Which SLA charger - slow or fast?

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Which is the best way to charge SLAs - very slowly or normal speed?

Slowly
1
17%
Normal speed
5
83%
There's no difference
0
No votes
 
Total votes: 6

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ChrisB
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Re: Which SLA charger - slow or fast?

Postby ChrisB » Sun Apr 04, 2010 9:37 pm

Totally agree with you on the bit about the supplies, not much different to oil............its finite.

Its interesting what you say about SLA's, my own personal experience has been they tend to be pretty naff :? time and time again I've had to junk SLA's due to lack of use and they have sulphated up :(

I know what your saying but all my research on the Ping packs seemed to show they where reliable, the one reason I chose them.

The thing is what are you getting for your £60 set of SLA's 30miles ?? I'm pointing you at a £700 ping pack but theres a good chance you would be trippling your range for that price 8) if you dont want that then its quite likely a cheaper pack would do :wink: if your only after 30miles then theres a chance you could use a much lower ah pack, take a look at the specs of the others and measure your discharge on your current pack and determine if you could say get away with a 15 or 20ah pack :)

ChrisB
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badnewswade
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Re: Which SLA charger - slow or fast?

Postby badnewswade » Mon Apr 05, 2010 12:22 am

The £60 SLAs are in the tiny bike - seen here:

http://www.evalbum.com/1370

That only gets me about 8 miles (well they were £60) but that's all I need for 90% of my journeys. The big bike takes two 48v strings, each of which costs up to £160 (I.E, £40 per battery) - but I should only need to replace about one string a year as long as I treat it well (slow charging, not using it too often or when it is cold or wet)

These days, I only use the big bike once a week or so - generally either if I want to be somewhere fast, want to be somewhere more than about four miles away, or otherwise have a lot to do. I'll be using it more in the summer, well, hopefully anyway, and don't use it at all in winter. I've calculated that the 30ah Ping might - if I was lucky - give me the same range I have with my 48ah SLAs, only it would cost several times as much. To get an actual improvement in range I'd need to spend at least £1000 and buy two 20ah units. Interestingly, if they were made in Britain, they'd be a lot more affordable - quite a bit of the cost is shipping. Not much chance of that though!

I have heard a lot of good things about Pings and they would be my first port of call, however someone in my area bought two massive Ping packs and the BMS on one of them was completely shot. While Ping was great about sending him a replacement, he now has to fit this himself which is the mother of all DIY hassles. Basically he has to solder a thousand quids worth of battery to this cheap-looking BMS all by himself. :cry:

Like I say, fitting SLAs can be irritating but there's little danger of busting your new batteries and no hassle with solder and expensive circuitry. Also, word on the street about the lifetime of Liths is that they quit on you after about three years. I just don't like those numbers. :(

If Nissan really do build the Leaf in Sunderland, and they make the batteries here as well, we may be in for a price drop, but that's not neccesarily going to happen. We might see a trade war with China making Lithium batteries even more expensive, and as British industry is knackered anyway we're unlikely to start making them ourselves - we don't have the expertise, the workforce or the kit to start banging out any kind of tech equipment, as we are basically the spivs of the world and do not dirty our hands with actual work. :roll:
34 Watt Hours per mile, or > 700 MPG. What, me, smug?

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Jeremy
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Re: Which SLA charger - slow or fast?

Postby Jeremy » Mon Apr 05, 2010 10:14 am

Unlike a lot of things we buy, it seems that the price of lithium cells is pretty much dominated by raw material cost, rather than labour cost. The actual manufacturing process for the cells is pretty simple and needs no high tech gear at all, just a clean room and some simple foil handling and coating machines. There's a video of it on YouTube somewhere, but essentially it's just a machine that unrolls the electrode foils, coats them in the mega expensive phosphate powder, plus carbon, and wraps them up with a ion-exchange film impregnated with solvent. The finished cells are them either fitted into metal cans or sealed in a plastic pouch.

Because the cost is so closely related to the processed raw material cost, it seems unlikely that there will be a sudden massive drop in price for as long as only one or two companies are making the powder. Given the long drawn out patent battles that have been going on between Phostec Hydro Quebec and companies like A123 I think it may be some time before we see a reduction in the cost of this stuff. The Chinese are certainly moving quickly to develop cheaper alternatives, but given their normal disregard for the niceties of intellectual property rights I suspect that they won't be allowed to sell potentially patent infringing product in bulk outside China.

Jeremy

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badnewswade
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Re: Which SLA charger - slow or fast?

Postby badnewswade » Mon Apr 05, 2010 11:54 am

Interesting. Of course to us in the UK the cost is complicated by exchange rates, shipping and tarriffs.

The one ChrisB pointed out is 628.031 GBP without shipping and 775.527 GBP with shipping. A couple of months ago it was £700!

I suppose we are used to high-tech goods getting cheaper as time goes on because of the computer revolution, but there's no reason why they shouldn't become rarer and more expensive. :( It's only a very lucky combination of the economies of scale, domestic production (at least in the early days - I think), low raw materials / transportation costs and a favourable trade environment that has put a computer on every desk. No reason why decent EV batteries shouldn't remain expensive or even become more so, especially if we face "peak Lithium" along with everything else. ( http://www.energybulletin.net/node/48013 )

Oh well. Maybe when I'm 40 I'll have saved up enough to buy a X-Treem XM-5000 Li...

http://www.x-tremescooters.com/electric ... 000li.html
34 Watt Hours per mile, or > 700 MPG. What, me, smug?

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ChrisB
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Re: Which SLA charger - slow or fast?

Postby ChrisB » Mon Apr 05, 2010 8:38 pm

badnewswade wrote:......... I've calculated that the 30ah Ping might - if I was lucky - give me the same range I have with my 48ah SLAs, only it would cost several times as much. To get an actual improvement in range I'd need to spend at least £1000 and buy two 20ah units.


