Self discharging cells hurting my storage capacity, So doing some maintenance on my wall.

mário trubiz it is a beautiful Saturday morning here in my workshop and it is time I actually did some maintenance now two locations one in my battery shed and I've got to deal with this that is cell number 55 has always been low I don't know whether it's like a self discharging cell I don't think it's a self discharging cell because it'll just keep going down if it was I think it's actually just got really high resistance and just just a bad cell you know it's just an ATP pack so we're gonna go down there we're gonna pull that one out of service we've got a fairly good balance happening there a fairly big spread but as you can see 55 is very low that 29 is high the batteries are pretty much fully charged they're doing their little bit of a balance and it's only about midday here in Brisbane Australia at the moment so the batteries are getting charged off really quick the second part of this video is I have to take this battery which I have built and I'm storing up here to try and do things a little bit safer out to the farm because he has a self discharging as well where it's just constantly going down we keep hoping to bump charge it up so I'm gonna take that out replace his battery and then bring them both back down into my bench here we're gonna test both of them work out what's wrong with each one and then work out what we need to fix them to get them back in the service now to replace this one I already have another pack here built I've just got to attach the bus bar this one here is one of my first packs or at least one of my early packs anyway so it's got the different style bus bar it hasn't got the twisted copper it's got the flat bus bar so I've just got to make that up put it back in the service but we're not gonna notice ten kilowatt hours missing from my battery this time of year it'll be fine and it's just going all across there just doing a bit of a balance so tubers let's get after this we'll go and grab some tools and we'll get some gum pull this battery up get it sorted down in the battery shed we you have got soul of a 55 which I know is this one here I actually run my bait room through the step-down which is completely stupid considering that this wastes a bunch of energy and I will be changing that shortly but I've also got all my fans and stuff running through it as well so I have to turn off my bait room because it runs through that and then a disable this pack male will take it out of service we've got more than enough on the other side in the other shed there to cover my loads so I'll just pull the power out of the watch bond disappear actually that it takes a couple of minutes to realise that it's not there stop receiving a signal now we want to turn all this off so we turn that off up there now where that battery is placed it's a little bit hard to get to so I'll have to move this bench out of the way a little bit more space there it should be able to slide it out there without a problem so I go through a disconnect these cell monitors Oh with that much removed wasn't very difficult at all so straight up I realized I didn't have a zip tie on the bottom of that cell monitor but I don't think that really matters a very quick visual inspection I like to do a visual inspection before I take it up to the shed just in case I damage anything in transit so to speak now this cell has been in service for a couple of years and apart from not cleaning the flux off properly she still looks all right what do we got there some 23 23 27 24 so that doesn't look like it has any low quality cells there we've got a nice a nice I dunno this is we've got a couple of 4.35 old cells in there which of these ones here with the yellow rings shouldn't matter too much now this is the few side again not looking visually horrible it's not overly clean but not terrible either all those cables are alright connected nice and firm it doesn't appear we've got any bad cells there at all there's no discoloration there's no pitting on any of them or rust so we'll get that up to the shed and we'll start working out what we need to do to test this particular cell before we go and grab the other one back up into the workshop and a quick note I did think it was the older style bass bar it is the new style bus bar which is yeah well there's nothing I can do about it but it does mean I can just pull the cell from here and I don't actually have to make another one I can just swap it over but in the meantime let's try and work out why this failed I guess that's the main thing so the first thing we do is grab the multimeter and test voltages on every single cell and that will quickly tell us if there's any disconnected fuses or any think obvious there just to start with a very quick voltage tester that battery didn't bring up any problems there are all about three point eight eight volts so there's no disconnected fuses on the battery itself there's two ways forward I could just disconnect all the fuses because they're quite simple to put back on there again what I might do is charge it all the way back up to 4.2 volts using the IMAX x6 charger and then do a discharge test on it and just see the capacity of it because I've got a rough idea on 57 160 to 165 177 and so on and so forth so I know the rough size it should be I've got a feeling it's going to be around the 130 to 140 mark and then we can see what we do after that process is complete so let's set that up and get that started I definitely take the easy way out charging this battery some positive juice and that goes to the output and then we'll use the portable recycled power battery pack to power the x6 this little I charge it is a crackin little charger for DIY power walls charge and discharge does regen it is great and it's giving given a hard time and just handle it all well I've got it set to eight or nine ants or something charging so I'm not taking it all the way up to the 30 amps it's a bit warm in the shed at the moment and it is set to 4.2 foot 2 volts but that won't hurt it too much so we'll let that charge up and then we'll do a discharge test and see what results we get so it turns out there's actually three ways to do this and I I didn't even pick up my thermal camera now that isn't much hotter 40 degrees you can just make it out there on the screen move off to the left a little bit 7 to 8 degrees cooler so it's not very hot but it's certainly causing a problem we have a look on the other side that is connecting the charger and you definitely got a hotspot down there yeah it's interesting to note that I can't feel anything more than the slightest of temperature difference with my fingers yet it's extremely obvious on the thermal camera that we've got an issue so I'm still going to proceed with the test I'm still going to charge and discharge it we might actually charge it and let it sit for a week and then