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.

I just got back from showing Mark Barr's Ghia at the Sustainable Shopper's Ball here in Austin. This event is held 3-4 times per year and AustinEV was invited to show some cars there. I am really proud because I had managed to get the batteries in the Ghia rehabilitated enough to drive down to the Burger center and back without much of a problem.