48v DIY Battery in an Ammo Can

this will be my first project using 18 650 lithium-ion cells I'm going to build a portable battery inside this ammo can so here we go now I've been breaking these 18 650s out of modem packs for the last two weeks and testing their capacity I have not had a single one that came out of the modem pack at less than 2 point 7 volts and they all tested really well here's the ammo can and here's the two ports they came with the kind of thumb screw facing in and I was swapping it around like this now these 18 650s I could put them in as 2 stacks so I could stack one on top of the other like this and put it in as 2 stacks or I could do it sideways or maybe even 3 rows like this going back I mapped it out a couple of different ways and the way that I think I'm gonna do it is actually with 2 rows like this alright so what this will do is give me a 12 P and I'm gonna do a 14 s so what that means is 12 cells will all be paralleled so they'll act like one giant cell and then I'm going to Series connect positive to negative 14 in a row which will get me up to 48 volts 12 P 14 s we need 168 cells so I've got to pull out 168 of my best of cells I have 200 total now I asked for 200 from battery hookup because I was expecting some of these to turn out bad but none of them actually turned out bad for me [Applause] and I'm going to start off by just separating out all the red ones I think these might be Sanyo brand I'm not a hundred percent sure on that though because they don't say Sanyo on here whereas the other ones that are blue say LG and the green ones say Samsung so let's see if we have enough just in blue and green i watch HB powerwall his videos and he has had bad luck with San Jose so I figure if I have the option to do it all in LG and Samsung let me try but I'm not opposed to tossing in some red ones if I need to they just seem to be the minority of my cells all right I think I got all the red ones out so right here are all the cells that I need to create the battery these are the spares that I have of the green ones so I've got some cell holders here there's these little dovetail clips built into them 11:12 up to here but I don't need it to actually go beyond that I can actually cut this off and if I can just hit this for now yeah okay so I can just snip these for now and worry about the cleaning up the edges later we go so now I've got seven by 12 plus little halves I'm gonna probably run this through the bandsaw to clean it up [Music] here are the sell holders they're currently seven tall and twelve wide and they fit in here great so they fit right in the box there's gonna be two rows and the front here where you have these positive negative ports there's clearance for them so it looks like everything should fit in here really well there's enough height that you could actually go eight tall if you wanted to there's enough extra room so somebody like my friend Ben who does 16s for his system he could do the same type of thing just go eight tall and it would work so I guess I'll just go through here and start lining up all the I did not receive most of these cells sometimes I just simply took black tape oh actually I just realized I'm putting these on wrong okay what do I need to do I need to flip them and go every other yeah like this because these are gonna be my parallel rows going this way these ones go in the same orientation there we go now part of that is because these cells really are just they're new old stock so there are pretty good cells to begin with while I'm lining these up I'll go ahead and throw in some footage of how I broke down these cells so you can see that process and this one I left a little nickel strip there I'm gonna take that off so I didn't do a very good job on some of these but here's how I broke them apart [Music] I have to make sure that I've got all of them in the right orientation so negatives across the line here and then positives across the line so I just got to make sure that all of this I didn't screw any of them up see here this is gonna go on like this and this one go on like this good so that wasn't too hard all right so this is the spot welder I bought this from Keith Keith has a business called 18 650 and he is down in Rhode Island I actually drove down there and bought this from him but you can check out his website I'll leave a link below that's where I bought this this is nickel few strip from Atari hookup Wow like that that's so cool this guy here I've got to flip it over and I have to do the opposite the opposite runs I have to flip it over and I have to do the opposite runs so right here is gonna be the opposite side and I can go through and do these ones okay so I'll just keep going like that and tape them off as I go so this is the BMS I'm using it's a Dahle it's a 60 amp discharge with 50 amp charge and then it comes with this wiring harness which has very long leads on it nothing wrong with making your BMS is bigger than the way that you're gonna size the capacity of these BMS is you don't want to blow the MOSFETs out so always make them bigger than what you need the other thing that I want to plug into this since there's no monitor on here I'd like to be able to periodically check the cells if I need to so I have this is d t-cell checker I use it on checking all my batteries the connection on here is a jst - xh that's what these connectors are so i'd like to put a one wiring harness on each that way i could manually open the lid plug this in check what the cell voltages are doing see how unbalanced they are that's just for fun so totally not a requirement just fun like that you can see there's one line of cells here that isn't connected to anything this one right here and because that's the flat side i know those are negative cells so this is going to be the main negative of the entire pack and then over on this side we have the main positive of the whole pack you can kind of see how those are positive cells so the main negative is going to be number one so i'm gonna label that one and then over here on this side it's going to be two three for so those are my eight wires for the 7s now this one is going to be connected on the other side right here for the positive so this one's not going to get one and then we have over here this is going to be number nine ten okay so that's how I'm going to make my connections for this guy the main negative over here which is the red one um so here's the main negative of the whole pack and you can see that corresponds with how this plugs in plugs in this direction and there's a little negative symbol and positive symbol so I'm just cutting open a little section of tape right here that