find out how much one cell can take away from an ADP pack ended up taking it outside and resting in its for point one volts when I took it off charge twelve hours later it was four point seven volts the next morning and then the next day you didn't give an 8 o'clock at night it was about 4 point 4 volts so that's 0.6 of a volt dropped in 24 hours so that that equals tour at 16 days I think the battery would be dead flat you can see it's 39 degrees there later on the evening and it's very clear how hot that cell still is I finished with that one there's not much more I can do with that we found the heating cell I've left it in there I haven't removed it it's just not worth it for the extra couple here powers and then the damage it'll do it'll thaw all disconnected so it can't cause any more damage or harm there and she's down to zero volts so she's good to go now we'll get this other cell down off here get some Bloods on it and get some heat-shrink on it and get it at the farm and get it swapped over [Music] [Music] [Music] hey shrink is all being complete lugs on there nice and tight double crimped as always let's get in the car go look at some beautiful scenery it's probably a little bit dry in here and get this done [Music] yet to the farm as you can see it was a little bit drier now we've we've done an initial check the first thing I did was walk in here and check everything I didn't grab my phone first so as it turns out this cell here is the 1i nose got issues but because the long ones are all doing their jobs we got on on on on and on we come down to the watchman toolkit and you can just hits by passing it 0.32 of an amp so it's only just by passing and the spread is pretty close so the long ones are doing their job but we definitely have a problem there that has to be addressed what I'm also going to do is because it's just a little bit bypassing I'm gonna turn the voltage down by just a smidge just to stop it from going up the top and of course it's at 28 volts and if I did my math properly that's 4 volts per cell so it's nice and nice and nice and safe range we can do this now hot water's been taken out because using the relay together and I've got to work out something for that but let's get after this get this replaced and go back to the workshop and it took a few minutes to change out that cell and we're all back up and running again unfortunately I didn't put much thought into the actual voltage when I put it back into service so it's a little bit hot it's a little bit low actually so three points eight seven volts and everything's all the other zone you know actively the bacterium said well that's a bit low we'll bring that one up so that is in progress now so we'll just let the bay trim sit there and do its thing as it does I'll get back to the workshop and we'll start some tests on this we still clean this mess up we'll do that later yeah late is a good time okay the workshop again and I absolutely can't believe how dried is out there I'll leave some footage at the end on my driving home but here we go I instead of playing any games of this I just brought it straight home again got straight into it grab your thermal camera this time didn't dig around with voltages and stuff actually did taste the voltage it was point two of a volt 0.02 of a volt lower than when I tested it on site not too concerned about that because it was actively being charged at the time so wasn't wrested voltage so we got arrested voltage now but I can absolutely feel that there is something in this general area that is a problem now this is probably one of the drawbacks to nickel strips is that it's a lot harder to actually see with the thermal camera the the differences and stuff like that in temperature because of the shiny surface so I'd have to cover it with black tape or something I believe that's how it works but let me grab the thermal camera and show you what I can see now I've change the settings to black and white so we don't get the the high in the low range of the Reds to make it look artificially bad but as we slide down here sort of just make out that that's 36 37 degrees off to the left it drops to 32 degrees so we have just a little bit warmth in this area you can definitely see there's something under there so we're gonna we're going to assume it's that sanyo cell right there that's the problem so let's let's get after it straight away let's not try and mess around and play games like we did last time I'm just going to pop that nickel strip off there mr. Sam your cell is faulty so we've got the fuse on this side down there but I might just run it from this side over so I'll snip the fuse and that's going to run these other two cells down and I don't want to waste two cells so to speak so I'm just going to lift this nickel strip up a bit with that nickel lift it off we might actually do a voltage test so this is the entire pack yeah we'll get the range happening so it's a little bit easier to see so we've got three point nine eight volts and the actual faulty cell that I believe is faulty [Music] look at that 0.2 one of a volt and the two cells beside it three point nine eight volts so it's definitely that sandy a cell that has failed and I'm very glad we found that so we can actually put that back into service quite quickly I will just remove that put a new fuse on there and away we go so there we go we found the bad self it's 0.2 of a volt so it's definitely that same yourself that was self discharging and drawing the whole pack down which is a real shame now this this leads me to believe that this route for several cells with nickel strip is probably not ideal I like the idea it's really fast there's less heat that gets into the cells I don't have to worry about trying to spot weld the fuse wire to the cell because I simply can't see it well enough but moving forward this would be the last time I do it this way I think I'm gonna have to get a better way of doing it so troopers that's a little bit of maintenance done if I could say one thing please check your packs these things don't look after themselves and use whatever money you've got left in your pocket and do something about your safety within our community I feel like a bit of a Nazi but you know that's kind of kind of the way it's sort of turning out that we just have we have to start doing better right so thank you very much for tuning in to burrs I'll see you on the next one enjoy my drive home have a look out droid is Cheers [Music] [Music]

Channel: HBPowerwall

Views: 89,166

Keywords: 18650, DIYPowerwalls, DIYPowerwall, HBPowerwall, powerwall, Batrium, BMS, Battery, tesla, PCM60X, PIP4048, powerwall2, 18650ED, BatteryHasher, maintaining a powerwall, servicing a powerwall, selfdischarging 18650, self discharging, NCR18650, dead battery, renewable energy, FLIR, Thermal Camera

Id: KnXqwiaAxV4

Length: 17min 14sec (1034 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 28 2019