P pack + 1S
The one S had had to pass the same current as the remaining pairs and had blown its terminal off