More Problems

After the end of last week and all the work we’d done on Saturday, we were beat. Sunday we woke up at 4:30 am to get over to the shop early. My wife had to work later in the day so I had to watch the little one.

We had only a couple of projects to get done over the course of the morning. We mounted the gauges and pod and got them all wired up. The volt meter measures the voltage of the entire pack, and the amp meter measures the current being drawn at any given time. The amp meter DOES NOT measure how many amps are in the batteries – it measures how much you are drawing when you step on the accelerator.

The other big thing was to finish wiring the contactor. We got that all worked out in about 45 minutes or so. We’d done all the prep work the day before so it went pretty fast. We took the car up to NAPA to try and find a headlight for the car. They were closed so we headed back to the shop. The car got awfully sluggish on the way back so I figured it was time to give it a charge. This is where the problems began.

We basically spent the entire day going back and forth from my house to the shop checking on the charger. It wasn’t putting anything into the batteries. By the day’s end I was very frustrated – the charger had been on the battery pack for about 6 hours and the voltage hadn’t increased a bit. They were pretty dead. I was pretty tired by 8 pm when I decided to wait till Monday to look at it some more.