209: Tuesday 4th October 2011

For the last few days now I have been running on 9 batteries instead of 10 and getting a better range. I am still waiting for the battery recyclers to get some more deep cycle batteries so I can go and select some and swap with the dead ones I have now. I kept swapping the 1 dead battery, and the last one was promising, but it was charging much slower than the rest, so it was dropping down and down every time I discharged. I put this on the end of the pack and arranged a copper bar extension from the terminals of the last 2 batteries, so I can move the connection from 9 to 10 batteries easily. The motor controller seems to be ok with changing some settings and fooling it to believe it is a 96v system. The power is slightly less, but the range is more than double what I was getting before and the 9 batteries are all discharging evenly. I have to connect up for 10 batteries before charging as the charge is 120v only and I don't want to change this at the moment. The process is as follows; for example when I get to work, open the hood and pull the main battery pack connector go to the trunk and move the minus terminal cable from the 9th battery to the 10th and bolt it on. re-connect under the hood and then plug in the mains cable for charging. However yesterday I forgot to put the connector back on under the hood, so the charger was connected to nothing. Shock, horror, what was I to do? Fortunately I had done some tests the night before and I knew my range was 18 miles in ideal conditions, so 7.5 miles each way should be possible, and it was. That was really lucky though. The worst case was that I would have put it on charge and sat in work for couple of hours to boost it up. I learnt from that mistake and it won't happen like that again. Meanwhile work is still progressing on the battery monitor and the centre console plate, but I have nothing to show right now.