I ordered some cell terminal covers from EVTV. It is a nice little poly-something or other that fits over a string of terminals to keep hands, wrenches, etc. away from danger when working on the car or showing it to people. Jack Rickard of EVTV calls it cell booty. I made my order right after EVTV had finished their annual Electric Vehicle Converters Convention and it seemed my order got a little lost in the shuffle. I alerted them that I had not received it yet and they promptly next day aired it to me along with a little EVTV swag, which was very kind of them. They do understand customer service and are usually very prompt. Here are a few shots of the batteries with and without their booty.
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| Before -Rear Pack is Booty-less |
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| After - These cells can now show off their new booty in public |
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| Full Frontal coverage |
As you can see, my battery pack is now decent and can make public appearances without all the photogs clamoring for one last pic of exposed terminals. The front battery rack on the firewall may need some special attention as the height of the cell booty may be too high for the hood, so once I get the hood back on, I will need to adjust the booty to get it to fit just right.
It was pretty hot last weekend, so I didn't spend too much time in the garage. However, I did hook the charger back up and also put my Kill-a-watt meter on the outlet to see how many AC amps my charger was pulling before tripping the breaker in the garage. It was drawing 14.25 amps continuous, a pretty sizable load. Then I ran some extension cord into the house to an outlet that I hoped was on a 20 amp breaker. Turned it on, and it started charging away. It did not trip a breaker, so that particular outlet is probably on a 20 amp breaker. The cells charged for about 40 minutes before I had to leave, so I did not get to see how they acted at the end of the charge.
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| Charger sitting in its future location but not installed yet |
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| Hoping you can see the red charge light in this shot |
I have not hooked up any metering in the car yet, so I have no idea how many amps are getting into the battery pack, but based on some rough calculations, I think the charger is delivering about 10amps at 150 volts to the pack. If the pack was completely dead, it would take about 17 hours to charge. I will only be using about 40% of the pack on my daily commute and I can charge at work, so it should take about 7 hours to get that 40% back into the car. I am usually at work for 9 hours or more a day, so this should work out well. Also, my work is planning on putting in some 240V level 2 chargers, so it may charge a little faster on those chargers. I will need to buy an adapter to connect my regular AC plug to the J1772 connector on the level 2 charger if I want to use it.
Next item to complete is drilling mounting holes in the new fenders and get them installed along with the hood. Then I need to get insurance and start the DMV inspection/registration process. There is still a bunch of other stuff to do after that, like upgrading the brakes and rear springs, but I really want to get it registered so I can test things out on the road without fear of getting ticketed or impounded for driving a non-op vehicle on the street.
