Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Bypassing theCharger

Since my battery voltage never gets above the cutoff point for the Zivan charger bulk phase, I made a special charging cord with a timer built into it. If I leave the Zivan in low-current mode, I only pull 12 amps, which is less than the 15 amp rating of the timer.


Since I know how many amp-hours I pull from the batteries during my commute, I can generally pick a good timer setting to get the batteries close to full without "boiling" them too much. I think this will work out fine until I replace the batteries or sell the car.

Not ironically, I've been having problems with the charger on the Civic-EV not getting out of bulk-charge mode too, so I built a second timer-cord for that car too.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi, I have a converted rav 4 using the heavy vehicle ac kit from electro automotive and was looking into putting in that low current mode switch on my zivan ng5. If you could tell me which jumper or pontentiometer I have to attach the switch to on the logic board or tell me where I could find this information it would be much appreciated. Thanks in adavnce.

TimK said...

Hi Nolan,

I called Zivan support here to find out that information and they refused to give it to me. Instead, they installed the switch and relevant firmware for just $60.

You can contact Electric Conversions at http://www.zivanusa.com/ and chat with them. One trick they told me when sending in the charger is to attach a label that says "repair" to get things moving faster through their system.