duxuk wrote:Greenbeast,
my battery pack of choice is 6 Elecsol 110Ah carbon fibre lead acid batteries. They weigh 25.2kg each and are suprisingly compact. I have heard reports of poor life expectancy but here is my recipe which I hope will sort this. I will not charge to >14.4V (per battery) as Elecsol say you must not! I will never mix them with any other brand since other lead acids will usually need charging to 14.8V, and this will kill the Elecsols quickly. I will check that the batteries are perfoming equally by measuring the voltage in a charged and discharged state and, if needs be, charge each battery seperately to try to equalise them. If this does not give me good battery life I will curse the company and all who work for them! So watch this space. "E-Day", when I get it all running should be sometime around September. Wish me luck.
Duxuk.
Theres not a lot wrong with Elecsols, I had a set in my Fiesta and they seemed pretty good, although I've heard that the QC on the batteries can be flakey and sometimes you get a good set and sometimes you can get dodgey ones ??
In my view their nothing that special, reasonabley priced multi purpose marine type units, treat them well and they should do you a good turn. As with all these types dont give them a hard life, re-charge ASAP after use, although due to the fact Elecsols run (or always did run) with a reduced acid concentration they arnt as prone to sulphation as others. Dont run them flat, once the perfomance drops off thats the time to re-charge ASAP but its better to do it before that point. My 110ah units where able to almost deliver 50ah C1 which wasnt bad TBH but I'm not sure I'd like to run them at that figure all the time.
The fiesta would pull about 35A-40A from memory @ 30mph so was fairly well in, although @ 75mph it was 200A which while they would deliver I dont think they took too kindly to it ??
From personal experience now, if I was to return to Lead Acids I'd pay extra and opt for some Trojans
but now I'm a Nicad boy I just love those.
Good luck and keep us up to speed with the project
ChrisB