Sometimes it’s hard to find what you are looking for on garage shelves. Sometimes you just need a little more light over in that corner of the garage. Sometimes you find a good buy on LED rope lights and have a lot of zip-ties just laying around….
(LED rope Lights can also be useful in storage attics….)
I purchased a 2013 salvage (wrecked) Nissan Leaf from the CoPart auto auction house for $4081 (including delivery and fees). I consider this to be a very good price for a wrecked Leaf, but if you stalk a lot of auctions and bid on Leafs that have the most damage you can probably get a similar deal with enough patience.
Then I spent 439$ on the following tools that I needed to move the car around and extract the battery (the largest amount was for jacks and wheel dollies…)
| Car Cover (Keep the neighbors happy) | 37.1 |
| Wheel dollies & Jacks | 243 |
| Bluetooth OBD II scanner | 9.98 |
| Leaf Spy Pro android app (to check battery) | 14.99 |
| 500V gloves (Safety first!) | 21 |
| 2 Jackstands (already had 2) | 25 |
| Air Impact Wrench & Sockets | 46.5 |
| 18mm wrench | 12.4 |
| 13mm deep socket | 8.99 |
| 21 mm combination wrench | 20.69 |
This puts my total costs at 4520.75 ($94.18 per module) for a 24 kWh battery pack, which is less expensive than if I bought large format prismatic cells.
Of course, with a lot of time and effort, you can sell all of the other parts from the car. Over the course of six months I made back $3180.46 (including the sale of the smallest of the three jacks I had purchased and 0.46 in change I found in the car.) I’m posting this after selling the main body of the car, leaving me with just a few small items listed on ebay. I may earn a few hundred extra dollars over the course of the next several months, but the overall cost recovery is finished.
My current total out of pocket expenses (not including lots of labor!) is 1340.29 (or $27.92 per module) which is quite a significant savings over other options for purchasing large format Lithium Ion batteries.
I’ve seen Nissan Leaf modules selling on Ebay for around $130 each with shipping (in larger quantities), so my ~ $30 per module cost is around 21% of the cost of purchasing them on the used market.
To put this cost savings in perspective, purchasing 20 lead acid golf cart batteries to replace my current pack would probably cost me around $2000-$2200, so the Lithium Ion Nissan leaf battery pack was actually less expensive than a replacement lead acid pack!
However, the process of parting out the wrecked car takes a lot of time and effort. If you are just after the battery and can find one for sale at a salvage/junk yard for less than $2500 it would probably be easier to buy the battery alone without the rest of the car. The one advantage of purchasing the whole car is that you can (sometimes) find out how many miles are on the battery pack. In my case, I was able to use an OBDII scanner with the Leaf Spy Pro application to find out that my battery pack health was still at 98% before I removed it from the car.
If I were to buy a whole car again, I would try much harder to sell the entire car (minus battery) in the $2000-2500 range before parting it out and trade some money for my time.
The Nissan Leaf pack weighs about 650 lbs less than the lead acid batteries currently in my truck. They are capable of providing more amps with less voltage sag due to lower internal resistance, and more of the pack capacity is usable as they don’t suffer from the Peukert effect as much as lead acid batteries.
The overall performance of the truck should be much improved. Also the battery life should be much longer than 2 years. (Cycle life for lithium ion batteries is measured in thousands of charge cycles, instead of hundreds of charge cycles for lead acid batteries.)
However, because I am changing battery chemistries, I am also upgrading my trucks’ charging system (and home EVSE) and those costs are actually more than the battery pack, so the total upgrade cost will be more than just getting another lead acid battery pack. (I will talk more about charger upgrade costs in a later post).
My work recently changed over to using Office365.com for their email. As long as Office365 supports IMAP and SMTP (it does) I don’t mind so much, as I can continue to use Thunderbird on my desktop to access my email.
However, because the mail servers are no longer located “on-campus” the lag to the SMTP server is much more noticeable than before. When I pressed the “Send” button, Thunderbird would sit there for 20 seconds with a progress bar sending the mail, interrupting my flow of email processing much more noticeably than when the server was hosted on the same network.
So I tweaked a few advanced settings in Thunderbird by going into Thunderbird Preferences (Edit->Preferences), clicking the “Advanced” tab, then selecting the “config editor” button and promising to be careful. [Newer versions of Thunderbird have these options under the tools -> Options menu. ]
mailnews.show_send_progress false
mailnews.sendInBackground true
offline.send.unsent_messages 1
Telling thunderbird to not show the progress indicator only hides the dialog, but the compose window still sits up on your screen (with no visible indicator of what it’s doing) until the mail is sent, so you also need to turn on “sendInBackground” to make the compose window disapear immediately after you press send.
This makes the message go immediately to your Local Folders -> Outbox, but DOES NOT SEND IT, until you select File -> Send Unsent Messages. Hence the “offline.send.unsent_messages 1” which tells Thunderbird to send unsent messages (from Folders -> Outbox) whenever it can. It still takes 20-30 seconds for the message to be sent, but it is done in the background now.
Using a printed template you can center punch drill pilot holes and rival the accuracy of a milling machine. It’s faster than using a mill, and a lot cheaper as well!
While making the busbars for my Nissan Leaf batteries, I needed to precisely drill holes with 1.3333″ centers. I’m fortunate enough to own a small mill, which I used to drill small pilot holes, allowing me to drill the main holes on a drillpress very accurately.
