Wirelessly charging 18650 batteries!

g'day youtubers it's been a while right turns out the neglect fairies jumped up smacked me in the side of the head said qp what are you doing now about three months ago i did a battery check and i found one of the cells was a little bit low i fixed that up i found i had a self-discharging cell didn't look at it again i thought all the rest of them at three point was at 3.75 volts or something pretty much what i left of that when i i balanced them all and put them in a resting voltage i need to walk out here yesterday afternoon to find i think it's this battery here was just under two volts i can't remember exactly so the neglect ferries have really kicked my ass i could have damaged the cell beyond repair i'm not sure but what i'm going to do is going to take the chance today show you how i'd find the fault and how we go about fixing it i guess you'd say now i've already had a quick look at this one off camera and i thought man it'll make a good video and it's almost obvious where the fault lies there's a couple of cells there that you can see a problem with but they're not a problem for the for the reason you'd think they were a problem so there might be something else at play here that i can't see and i need to charge the battery back up but given that it's under under two volts i'm going to have to charge it up really really slowly let's have a look at the voltages of all these batteries after six months of sitting here doing not a great deal of anything let's get to pulling this apart and have a look so let's have a look at cell one get the polarity right three 3.73 seven five one point five four that's the bad battery one point seven three one point seven three sorry three points uh that was three point seven four i think i said one point seven three before three point seven four 3.73 3.74 3.68 so that's a little bit lower 3.75 3.76 3.97 now this is the prop one i had a problem with so literally rebalancing with the rest and 3.74 volts oh yeah i'll put it on the ground there's nothing loose now this is a key part to look at up here is three cells that has been um they're zero volt although close enough to zero volt cells i'm fairly sure those are right cells and they're not connected but they are connected here just for a little bit of extra mechanical strength there i think i might have done that after the fact i'm not sure as you can see there's nothing much to see on that side unfortunately until you turn it over the first thing i can see is this here a discoloration on that cell there now these are not connected yet there's some sort of leakage happening there is a little bit of pressure so that cell there is probably the only cell that touches that amount there so there is a bit of pressure on that particular cell but there's no deformation of that cell at all it's still nice and round but i can actually feel like a rust underneath that cell now off camera i have gone through every other battery and i can't see any signs of any damage or anything else but more importantly up this end focus come on look at that now that is actually where is it i got the multimeter yesterday and i put the multimeter on and it went through the top of the cell so and that one's a bit rusted there as well but like i said they're technically not connected so if i got the multimeter now i i said these are zero volt cells but i genuinely can't remember if i discharged every cell to zero volts or just one volt or whatever but i definitely put them on a discharge cycle so i'm going to put the positive there and the negative here we've got 0.01 volts get a scratch around and there we go that's one and a half volts not sure if you can see that you can one and a half volts that one's 0.64 of a volt and that's 0.58 of a volt now i'm not sure whether or not that cell could have somehow contacted there it's to my mind there there's no contact there at all on the negative side so even though that cell's gone south there's no potential energy in it to cause a problem and it's a different voltage to the rest of the battery so it mustn't be connected it mustn't be that that's a fault there's no other cells that i would you know look at and go uh you know maybe that's a problem as you can see there slightly over it that's one side so the nickel strip hasn't rusted or anything like that so i'm still happy with the nickel strip i'm not happy with how i've got it sitting here on the edge but i don't actually know how to fix that um but there's no other visual with this cells that are connected causing this to self-discharge so the challenge will be how i find a cell in here that's faulty so i've got the battery up here on my workbench uh so it's nice and close to where i work so i can keep an eye on it so the plan is i'm going to charge it up i've just got my bench power supply uh so it's about 2.13 volts and one amp so i don't want to i don't want to charge it much more than two volts maybe two and a half volts but i'll do it at one amp so it's going to take a really long time to slowly charge back up but the community has spoken on how to actually charge these batteries when they're low and that is really really slow so that's what i plan on doing we'll bring it back to life again now i did test this on the 11th of the 6th 2020 and it tested out at 482 amp hours so once i've done this process and found the dead cell i'll retest it again and we'll see what the amp hour of the battery is and we'll work out whether we've lost any capacity all right a good couple of hours later it didn't take as long as i thought it would to recover that voltage um i've never really watched it should i be honest but we're at 2.78 volts and it's doing 0.02 of an amp charging so it's doing almost nothing in that process i was constantly touching it and trying to work out whether i could feel any heat using the thermal camera to see if there was any thermal problems with it all and you couldn't see anything now one of the problems with a fleur thermal camera and a reflective surface is it just glows at you and gives you a false positive so you've got to hold it at a nice angle like that to be able to read anything but now we're going to charge it up to 4.2 volts and we'll do that as fast as we can and the i charger x6 will do that at 30 amps so we'll run a charge through it charge it all the way up see if there's any obvious faults with heat and again we'll be checking it constantly and i'll be doing it in a safe place and then we'll go through and if we can't find anything charging it up it'll take a lot longer to discharge it so the longer it takes to discharge at 30 amps the more accumulated heat and we'll see hopefully we'll be able to see a problem now if you don't own a thermal camera one really easy way i worked out of doing it in the early days and i do the playstations and xboxes and stuff like that the board repairs is to get a little icy icy coal or isopela propane i think it is and just dab it on each one and anything that's hot will evaporate quicker than the rest it is a really redneck and cheap way of doing