way I can solder the wires to that those little spots two three four here's number four one two three Green is for okay four I finished the soldering of these wires the ones that at least I could do right now so I have to jst connectors but I still have to do the connection down the middle and the two main positive and negative now here's the nickel strip which is going to go right down the middle and that's going to join the two halves and then we need to fold it together so there's two things I got to do I have to put a crease in this nickel strip so it folds right in the middle the other thing I want to do is take this plastic water bottle this is just a Coke or Pepsi bottle and I'm going to cut it and use the plastic as the insulator between the two halves alright so now I'll be able to put this on here like that that's nicer this is just water there we go that there I need to create my main negative across here over on this side it's gonna be main positive so they need some bus bars to come off so the battery is gonna sit in like this so these are going to be the positive and negative posts of the Amal cam the back side is going to press up against the back of the Ambo can the front is where I'm going to have like the BMS here so it'll fit right in this area one alright so for these two strips which will turn into the main positive and negative have one row to actually spot weld so the other row can come off but I'm going to leave little tabs of nickel and that way I have something to kind of solder my bus bar to I think this will work now I'm left with a bunch of tabs so I've seen HP power well used this method he puts the copper wire in a drill and spin it and it becomes this nice busbar this is doubled up 14 gauge and what I did is I bent over all these little tabs for the nickel strip and I put some flux on there so now let's go ahead and try to solder it okay so now I've got those soldered on last two wires this is the negative side here's the negative bus bar and it comes straight down to the BMS which is right here the positive side comes off the opposite corner so hopefully by taking the negative and positive from opposite corners that will help evenly distribute the amps across the whole pack now I have some this crank all these little things I then I picked up from Keith at 18 650 [Applause] [Applause] I think that was pretty cool Wow dad huh that is one big brick of a battery awesome some padding in this bottom and so I'll probably just use a prime bag here with some bubble wrap and set that in there's plenty of room actually between the studs and the battery probably probably a good half an inch actually so I'm gonna be adding something to block in here so now I've got a get the circuit breaker in here this is a midnight solar a circuit breaker this one is a 20 amp so this wire comes from the battery and this wire goes to the front stud so I just need to get those screwed on there somewhere so we're currently getting no voltage at the two outside posts so let's flip it on yes and the BMS is working because otherwise we wouldn't get any voltage out now I have these two extra jst so let's check what they are doing everything is three point three and three point three on this side as well so it looks like we wired everything correctly now if somebody wanted to they could put two of these monitors inside here but I'm just going to use them one time just for top balancing when I bring everything up to four point two because the BMS is very slow at that so these will speed that up bring it up to four point two volts per cell and then have to put a discharge on it but we currently have voltage out here at these posts so it works now battery hookup gave me this ammo box and they had already removed this rubber gasket on the inside they said that's important to not make it a pressurized unit the ammo can battery is done and it was a lot of fun building it let's see how much it weighs this is just my bathroom scale it says twenty two point eight pounds I'll put the numbers up on the screen of how much this would cost I think Tom at battery hookup is going to be charging twenty nine dollars for the ammo cam painted with these studs already drilled and installed the modem packs for this are 2 dollars and 20 cents per pack with 4 cells in each and you'll need 42 packs so the modem cells are going to be $92 now that's before discount but if you want a discount you can use my coupon code that's David Paz and that'll get you 10% off all your purchases at battery hook-up so all told you're gonna be somewhere around a hundred and ninety dollars for this package the circuit breaker and the BMS in here for a hundred forty bucks per kilowatt-hour that's uh that's a decent price so what's a good application for this now these are a very good value sell they're not necessarily the highest capacity sell but they're really good value at about fifty cents per cell and the total package here being about $140 per kilowatt-hour is really good so if you build this you could say build one package every time you get another 200 bucks and add to your system over time you don't have to do it all in one big shot like I tried to do with the Tower of Power behind the camera now these are not very high amp sells so if you are gonna do this and you're specifically thinking of maybe like what I'm thinking of doing for a future project it might be to build one of these but just for the purpose of powering my miter saw my miter saw has a really huge surge and this these cells wouldn't do very well in that application but battery hookup also sells Ryobi cells which are less capacity but really high amp 15 amps per cell so you you punch those into this assembly and I could run my miter saw off of it in short little bursts and the cells could handle it so that's actually a project that I'm thinking about maybe doing in the future let me know in the comments below if you want to see that thank you everybody very much for watching I'm not testing this in this video because it's really late and I've just got to get the video into editing so I can get it posted but I will make a future video where I after I get this fully charged and we'll do a capacity test on it and we'll power some stuff up with my little inverter so thanks a lot for watching if you enjoy the video please like subscribe comment and share

Channel: DavidPoz

Views: 268,970

Keywords: lithium, diy, battery, cell, 18650, 18650ed, cell holders, heat shrink, ammo can, ammo battery, military ammo can, build, k-weld, spot welder, kweld, 48, 48v, 48vdc, volts, DC

Id: iKEYDNvNRGQ

Length: 28min 21sec (1701 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 12 2020