Are you sure ?? just looking at Pings site he suggests you could get away with a 15ah set on a 800w motor scooter, although he recomends 600w, which means a 20ah set would be more than ample, I recon you'd be surprised with them.


badnewswade wrote:.........
I have heard a lot of good things about Pings and they would be my first port of call, however someone in my area bought two massive Ping packs and the BMS on one of them was completely shot. While Ping was great about sending him a replacement, he now has to fit this himself which is the mother of all DIY hassles. Basically he has to solder a thousand quids worth of battery to this cheap-looking BMS all by himself. :cry:



Bit of a bummer :cry: defo that, I would be equally hacked off if that had happened to my dinky £250 pack, thing is you have to remember what your getting for the price, I dont think theres still nothing out that even comes close to supplying a battery and BMS AND charger for the price so even if I had to re-solder the BMS back on I'd still think it was a bit of good deal, but then I'm quite a soldering iron weilding fiend :lol:


badnewswade wrote:.........
Also, word on the street about the lifetime of Liths is that they quit on you after about three years. I just don't like those numbers. :(


Not convinced by that TBH, I've got some consumer electronic stuff runnng Li-ion cells and some are now 10yrs old and still return something like 70% of their capcity 8) from phones to camcorders to cameras, all still working fine on their orginal li-ion units, the main issue seems to be they dont like being left either fully charged or flat for months at a time :| , leave them at around 50% if your not looking at using them for several months or even a year and they just keep on going, recently just bought my wifes Samsung D600 mobile out of retirement, the li-ion battery had been ran to about 50% before being taken off the phone and put away in a cupboard for the last two years, up until then it had been in daily use for 3yrs.
Even after all that time the battery was still able to boot the phone and show a couple of "blobs" on the display so charged it up and off she went, wifey says theres no difference from the day we put it away 8)

I'd love to be able to buy a 48v back and give it a whirl on the bike to see how you got on with it as I recon you wouldnt want me to take it away :lol: certainly no ones going to take my 24v 15ah pack off me, its amazing.

ChrisB
I reject reality and substitute my own !!!!!!

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badnewswade
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Re: Which SLA charger - slow or fast?

Postby badnewswade » Mon Apr 05, 2010 9:29 pm

I'd love to be able to buy a 48v back and give it a whirl on the bike to see how you got on with it as I recon you wouldnt want me to take it away :lol: certainly no ones going to take my 24v 15ah pack off me, its amazing.


I would too, but like I say they just cost too damn much! No way I'm blowing the best part of a grand on some battery.

Also remember that with respect to the batts in consumer durables that they are made for a completely different job and at a completely different scale - and that large format EV batteries are subject to a lot of mistreatment such as rattling, repeated impact, high G-forces, etc that the batts in phones just do not have to put up with. Being bigger the large format cells are may be subject to very different chemical stresses as well.

It's a bit like saying that since SLAs do OK in electric cars, why can't we run phones off them?
34 Watt Hours per mile, or > 700 MPG. What, me, smug?

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ChrisB
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Re: Which SLA charger - slow or fast?

Postby ChrisB » Tue Apr 06, 2010 8:38 pm

badnewswade wrote:It's a bit like saying that since SLAs do OK in electric cars, why can't we run phones off them?


But then dont actually do very well, and infact they use to run phones...........and the below picture shows exactly why we dont use them in phones any longer :mrgreen:

Image

From memory they use to have a pair of 4ah 6v SLA's in them 8)

I do agree that Li-ions in consumer electronic stuff is much better matched than the stuff we're putting them through in EV's, so there is a likely hood they could fail, hence my view of over matching the pack to the motor.
I suppose at the end of the day ............I'll let you know when my ping pack goes west and dies ........then you can say "told you so" :lol:

ChrisB
I reject reality and substitute my own !!!!!!

Deker
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Re: Which SLA charger - slow or fast?

Postby Deker » Wed Apr 07, 2010 3:02 am

badnewswade wrote:http://www.barden-ukshop.com/sonnenschein-a51230g-1101-p.asp

Sadly, at a £131 a shot they're not much better value than Lithium. At least least lithium battereis are lighter.

Why are batteries always so insanely expensive?


Then you go on to say
"I've seen that site, and unless you're rich it doesn't make any sense. With shipping that battery costs arond £700. It costs me around £160 per year to run my bike on comparable SLAs."

Check my batt cost, 262 pounds, at todays prices it would cost me £ 32 per year,8 plus years so far. and bear in mind my batts are still performing well :)

Sounds like you and me favour SVLA, BUT you have to buy the best if you want long life.
As Iv found, cheap = short life and range.

Also - in one year I did 2000 miles on my bike, 'an I don't pedal the thing, except for "Show" when certain uniformed persons are watching me 8)

Sorry to say this - Mr. B D Wade, but you do seem to be taking a negative attitude.
WE all know good batts are expensive, I don't like it either.

To fit Li-on to my bicycle would cost over £ 700 plust charger and BMS,
I would gain range and lose a lot of weight.
But, for my local village trips (Furthest one = 6 miles round trip) SVLA suffices.

Deker.

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Peter Eggleston
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Re: Which SLA charger - slow or fast?

Postby Peter Eggleston » Wed Apr 07, 2010 1:18 pm

I still say you do not have to buy expensive batteries. I have posted this before,but I paid £11 per 100 amp/hr 12 volt battery for my truck. I do about 3000 miles per year and these batteries are still going strong after 7 years. These are Ex British Telecom lead gel backup batteries. There are still similar batteries to these available now on ebay at £45 per 12 volt unit. Unfortunately they are too big and heavy for a bike.
No doubt these batteries would be expensive if you had to buy them new.
Peter


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