More feedback from the guy that has an Elcon that gassed the batteries a
lot and ran warm at 120VAC.
He said this is the only charger he's had, at least for this EV, and I
think this is the only car-sized EV he's had. His roundtrip daily
commute is 10 miles. Lost a battery after about five months of use
starting in April, although the car had sat through the previous winter
(2011/2). I suspect his batteries are from the summer or fall of 2011.
So my guess is he's got 1.5 year-old batteries with maybe 2-3K miles
on them (assuming ~200-250 workdays @ 10mi/day + misc. miles). Kind of
young to be gassing so heavily, since new-ish batteries should be able
to reach the USBattery-recommended constant voltage setpoint pretty
easily without a lot of amps. However, I am aware of USBattery
recommending (at least at one time) an equalization charge current of
11A, which if that is dialed in as the third-stage constant current
phase, that would produce a lot of gassing and stink. It seemed that
USBattery changed their charging recommendations a year or two ago, from
IU to IUI, so it's hard to guess what is dialed into the charger. I'd
really like to measure one with a voltmeter and clip-on ammeter.
Chuck
On 2/1/2013 11:38 AM, SLPinfo.org wrote:
Chuck
Thanks for that. I too am actually considering going to one of these with
my lead pack at some point. I worry about how long my current charger will
last (I bought it used and have been running it daily for almost 3 years).
I'm probably pushing it too hard which will likely shorten its life - it's
rated for up to 150 AH batts and mine are 170 AH.
The "gases a lot" comment may be sort of relative. With my current charger
when it's in the last phase (the final 20%) I can definitely smell the
gassing (I run a fan in my garage to vent air out the window just in case).
But my understanding is that with floodies this is what you want to get a
proper charge and prevent sulfation. It would be good to know if that
person has experienced the amount of gassing produced by other chargers?
In other words is "a normal amount of gassing" which this person just
thinks is excessive, or is it "more than you'd see with other chargers"?
If it's the latter perhaps the charge endpoint on the algorithm is set too
high.
The comment about it running hot at 120V is especially interesting (not
sure what your "hmmm" comment means btw). I currently use a Quick Charge
Select-A-Charge which weighs in at 42 lbs and does get quite hot. I
actually added a small external AC fan next to it that comes on during
charging - not sure if it's really necessary, but I didn't want to take any
chances. The "hot" comment suggests that while I might gain some weight I
probably should keep the fan.
While I think of it, will these chargers allow you to do a regular
"equalization" charge (i.e., run two charge cycles back to back)? Or will
the charger just notice full charge the second time and shut off right
away? My current charger can be set so it will quickly charge up to 80%
and then just repeats the last phase for 3 hours. I do that monthly.
- Peter Flipsen Jr
On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 1:57 PM, Chuck Hursch<[email protected]> wrote:
I just wanted to throw out the feedback I got. Basically people seemed to
feel that it was a plug it in and forget it type of charger - it does the
job. One person said the finishing charge seemed to gas the hell out of
his batteries; he just kills the charger early if he's available to do so.
And perhaps most interestingly, someone said that the charger seemed to
run rather hot at 120V with a slow-running fan, cooler at 240V with the fan
running faster - hmmm...
Chuck
On 1/28/2013 2:40 PM, Chuck Hursch wrote:
Hi Peter,
Thanks for the pointer. I sent some queries.
Chuck
On 1/26/2013 10:01 PM, SLPinfo.org wrote:
Chuck,
Have you searched the evalbum yet? A quick search under the category
"battery brand" yielded 160 hits for Elcon. By looking at the first
couple
of pages I found the following folks who are running Elcons with lead
acid
batts. There are very likely to be more. Hopefully you can find a few
with
significant experience.
http://www.evalbum.com/4339
http://www.evalbum.com/4290
http://www.evalbum.com/4176
http://www.evalbum.com/4168
http://www.evalbum.com/4046
http://www.evalbum.com/4030
http://www.evalbum.com/3984
- Peter Flipsen Jr
[snip]
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