it but it does work it's even better and this sounds weird and i've never actually done it with a battery but you cool the battery down so there's a bigger difference between the hot and the cold and you can see the the difference or even feel the difference a lot better when you just put your fingertips over it so there's a couple of ways of actually doing it if you don't own a thermal camera okay so this is my little test rig i've had this set up for quite a few years now and it works really really well um these are all my third life batteries um so basically all i've got is a positive and negative coming in well negative and positive coming out into an anderson connector and underneath there it's nice and neat and tidy and it goes down into the eye charger x6 and it's saying it's 2.8 volts and it just fell on me thank you very much and then i've just got the little balance leads plugged in and that's opposite end so i've got the positive balance lead there and the positive lead there and alternatively the negative down there and the negative at that end so it's opposite ends so you've got the voltage at the top comes from the bigger cables here and then the voltage on the balance 2.816 or 817 is the smaller one so that just tells the actual voltage itself so now we're going to charge it all the way up so we're going to click that go to lyo get a charge yes that should crank up to 30 amps or something like that we'll just let that run we'll come back a little bit later i just chopped the charging there for a minute just so i could do a couple of um just a couple of physical tests to the battery to see if there's any problems now apart from a bit of heat going down that bus bar you can't see any hot spots there yet this is what i was talking about earlier when you go up on top it reflects off the nickel strip so it's a little bit harder to see hot spots you still can see them though so epic there will be a drop of solder so it's a little bit more reflective it's actually not hotter um so yeah we're about two hours in i think two hours in at 30 amps i just started um charging again so that'll allow you by the time it's reset doing 100 watts 30 amps it's at 3.4 volts now so it's coming up nicely it stayed at like seven amps for like an hour or something and then jumped up to 30 amps so let it run for another couple hours was it 3.4 volts i'd say another 5 to 10 hours maybe here we are now about 24 hours later now unfortunately my poor x6 fan has died and it keeps failing right at the very end it's actually turned off and it actually is overheating so i'm going to have to use the isdt t8 which works i treat it's just got a really noisy fan but it is much bigger so on cue thank you very much uh so what have i found so far well i've used my thermal camera the whole time little fleur thermal camera that plugs into my iphone and i can't see any noticeable heat difference from any cell there however we've come across a result that wasn't at all expected there there we go it's just overheated so i'll turn that off anyway it's a close enough to maximum voltage pull that out of there let's grab the thermal camera and have a quick look at those cells we've got the three blue cells here the one two three and there's no heat there's nothing there's no heat in any of those cells that you can see i'll go back here a little bit further for scale and there's no real warmth in that whatsoever bearing in mind we just had the charger sitting on top here top down view i find if you go a little bit further away it's a little bit better to have a look at that nickel strip but there's nothing there that stands out that's hot now this really does leave me uh at a loss to know what's actually going on so grab the multimeter again i really want to try and point out that these cells are not connected um they are connected at this end but this whole entire thing is negative on the outside as we know underneath here and there's nothing connecting them through there there's no way that they can touch there they've got the little green insulator rings underneath there and on this side there is no connection so what i might do now well i'm going to have to replace out those cells somehow it's not really hard to replace these cells out to replace them out all you got to do is knock the little tabs off on one side and you just knock the cell through and put another one in there so i'll do that a bit later on but not now what i will do i'm going to take these bits of nickel strip off and once i take these nickel strips off that should stop any potential energy going into those cells just pick these off i thought this was a really good idea at first clearly not there's one side and this side's doubled over it's actually folded around the bus bar and then that all come off so that wasn't soldered on there that well oh yeah so that bus bar is off let's take another really quick look at the voltage of each of these cells so we can see the rusted one at the bottom there it's 3.72 4.11 now once i disconnected that why did that go to 4.11 volts it's 3.72 and that one's got zero volts so we're just going to let point one another couple of hours so just come back and check those voltages again one one against what they were a couple hours later i'm honestly at a loss as to explain the behavior of these cells now this one as you can see in the previous clip that was one one and a half volts or something the one with the rust on it and now it's zero this one and this one were about half a volt this one's 4.11 volts which is the same voltage as the rest there and that one's a little bit higher as well yet there's no connection there wasn't i can't see any way that these although they must be right are connected let me know in the comment section below what you think it is i'm not going to touch this one now i'll just run the voltages again on these three cells that's 3.728 this one was at 4.11 so that's the same and that was nothing and it still is nothing i wonder if i connect to the positive side over here now that's okay that's really really odd uh can you see me here i'm touching that to the positive so i'm posit negative here and positive to the bus bar yet if i go to the negative side of that actual cell there's nothing there explain that to me youtube here i am trying to share my knowledge of what i've learned and i think i know less than when i started this video stay tuned for the next video we're going to knock these cells out and try and work out what the hell is going on thank you very much for tuning in i enjoyed making a video again after all this time if you're still here smash that like button if you haven't already hit subscribe it really helps and i'll see you you on the next one you

Channel: HBPowerwall

Views: 58,470

Keywords: 18650, DIYPowerwalls, DIYPowerwall, HBPowerwall, powerwall, Batrium, BMS, Battery, tesla, PCM60X, PIP4048, 18650ED, electric mini, lithiumsolar, averagejoe, jehugarcia, Batrium BMS, DIY Lithium Battery

Id: sOFBYmMenXU

Length: 16min 58sec (1018 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 16 2021