Pack Size

Well I still need to put in the cells I charged up. Been busy. I found that my DC stationary pack is way to small to charge my pack in the car. It was a good demo for low voltage vehicles and a good demo of what the controller is able to do. Now that we are at a high voltage we need good AC source for charging. I can build a dedicated 100 amp AC circuit for charging and pump in a cool 50 or more amps into the pack. All through the controller. The best thing to do is to just setup like any normal charger and charge that way. Takes longer but runs cooler. If I were to build a good DC source for charging I'd need a huge bank of batteries. Since I am now at 192 volts I can have a stationary pack of at least 144 volts and as much AH as I can possibly get. This would be a great way to recycle lithium batteries. Run them in a cool ground box. You need energy not power for charging. At charging rates the batteries would not even breath hard while charging. That is good news. But for the mean time it would be good to have a good AC source set up to charge your car. It would eliminate the need to use the motor fields as an inductor and introduce heat and would allow a much cleaner install. Jack has proposed a way to use the CANbus setup for the Elcon chargers and to allow you to set your own settings for your own needs. It would give you a great charger that you can configure for a decent price. The chargers are good. I have two of them. But you still need to mount them in a good place in your conversion and that space is limited. You can't just stuff them anywhere. I like the idea of the controller being the charger too. Small light weight package and no extra charger. That is a huge deal. I am going to try to get my DC generator running to see how much power I can pull from that running off a gas engine. Mostly for portable power away from home. Need to make a mount and connection to the gas engine. A nice Joy coupler should do just fine. If I can pull 36 volts and 400 amps I should be able to charge my car at a pretty decent rate. I am thinking more like 3 hours rather than 8. This is just speculating but we will do a test.

Time to put all the components into the Red Roadster. Hunting for some nice seats right now. Looking to find some good ones that are leather. Leather holds up much better.