Oh, hey...it looks like I never continued my story from the first post. Ha! Only took a couple of years to notice.
About to and a half years back, I bought another fixer-upper ebike. Bit better quality than the ones I originally had. Bigger batteries, more power. As she was when I picked her up:
Dead batteries, flat rear tire, plus a year or more weathering to undo, which meant taking apart all the switches and cleaning the contacts as well as cleaning and removing rust. She's been a faithful ride ever since.
And here's trouble brewing:
This is the "bike" I was referring to "still riding around" in earlier posts. It ran well with my LiFePO4 pack for a while, but I lost another cell or two, and it got shelved, as I was out of replacements. Expensive learning experience! I've recently(if 3 months ago is recent) built it a brick of healthy used lithium batteries. For now I'm still using their original BMSs and charging each of the 5 packs off its own charger, as I
trust their BMSs.
Brick:
Plenty of room where the big old 20ah SLA's were: (Still room for one more of the packs it's built from)
I also "upgraded" the controller. Somewhat unnecessarily. I was trying to give the "bike" regen braking. Turns out that "EBS" (electronic assist braking) is
not the same as regen braking.
In fact, I have no idea what it is because it doesn't seem to make a difference.
I did get more power out of it - it's a 40 amp controller vs maybe 27...? - so it has a lot more gusto. The controller is also rated up to 64v...which is good, since the nominal voltage of my pack is 55 and the full-charge voltage is 63. (which is what the capacitors inside it are rated for, so no going higher yet).
I still need to test the actual capacity of said brick, but expect to have 1.25kwh based on the tests already done on some of the cells. Maybe that will be a project for tomorrow...