The weather finally took a bit of a break on Sunday. So, I got a chance to get out of the house and do some work on the Ghia. The agenda for Sunday was battery maintenance. With flooded lead-acid cells you can hook them all up in series and treat them as one huge battery pack. Through typical use, the individual batteries in the pack will perform with slight variations so you slowly end up with some batteries that come to "full" charge at lower voltages than your strongest cells. To prevent these batteries from getting worse and worse, you have to "equalize" the pack which just puts the pack on a low amperage charge at the end of the charging cycle. While the batteries that are still low will continue to charge, the ones that really are full will start to bubble, releasing the excess energy as gas. Since I have had it, I have been bubbling the pack a bunch trying to give it some long equalization charges so as to improve the pack's performance. So, I wanted to take the time to go through and check the water levels in the batteries and make sure I wasn't damaging them.

Some packs don't require watering because they are sealed. However, watering a battery is pretty simple and the sealed cells are more prone to damage if you haven't installed a battery management system. The "flooded" cells that are in the Ghia have a quick release top so it is easy to remove and check the water levels. You want to ensure that the water in the cell is covering the plates completely. When I checked in the Ghia most of the batteries were fine except for the two or three that were obviously spending the most time bubbling. I topped those guys up with distilled water (you want to avoid the impurities and intentional chemical additives that you will find in standard municipal tap water if you can)and we are back in business.

Since I was in the car doing work, I also did some more clean-up on the battery connections. I noticed that some of the old steel washers that had managed to remain in the car had started to cause some interesting reactions with the copper battery interconnects that they were on. So, I went through and made sure that I had removed ALL of them this time around. I replaced them with copper, so I am hoping that I won't have any more of an issue with this. We shall see. I also noticed that a couple of the interconnects still weren't seating very well. Just more evidence that you need to check the connections on your pack pretty regularly. Otherwise you might zorch a battery connection... (link to previous story temporarily removed because I have to rewrite it..) I really do need to spend some time making all of these connections the right size so that the chances of having an issue are greatly reduced. When I get a chance... [grin]

In the meantime, I put the Ghia back on charge for a bit and then took it for a quick test run. I went over to the gas station to fill the tires with air. The air pump is at my local convenience store so that is a nice low speed test whenever I have done some work on the car. Since everything seemed to be okay, I decided to stretch the test a bit further and get it up to speed, drawing more amps from the pack. For that, I usually head over to the post office. This involves a quick run up to [mph deleted to protect the innocent] on a 45 mph road and then driving through some stop and go traffic to the post office and then a long although gentle hill climb back home.

The Ghia did fine on all of this. So, I took it home and put it back on charge and let carabou know that she could go ahead and use it if she wants to. Since I have to go to a conference this week, I won't get to play with it, but she should be able to do any errands that she has with the car. This weekend, I am pretty excited because I am going to get some time to do more EV work. I need to try and figure out what I can do about a rattle that is driving me nuts on the left front of the Ghia on Saturday and then, on Sunday, I will be helping to remove the engine from the Rob's RAV-4 that he is going to convert. This is how life should be!