Elite Power Thundersky Balancers
Posted by Max Dunn Mon, 02 Aug 2010 22:40:00 GMT
This post is very specific about the new Elite Power Solutions Thundersky battery balancers. I am posting it in order to help other people that might have the same questions I did about how to mount them.
First off, here are the old battery balancers that Elite Power Solutions provided for Thundersky batteries:
Notice that the circuit boards have a short wire attached. This makes it easier to mount and allows both LEDs on the board to be seen. However, some might think that the wires look a little sloppy.
Here are the new battery balancers:
Now the balancers are a long circuit-board with no wires which makes it a little cleaner (and less expensive to make). There are several problems with these new balancers though. The first is that there is a chip that bulges out on the backside of the boards so that they don’t normally lie flat. In order to make sure they don’t bend when bolted down, it is necessary to pry off all the Thundersky tabs and then put one or two washers underneath each side of the circuit-board, like this:
When the batteries are wired into the scooter, the connections can go underneath the circuit-board so some of the washers may be removed. However, it is important not to flex the circuit board too much or it could damage it.
There are two other problems with these new circuit-board balancers. The first is that the intermediate hole is live so it should be taped. The other problem is that once the caps are on, the green LEDs are hidden:
The red LEDs are still visible however, and these are the most important.
In summary, these new circuit-board battery balancers from Elite Power Solutions for the Thundersky batteries are not as convenient to mount as the old ones, but as long as the Thundersky logo tabs on the battery are removed and washers are used underneath the circuit-boards so they don’t bend, they should work fine.
So what are battery balancers? Something to ensure all the cells discharge equally – Wouldn’t that happen naturally?
It would be great if all cells discharged equally, however, that is not what normally happens. The problem is that batteries are connected in series and once a battery has become fully charged, it blocks the charge from reaching the other batteries. Over time, especially when some batteries are hotter than others, they will become increasingly out of balance. This is why balancers are needed to make let the weaker batteries get a full charge too.
That makes perfect sense – I’d always wondered about that. Thx