But what if you don’t have a mill? You can actually get similar accuracy by using a
printed template and careful application of a centerpunch. Just create a template in
a drawing program such as InkScape, Corell Draw, or any other tool that allows you to
lay out lines in a dimensionally accurate way. Print it out on a standard printer, and
then use a center punch to mark the drill starting point on your metal.
Here you can see me comparing the holes in my milled busbar with the center-punched busbar by passing some bolts through two of the three holes and shooting a picture of the third hole.
When wiring up an electric vehicle traction pack battery, an off-grid battery backup bank, or other high current power systems, you sometimes need a cable capable of handling high-current with a custom length. If you have a few tools, it is easy to make your own by crimping terminals onto welding cable. This video shows a time-lapse overview of making such a cable:
Here is a set of links to the tools and materials I used:
Continue reading
This is a Battery Carrier tool designed for picking up and carrying around lead acid batteries (golf cart or starter batteries). I own one because it’s very useful when removing 20 golf cart batteries from my S-10 electric pickup truck and replacing them with 20 new batteries. While manhandling my Nissan Leaf batteries around my garage, I though “Boy, it sure would be nice to be able to use my battery carrier on these guys.” A few minutes spent rigging up a jig for my trim router and vacuuming up a lot of saw dust later, each of my batteries has a small slot cut in both sides…
I had thought that I would have to sell my battery carrier and battery filler now that I am upgrading to Lithium Ion…I guess only the battery filler will be obsoleted.
I also modified a few of the batteries to better fit in my existing battery bays. Specifically, I decided that batteries 1&2 and 7&8 would be mounted “back to back” and I didn’t need each of them to have a full 1″ of space at the bottom, so I cut a 1/2″ off the bottom of each, giving me an extra inch of room, and leaving them a shared 1″ air vent.
On battery 3, which will be mounted “sideways” with respect to batteries 4,5 & 6, I used a spade bit to sink the washer in a little, and cut off the ends of the threaded rod to make sure they wouldn’t interfere with cables.
I purchased an ANOVA precision cooker (a Sous-vide immersion heater) via their Kickstarter almost a year ago and have been having fun cooking things in water baths. (It makes cooking salmon so very easy….)
My wife told me about a recipe where you simmer a can of sweetened condensed milk in near boiling water for three hours to make Carmel. After my initial “But won’t it explode?” questions were answered (don’t use a pop top can and you are supposedly explosion safe…) I checked my ANOVA’s manual, and sure enough, it listed the Max temperature at 99 C, perfect for keeping water at a very low simmer without having to keep an eye on the range…[1].
Little did I know, the ANOVA can’t actually take being exposed to steaming water for 3 hours. Continue reading
I finally jumped on the “SmartWatch” bandwagon (after the CST – “World’s Thinest Watch” Kickstarter I’d been waiting on for two years finally gave up the ghost) purchasing a refurbished (Jet Black, original plastic) Pebble for $60 from Meh.com.
I can’t imagine paying $300+ for an Android Wear or apple Smartwatch when you can get the original Pebble’s new on ebay and discount websites for $50-$60. It does everything you really want a smart watch to do, at a fraction of the price.
Built in features I use and love:
Continue reading
My original Pebble smart watch (purchased refurbished) started to have a problem where the display would get corrupted. It mostly only occurred when I was pushing a button to change the display, or when my stopwatch/timer was running (updating the display continuously). For day to day use of just wearing the watch, the screen would be normal much of the time.
I thought at first that something was just corrupted in software, so I removed all of my applications, but that didn’t fix it. Then I reset the watch, and that didn’t fix it. Then I rebooted the watch, and that didn’t fix it. Then I reset the watch to the factory default settings with a super hard reboot and reinstall (removing the custom firmware I had installed), and that didn’t fix it. So, I admitted that it was probably a hardware issue, and found this page on the pebble website that talked about “screen issues”.
I’ve found lots of information on the Internet that tells me this is a problem with the internal ribbon/zebra cable connector not staying connected properly.
I found this video that tells how to fix the ribbon/zebra cable connection issue by adding toilet paper in the back of the watch to hold it down.
If you don’t like opening your watch, and trust that it is actually water resistant, I also found this youtube video how to try and fix it by putting it into hot and cold water (but that doesn’t fix it permanently).
Luckily for me, I was apparently still within my 90 day refurbished watch guarantee, and Pebble is swapping out my watch for a replacement, so I don’t need to stuff toilet paper in the back of my watch. If you experience this type of issue you should report it to Pebble quickly. It appears to especially plague early Pebble / Pebble Steel watches, I presume they have changed their manufacturing process to keep it from happening to the later ones.
I am building 16 volt batteries using six Nissan Leaf LiIon cell modules. (A Nissan Leaf battery has 48 modules, supplying the construction of 8 of my “batteries”.) My Battery is arranged in a 3P2S (two sets of 3 parallel modules in series), giving a 180 Ah capacity and nominally 16 volts (each module from a Nissan Leaf has 2S2P cells inside, so the module goes up to 8.4 volts maximum at 60AH).
This video (playing at 4x-16x speed) shows all of the work that goes into building a battery. Directions with more information are below.
To build a battery, here are the parts you need: