mark, im liking the lipo....
I love the way that there is virtually no voltage drop on it, and the EMC600 charger is working a treat......49.5 bulk charge:)
25 miles at average 20MPH....no pedalling....with 12ah of a 15ah pack used ( altough im expanding this to 18ah for more cycle life)
I also have rigged it to 3 ah packs, so I can carrry only the batteries I need ...1KG per 3aH, each pack being capable of continuous of 60 amps continuous output, 90 amp peak .......
cost in UK, abot £25per ah depending on source
and to be honest, as i, webby and andrew have been on no bms for about a year now, cant see any real issues there....
( its still not coming in the house)
Yeah LiPo is good stuff al right, and to be honest a bms is fine but it adds another 100 Euro or so to the battery and they have been well known to fail and a bms failure on LiPo is as we all know very dangerous!
Hopefully Gary over at ES gets his LiPo bms running soon so it can be tested, but so far it looks very promising and is good for 12S. So not good for me now but I'm sure he will make different bms's in the future!
Once you leave a few ah in your pack the cells should stay balanced and charging to 4.15 per cell and not going much below 3.5 should give you very good life, so I'm told anyway lol
A lot of people talk about LiFeP04 as been a wonderful battery, it has it's advantages, safety being one, bms being 2 and ease of charging being 3. However for me the most important thing is C rate and lightness 2 things where the LiPo wins hands down over LiFeP04, sure you could buy A123 cells, but they are stupidly expensive where I can build 16S 10ah LiPo for about 240 Euros from HK.
Another thing is cycle life where you get about twice the life over LiPo, however considering the cost of my LiPo is about half that of a good A123 pack, it doesn't really matter to me because again, the LiPo is a lot lighter and more compact, with care LiPo can go for 600 or more cycles anyway!
I'm looking forward to my charger but they are taking their time sending it out it's still in "checking"phase! It would be nice to be able just to replace 3-5 ah without splitting all the packs up!
HAHA Ginge my LiPo is sitting on the kitchen table as we speak,
I'll charge her up in the morning before I go for my ride, I've only used around 2ah but it's only a 10ah pack so I want to make sure I have as much capacity and besides, it will help with cycle life too by charging it up early!
I long for the day I can afford to move in to some place bigger with space for a good shed, and a shed that has power in it. It would be nice to be able to do all my work in the shed and not in the kitchen. My mac is in bits on the kitchen floor while I'm waiting for my new halls to arrive. My girlfriend is very understanding, then again, she doesn't spend much time in the kitchen anyway lol!
