Sharing my mistakes so others can avoid them.
Wife was outta town so I hauled over the Honda Civic DC conversion project to the driveway. Didn’t really have time to mess with it (day job bekons 12,14, 16 hrs a day and all that). So I plugged in the charger (hasn’t been plugged in in 6 months). Was gonna keep an eye on it and forgot. Got to work, remembered, and 2 hours lateer got home to a melted extension cord. (At least now I will be more tolerant when the wife insists on going back home because she may have forgotten the iron). So then I switched to a conventional charger to top off the 12v accessory battery. It was completely dead. Came home (again around 10PM) and all looked ok. Battery was fully charged. This morning (realizing wife is coming home tomorrow), its time to move the bucket of bolts back to its hiding place (which is up hill)… Turned it on and the only thing that worked was the Windshield Wipers (going backwards)… and lights. Hummh… Darned if I did not charge the 12v battry BACKWARDS. Why did I do that? Well, the battery has a big round RED dot sticker (to show the date of purchase) and it is stuck on the battery right next to the negative terminal. And now you know the rest of the story… well, except that the controller and everything else electronic in the car is probably shot. And we wont know till later tonight how I get the 3000 lb car up the hill to its hiding place… Don’t do this at home… But you ask, “But modern battery chargers will not charge a dead or reversed battery”… No, so I paralleled it with a jump-start battery to get it started… (Lead Acid batteries have the same LEAD on both the positive and negative terminals. The polarity is deermined by how you charge it!) The windshield wipers comment was a trick question just to see if you were paying attention. Bob -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.evdl.org/private.cgi/ev-evdl.org/attachments/20150706/d41aecd2/attachment.htm> _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
