Thursday, March 25, 2010

The Culprit?

After swapping the PakTrakr remotes and finding similar readings as I was getting earlier, I decided to do some random thinking. I went for a 9 mile run, and found that battery 2 was again getting lower under load, compared to the other batteries, so I went home to charge up. After 3 hours, I went to browse the PakTrakr screen and found decent charging voltages, but my remote said the batteries were at 104F! The remote was sitting on the cable that goes from battery 1 to 2 and it was hot, even after 3 hours of charging and not high amp cruising.

Stunned, I took out the DMM and found that the cable in question had 0.9 mV flowing through it at 2 AMPs charging current, while all the other cables were at 0.1mV! It had 9x the resistance!

I have replaced the cable with another (I've got a stash of spares) and hooked up the charging and it was a nice 0.1mV like the rest. This could be the reason why my PakTrakr has found battery 1 and 2 lower than others because part of the signals use that cable, and that cable has a lot of resistance when it gets hot.

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