Grumpy-b wrote: Re Chris and his pack soon losing power once the light comes on. This is a feature of the limiter and seems to have changed depending on which controller version you have. My Van has an older controller that does exactly as Chris' possibly even sooner. The evlite shows the increased current limiting, but the later controller in my Multispace limits the current but does not increase the limit amount so whilst it reduces the power available overall it does not bring you to an early halt as with my van.
Grumpy-b
But my controller has stayed the same through out
I only changed the batteries
With the old set of batteries I could drive for miles, 12-15 miles wasnt un-common with the eco light glowing quite happliy the van would go right down to a crawel, yet it would still drive.
I drove it like that for a while with it limiting after just 5-10 miles, it would then just get slower and slower over the next 12-15 miles but you could drive it, eventually one of the front batteries went bang and it was at this stage I got hold of a spare one to swap it out, carried out an initalisation charge and promtly melted 30% of the rest of the pack
Thus a new (2nd hand) pack was sourced and fitted, this was charged normally and then taken for a few short runs before a maint charge was carried out, then I after a few cycles I carried out a range test and this was when I discovered the fact the eco light and limiting would come on and I would only have a few miles before it would stop dead, as I mentioned this has happened now a couple more times due to me getting the distance wrong and on every occasion its done just a few miles before giving up totally.
The controller hasnt changed at all
, its the same controller that allowed me to travel many miles with the eco light and limiter on with a duff pack of batteries and now it travels just a few miles with a good pack, which is why I deduced that its due to the whole pack giving up rather than the controller doing anything different as I havent done anything to the controller
Re: Voltage/current side of things, surely the only reason the current appears to go up is because your running out of voltage, thus you have to apply more throttle to get the same speed, if you fixed the discharge then the current would drop in line with the voltage, I dont think its the controller doing anything its the driver.
I'm still not seeing how a duff battery in a string can effect other good batteries, the only possible issue is the driver trying to extract the same speed from the vehicle with a lower battery voltage but it cant happen due to the lower voltage, its got me quite interested in all this and I can see I'm going to have to dig my ammeter & voltmeter out and hook them up and take some real time measurements to see whats actually happening
ChrisB