4000Li - Passed 6000 mile mark

If your charger will give the pack a bit of a "pre-charge" (also called "forced charge") right before you ride, that should warm the batteries. That, plus an insulating blanket, should make a difference.

I can't stand a long enough ride in Winter for range to be an issue, even with the 10 year old SLA pack on the Lepton. If I were going to take a longer ride on it, the Zantrex charger it uses will do forced charging - I've used that feature for years to extend range.

Hi

Sorry to take so long. I haven't located the resistor values yet but I'll try to answer the other questions.

If your charger is charging 80 volts it's way out of specs for a 20 cell charger or your voltmeter is off. That would be charging the cells to 4 volts each. Not good. My modified charger goes to just 80 volts and charges to a bit over 3.6 per cell. If you are going to try to add cells and string charge without a BMS I would expect the new cells to have a lower internal resistance and might not balance with the old ones but you could try it if you have an easy way to monitor all the other cells. It will only be a problem at the top of the charge and you would need to have the new and old cells charged to the same voltage to start with. It would be safer to charge the new cells with a separate charger. There is no need to disconnect them from the rest of the cells.

The DC DC converter might not take the extra voltage. My bike had a new one installed by the previous owner after the stock one blew. If you just add two cells in the string and hook the controller and Charger and DC DC converter positive to the most positive cell the charger and controller and DC DC converter with all be getting the increased voltage on the total pack. That is how my bike is wired. The other way to do it is to leave the charger and controller positive on the same cell they are on now and add the new cells between the last original cell and the circuit breaker. This way the charger will charge the original 20 cells and the controller logic side and the DC DC converter will be running on 20 cells just like before. A separate two cell ( or how ever many you want to add, certainly not over 8 cells )charger charges the new cells. They should balance ok with each other. Is that all as clear as mud ?

Yes, it's always easier to leave things the way they are ( if you can,Ha ) Things can go bad when you start modifying stuff.

As far as getting all the cells replaced on warranty after two years I doubt that the warranty works that way unless they all go bad mysteriously a week before the date the warranty is up. It sounds like the cells are going strong !

Hope this helps

PS On some of the other things you have been discussing. The controller usually does not limit speed although it is possible. The voltage limits speed. The amperage doesn't limit the speed either except up a hill where the controller is reaching its max amps. On the flat the amperage goes well below the max the controller can put out. If you increase the amperage of the controller you will have better acceleration and hill climbing but no more speed on the flat.

The speedo on my bike and I imagine yours is the same is just a cable driven mechanical unit driven off the front wheel. Nothing very mystical.

Hope this helped. Have fun. Garry

My battery tray has what appear to be cooling fins on the bottom to direct airflow up into the battery case. Does your E-Spirit have that?

The body panel in the front wheel well has a grill that air could get into, but behind that is a sheet metal barrier where the battery tray front ends, so not much cooling air comes in there anyway.
I have the controller sitting above the battery pack, but with the charger in between. However, the controller heat will not really get down into the battery.
But as has been alluded to further up, charging full shortly before the ride is a tremendous help in bringing the battery chemistry up to speed and heating up the whole thing from the inside. I have seen battery temp. rise some 5°C during a charge, even close to freezing temp. The best is when I have another appointment in the evening: When I come home from work the battery has heated up around 5°C too, then I charge while having supper, and by the time I need to get going again some 2h later the battery is not only fully charged again, but another 4 to 5°C warmer, and I can get the best of both worlds - excellent battery performance at close to or above 15°C battery temp., and controller and motor bask in the cold and the bike goes off like a rocket despite close to freezing ambient temp. :-) And that heat even remains till the next morning to a certain extent and gives me less trouble accelerating.

The heating is only around 115W and will encompass insulation too. And I have even figured out a way to get that in without having to take out all 6 battery blocks, two at the back were enough so I can slide my whole sandwich in from the back. Things will begin to get interesting now, as long as I can squeeze some time out of family activites...

Amazing..... these batteries are actually made in GBS though their sticker was still TS brand,but actually they come from GBS.

Are you referring to the picture in my post? Those are TS cells, all my batteries are TS. That is an older XM 3500li. I am interested in your batteries and will e-mail you soon. How is the BMS coming? Would love some specific details.

Yes，mountain chen told me that even old XM3500li is GBS battery,TS don't supply any 40AH,60AH during 2008 and 2009 because all small size OEM in GBS.

GBS changed into blue battery after 2010.

Our active BMS for 20cell is ready now.

Yes,our CHL battery is better than no matter GBS or TS.

. I am told that with 24 CHL 40 or 50Ah cells top speed is closer to the promised 95km/h / 59mph...

Yep, I have 24x 50Ah CHL cells and I am a big guy at 120kg and I can get 92-93km/h (GPS) on a flat road and I've seen 96km/h (GPS) down a VERY steep hill with a voltage sag only dropping from 79.5v down to 74v but at that high speed I could only put out around 3.5kw because of back EMF and also you can feel the motor vibrate because you've hit the top speed.

Thank you for all your input during the last months,I wish you a very Happy New Year!

