Multiple Vectrix

The thread that will not die:

OK, so I thought I was going to be able to "ride and charge" and "ride and charge" until I was confident that the bike was working, but it went the other way. Bike kept being harder to charge or ride to the point where error lights we on and now it's back to not charging again.

Yet I have been having the best luck on my Honda Hybrid using a grid charger to keep the batteries from misbehaving. I have several times gotten error messages even meaning that I was unable to drive the car, and EACH time when things have gotten bad, a weekend on the grid charger and all is well for months and months.

So I finally got a second cable from the Grid Charger guys on eBay and hooked it up to the bad bike. We'll see on Monday how well it worked. My only fear is that the battery for the Honda is ~180v vs the ~150v on the Vectrix. But the grid charger puts out 223v when not plugged into anything. Plugged into the Honda it will typically go up until it hits ~175v and then sit there, converting extra power to heat. This lets each of the 120 D cells in the Honda Insight to fully charge, so the pack is TOP balanced. Hopefully I will have as much luck with doing this trick on the batteries in the Vectrix.

Still haven't found anyone with Leaf cells. In fact my local branch of the EAA (ebeaa.org) shut down, so I don't even have electric car guys to hang out with anymore, and the SF branch is all "Let's buy Teslas". Perhaps one of them will wreck their Leaf, but it's not the same building an electric car group as the EAA used to be.

-Randy