DIY Solutions to Honda Hybrid Battery Problems (Insight, Civic, IMA)

[msantimanzano]

I just bought 5, iMax B6 charger/balancers, so when they arrive, I will have 5 units to use at a time, and then I can start working on the batteries.

[Cobb]

Ive seen the orange sticks go for 35 bucks on ebay. This maybe help offset the costs and time you have invested. If you like the honda hybrid vehicles you should consider a grid charger/balancer for your car.

Its typically not a good idea to use a junkyard pack. When nickel batteries are not used the electrolyte settles to one side of the cell depending on how it is situated. The only way to equally distribute the chemicals is to charge it to a full status at 350 ma. To do the whole pack without over charging just keep at the 350 ma. If you cant get that high of a voltage you can do a stick at a time.

I have a simple charger/balancers for my gen 2 that cost less than 200 bucks to make and I use it 4 times a year.

So far looking at your battery nothing jumps out. I had one where the plastic sleeve or shrink wrap was bubbles, pitted and just damaged looking as the stick had a high internal resistance and got hotter than hell when under a minor 5 amp load.

[msantimanzano]

Question, the charger I am going to temporarily use to grid charge my installed battery pack is asking me:

Voltage limit
Current limit
Watt limit
Continuous volts, current and watts.

350 mah is the current I will set for, but what should I set for volts and watts?

I'm still waiting to get the charger/balancers in the mail to start cycling my battery sticks.

[Cobb]

What voltage did the sticker on the drivers door jam say? 144 volts?

Fully charged should be 181.1-184.8V resting. Grid charged they will go to about 191.4V tops.

So I guess 191.4 volts x .350 = 87 watts?

Since you are in FL its a good idea to run the battery fan too. I just put a beach key in the car and hook a 12 volt charger on the starter battery so it stays up and the ima system runs the blower as necessary.

You need to baby sit this. It should take 3-4 hours to reach like a 90% charge, then the remainder 10% or balance charge can take up to 16 hours. You will see the voltage rise and fall during the process. When it stabilizes you are 100% done. 16 hours is a long time, but it will pick up if you have to interrupt it and cone back next week.

A good exercise is to check the voltage every 15 minutes and to 1 decimal place.

[msantimanzano]

Alright, I got my 5 imax By chargers. Now, doing each stick of 6 cells, at what amps should I set the cycles to charge and discharge? Max charge on these chargers is at 5A, and max discharge is at 1A. And 3 cycles should be fine right?

[Formula413]

The Superbrain charger that I used can handle much more amperage. Based on a post here I used 7 amp charge and 10 amp discharge. So it sounds like you will need to just use the max settings on yours. As for cycles I sometimes ran four or five if I didn't see the results I wanted after three (>5,500mah)

[Cobb]

Most people use the max settings so they can compare apples to apples. In real world use in the IMA system they will see way more. In other applications less is used. Many use older ima cells for ebikes and such.

May want to get an ir temp gun to check the temp while you are cycling them.

[msantimanzano]

Well, these iMax chargers are crap. 3 out of the 5 keep giving me errors, sometimes shutting down and not wanting to take the settings I am trying to put on them. Has me ticked off. Contacted the seller on Friday and told them I am sending them all back for being defective. Same with the power supplies I got for them, 2 of the p oversupplies got hot and shut off, won't even power up anymore. Grrrrrr.

I went to Tower Hobbies online and bought a $200 good charger/balancer TowerHobbies.com | Hitec X4 Plus AC/DC Charger

Charger arrives tomorrow.

Therefore, I still remain at a standstill in my journey. Argggggg

[Formula413]

I used the Superbrain 989 for the cycling and it worked very well, FWIW

[msantimanzano]

I had looked at it, but I wanted to be able to do more than one stick at a time, thats why I had purchased 5 of the iMax chargers.

Also, I had not thought about this, but I am thinking about it right now. My accord sticks are doubled. I cannot separate them as one end is spot welded together. That said, I suppose that in reality, when I cycle them, charging and discharging, I have to do it to each doubled up pack. I had initially thought that I would cycle each stick of 6 cells individually, but now that I actually think of it, that would be pointless since whatever happens on one half of the stick, will impact the other half anyways right? So I guess I will be cycling packs of 12 cells, total of 14.4 volts instead of my original thought of cycling 6 cells, 7.2 volts.

These are the specs of the incoming charger tomorrow.

Charging Current: 0.1-6.0A (max 50W x 4, total 200W)
Discharging Current: 0.1-1.0A (max 5W x4, total 20W)

I will be charging 4 sticks of 14.4v each stick at once. If I do 3 cycles charging at 6A and discharging at 1A, what do you think is the estimated time for all 3 cycles to be complete?