Hi Pete

I'm in Oregon so low temps are common for me. I have a 3500 Li with about 4500 miles on it. I have noticed the same thing but have never done any very accurate testing. I did try to test how hard riding verses easy riding affects the range. One day I rode up to and along a ridge with an elevation climb of about 700 feet and back down with lot's of wot riding. The next day I rode on the flat and never over 30 mph with very easy acceleration and was surprised to find that the voltage started to drop off at almost the same mileage of around 30 miles. I was really expecting to get much farther going slower. When it's cold ( cold is 40 degrees for me ) I have noticed that if I just hit it hard and ride at full throttle for a few miles that the speed and power seems to increase a bit. My theory is that the batteries in the morning are very close to the nighttime low. Starting off riding hard creates some internal heat, the air temp is warming up too and warmer ( relative to batt temp )air is passing around the battery box. Then charging the pack will also cause internal heat and by 1:00 PM the air temp is up so the batteries are warming up in three different ways which will increase voltage and capacity.

I wish I could get a 40 mile range. It never gets 110 here. If it ever does I will try a range test. Most of my riding is done with temps between 50 and 80.

Garry

LiFePO4 Batteries tend to loose power drastically below a battery (not ambient!) temperature of about 15°C / 59F. At freezing temp. in the battery the voltage sag can already reach very worrying levels.
Hard riding may heat them up somewhat, maybe 3 to 4 °C / 2-3F, and charging for 2.5h at 10A can bring double to three times as much heating up. It's all got to do with battery temperature. If you cannot heat your batteries it is at least good to time the charge so it is done shortly before the ride starts.

So far this 4000li has been a dream, with 7031 trouble free miles.

Wow! 11,249km without any problems. I'm impressed! I have the Erider 8000w scooter (same sort of body) and I've had very few problems too. I only had a little problem yesterday where the bike 'stalled' on me. It was a one off thing, I just had to turn off and on and it worked fine again. I have about 4600km (2875 miles) of pretty much trouble free riding in 4 months.

We had a cold winter with temps around 1°c and I didn't notice any sag with the CHL batteries. But when I had thundersky batteries, anything under 10°c they REALLY sagged from 79v to 65v in no time, even at 85Amps!! I can pull 185Amps from the CHL batteries and I only see a minimum voltage of 73.5v on the cycle analyst. During normal riding at 90km/h I used about 100Amps and the voltage sits around 75.5v. I have 24 cells to make a 72v pack, but hot off the charge it's 87.6v but settles around 79.6v at rest.

I will let you know how they go when we come into winter. It's summer here at the moment in Australia.

Phil.

Is it 20cell of 40AH or 21cell of 60AH ? 40mile GPS speed range or odometer ?

40 miles (64km) is very good. I get about 43 miles (70km) from my CHL 50Ah 24 cell (72v) pack. But I am a big guy at 120kg+. I am very happy to see you have passed 16,000km!!! That is a LOT of driving. I am hoping to get the same sort of reliability from my 50Ah CHL cells. I live in Canberra, Australia and we are now just coming into winter and this morning was VERY cold and the battery sagged to 71v under full power (8300w) just a few kilometers from home. But most of my roads here are 80km/h (50mph) and this uses a fair bit more power.

This Mr CHL guy seems to post a lot of comments about his batteries on this forum and so far I must say, they really do live up to what he claims! My 40Ah thundersky cells at 6000w would drop to around 65v and hit the low voltage cut-off. Plus in the cold weather I could only get 22Ah out of the 40Ah cells.

I still don't have a BMS on the CHL cells so I don't drain them too much.

PzlPete,

I think that the 40Ah Thundersky batteries in your scooter are fine for the 4000w system, not an 8000w system.
I went for a ride the other night at 11pm and it was -5 celcius (23F) and the voltage only sagged to 71.2v even under 116Amps! And I still managed to go 61km. The bike was fine but my fingers were freezing by the time I got home!!

In answer to that Pete, Lovely. I've ridden during a hot summer day here when it was 51c (124F) and the batteries LOVE it but the motor did run pretty warm. I rode up to a lookout, it was a very steep hill all the way up with no problems. I took a few photo's then on my way down using regen all the way the motor overheated and cut all regen, that was surprising! That was the only time it hit the over temp situation. But the CHL batteries loved the heat. Compared to my ride this morning at -6C (21F) the voltage dropped to 70.8v under full power. But even with the voltage drop I can not detect any drop in performance. During the warm weather under full power, the voltage will only drop from 79.9v (resting) to 75v at full 8400w of power.

From what I've heard, a voltage drop to 70.8v is pretty good during cold weather. There are other batteries that drop even more than that?! Even after 52km yesterday (-5c in the morning and 8c during the day) I was still around 70.4v after 52km and only used 37Ah. The bike still had no problem getting up to 8000 watts.

As for adding more cells, make sure you adjust the final voltage cut-off on your charger and make sure you TIGHTLY wrap that cell to stop it from "puffing" up and destroying itself.

Hi PlzPete,

How's your scooter going? I love the fact you have done 16,000km!! I'm now passing 7280km without a BMS and this morning it was -6°c and I saw the battery dip to 70.0v under full power. But the cycle analyst recorded a Vmin of 69.8v. But the bike still felt as quick as normal. It seems the battery voltage will sag as below from my notes taken over the past few months:

Voltage under full power (115Amps)

-6°c : 69.8v
-5°c : 69.7v
-4°c : 70.3v
-2°c : 70.9v
-1°c : 70.8v
0°c : 71.1v
+4°c : 71.3v
+6°c : 72.1v
+10°c: 73.2v
+14°c: 73.5v
+18°c: 73.5v
+22°c: 73.8v
+33°c: 74.1v
+44°c: 75.3v