Ben's Refurbished Mitsubishi Miev

[MN Driver]

Originally Posted by jakobnev

Ok here's my idea: You rent it to people, who then park it in their driveway to get eco-cred among their neighbors!

I've never seen this eco-cred thing. People see the car that I drive and if they know what it is(2000 Honda Insight), they ask about the gas mileage. Some confused people ask where the plug is(non-existent for a stock Insight) and that's when I wish my conversion to pure electric was complete.

Ben, if the rest of the car was toast and the battery was fine, you'd have an offer for the pack. ..albeit 16kwh is smaller than I wished and their specs are worse than what I'll be putting in my car, but OEM quality stuff is good to have. Sucks that it got drained to zero by salt water. I'd thoroughly rinse the salt mess off of a set of cells and connect a cell or pack of cells to a 12v battery charger to see if it will climb in voltage and stay or if it drops like a rock with the cells getting hot. Of course don't exceed the max voltages for the cell chemistry but if you can get them in the 3 volt range and they hang out there, you've got a good chance from there, my hopes aren't high but worth trying since there are folks who ran an entire set of LiFePO4 down to 0v and recovered them and continued using them for a long time. Word is that it is dangerous to do this with the Cobalt based chemistries though. Use caution, probably in the backyard fire pit in case problems arise, good luck.

I tried to find the nominal voltage of the pack and kept getting garbage. If it is Lithium Cobalt Oxide it should be 3.6vpc, if it is Lithium Cobalt Oxide Polymer it should be 3.7vpc. I find stuff online that says 88 cells and 330v nominal, which would be 3.75vpc which can't be right unless GS Yuasa is making numbers us like A123 did for LiFePO4 with the 3.3v instead of 3.2v for marketing purposes.

[Cobb]

Does it look like its been into before like they checked it out?

Yeah, there are tax credits for buying evs as well as installation of charging stations. You got youself a 2fer since you already own an EV, now you got an excuse to get a better charger.

I wasnt able to deduct my Insight, but I was able to deduct my phev kit and "charging station", IE 10 g extension cord.

[razor02097]

I don't want to be a debby downer man but even if all of the outside items are made to take weather chances are there is still some sort of vent...like the battery pack had...

[bennelson]

Yesterday, I got one lithium module out of the car.

Here's the video showing the removal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AE_tXGESWw

The main battery pack is built from 22 units of 4 cells, built together with a BMS board. Each one then is basically a 12V battery.

I got the cell block out, washed it in the bathtub (second time I've done it. Wife hasn't killed me yet, but this time I was smart enough to wash the tub REALLY good afterwards and then CHECK with her if it was good enough, preemptively saying how I would be HAPPY to wash it again if it wasn't up to her standards!)

And then dismantled it into the single cells. None of them looked swollen or otherwise weird. The plastic overwrap is cracked on many of them. All the cells were pretty much at zero.

The first block that I pulled out (day before last) I decided to try to charge. The cells are listed as 4.2V max voltage, which means a regular 12V lead acid battery won't overcharge 4 lithium cells. I put the cell block in the middle of my driveway and ran jumper cables to a large lead acid battery to "War-Charge".

When connecting the cables, the lithium drew 15 amps. I left it connected for about an hour, occasionally checking voltage and temperature of the terminals.

The next day, I checked voltage of the cells again. Two of them were back down to just above zero, but the other two were still in the 3V range.

Last night, I visited my buddy Tim, and we hooked up a cell to a CellPro PowerLab6

A totally dead cell would NOT take a charge, because the charger was too smart for its own good, where it would think that there was no cell hooked up. We were able to get one of the "war-charged" cells to charge, as it had high enough voltage for the charger to recognize it.

We used the LiFePo cell preset to get a 10-amp charge going into the cell for a good hour or so. The cell didn't get hot or do anything else freaky. We had a laptop hooked up to the charger for data-logging, and the graph looked like what a person would expect for charging a lithium cell.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2fg8PuMMVc

I borrowed the charger and laptop and hope to go through testing the 8 cells that I have pulled from the car. As for the dead dead dead cells, I'll need to get some voltage into them for the charger to recognize them at all. Somebody told me to try using a low-voltage wall-wort, like a cell phone charger to get some charge into those batteries. It would be a very low current and about the right voltage. It should be pretty darn hard to accidentally overcharge a 50ah cell with a charger designed for a tiny cell phone battery!

You can see some more photos by scrolling to the bottom of my latest blog entry.

[Daox]

I thought the little bit of charging we did last night was very promising at least for that one cell. If you can get half the cells, or even a quarter of them to charge up you'll have a decent pack that you can have some fun with.

[MetroMPG]

Ben: this is good news! Glad to see some of the cells are coming back.

[bennelson]

That means it's probably bad news for my bathtub.

All I need is the encouragement of a few good cells to get me tearing the entire pack apart and scrubbing them down in my tub for the rest of the winter!

[MetroMPG]

Bathtub - that was funny.

Sounds like you're going to have to expand your repertoire of placating behaviour for a certain someone.

[Xist]

What if you bought a plastic or hard rubber tub and installed a drain? If its drain flowed straight into the bathtub drain, you would not have any cleanup, right?

Or am I crazy?

I hate it when I am crazy!

[bennelson]

Must.....keep.......wife.......happy!


Xist, interesting idea.
The drain on my tub is a little small. I'd maybe have to use an extra skinny pipe, to go down to the drain, but it could work.

A rubbermaid tub or something similar could then be raised up to an ergonomic working height.