# Charging the pack - bench test



## sabahtom (Mar 1, 2011)

I was very cautious with this because my experience tells me that I can ask every question I can think of but there is still room for the thing I wish I'd known. Even so I may have probably done something unnecessary or wrong - but it seems to work, so I'll put all the parts in the car.

1. Connected the traction cables and charger cables to the bus bar and enclosed it in an electrical box. Connected traction fuse, in separate electrical box near the pack. The fuse is on the most negative terminal right now because I didn't plan ahead far enough with the cell polarity, and there isn't space for the fuse box near the most positive terminal. Other end of traction cables onto most pos/most neg of pack. Traction cables still separated by Andersen connector.

2. Connected charger cables to bus bar via waterproof plug (not necessary for the bench test) 

3. Double-checked to make sure I didn't have the + and - mixed up anywhere.

4. Connected each row (17 cells) separately to keep the voltage around 54v. I was wearing household rubber gloves so I figured that would be enough protection against 54v.

5. Connected the rows together. The voltage here would be too high (304v approx) for my gloves, so I made sure the last two rows were the easy-access ones.

6. Connected traction cables (now live) to bus bar with Andersen connector. The Anderson connector is supposed to be finger-safe to 600v and holds tightly, about 150N to separate.

7. Plug in charger to wall socket and switch on. Happy yellow light - charging, no faults. This is not a CAN charger unfortunately.

The charger has been sitting unused for a couple of years now so I was nervous about if it would work. Being a total newbie and never having used this charger before, I didn't trust the internals so I kept it disconnected on input and output ends until last. 

My pack has also been sitting unused for a couple of years, but both seem ok. I only had a chance to charge it for 5 minutes yesterday, next saturday I hope to charge for two hours to bring it up to 3.5v. Then I can top balance it with the single-cell charger.


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