24 Comments on “Some pictures of the battery”

    • I understand it is for soft charging the capacitors in the BCB. Switch on with the resistor in line, then short it out shortly after.

    • I don’t really understand your question or remark Borut. The manual disconnect is only removed for maintenance on the high voltage circuit. Why would you want to disconnect it? Actually, the official procedure is pretty tedious; it is not just removing the plug. The battery pack is never opened at the dealer. The current sensor (thank you for finding the part!) is connected to the LBS, so the battery “knows”. Of course there are more sensors on the car side in the BCB. And then I would presume that there are more sensing wires, such as detecting the fuse being blown. Those would also detect a pulled manual disconnect plug as the plug comes immediately after the batteries.

      Maybe I misunderstand you?

  6. Actually, I am a bit confused about that metal box with the blue “gelled” top next to the manual disconnect. What is that?

  7. Sorry about the bluebox I cannot make out the part number.
    Can you tell me about the tedious procedure for removing the manual disconnect plug.
    I would power down the car ,wait for the canZE to show zero battery current draw (that would mean that the main relay is off) and then simply remove the plug.
    Why would I remove it.
    I would not remove it .
    But there is a + and – of the battery present inside so one could build its own plug that would have a an extra fused output for Zoe2 home in an emergency …(like leaf2home)
    But the problem is since the power would not be measured by the battery computer there would be a bit of confusion ,you should charge the battery the same way and for exact amount. or the battery computer would not know what is going on ,where did the power go.
    Someone have to try it .
    And please don’t lecture me about the 400 V DC danger I work with high voltage every day.

    • I assume you didn’t mean that last sentence as condescending. I am not going to lecture anyone. If somebody wants to kill themselves by not knowing what he’s doing, be my guest, Darwin awards!!! If somebody wants to be bold and does know what he’s doing, I applaud that.

      So what you’re saying is the virtual plan is to off-take current from the disconnect, not from the power plug. That would indeed totally confuse the LBC and thus a very bad idea, in my opinion. In the end, a confused LBC would mean an early end of the battery.

      For such a project, I would think a more complicated, but better plan would be to splice the cable running from the battery to the BCB and then, through the CANbus, tell the LBC to do it’s thing. That way you have it fused, full battery management and balancing, and protected against over (dis)charging; the LBC would presumably simply open the relay in such conditions. It might be complicated as there is some form of “Digital Rights Management” involved.

      I leave it up to the reader if either way is a good plan…………..

    • As for the procedure, the guy who shared it with me unshared it later and I didn’t make a copy. Sorry. It was something ike 16 pages!!

      But it involved shutting down the TCU, the 12 volt system if I remember correctly, waiting times for the BCB capacitors to discharge, etc etc.

  8. Last sentence was a little hash but you lectured me before on the same topic so…
    And I agree that the second plan would be better if someone could do it but I don’t have enough knowledge for that task.
    But for first option I do .I would build special controller with all safety measures to monitor the voltage and the amount of energy out and in and would leave the soc as it was (if in an emergency I take energy out I have to replenish it before turning the car on again.

    that is just my thinking, I probably will not try it.
    There are talks that later this year one could by battery for zoe in my country.

  9. I am curious how the 12 battery modules are numbered. Often we see that the temperature of some modules are lower that others. Maybe that is because it is located on a corner? Would be nice to know!

    • We have no indication how these numbers are assigned at al. Since not even the country organisation is allowed to open a battery pack, I assume it will be very hard to get to that data. Unless of course somebody is brave enough to heat a corner of a pack…….

  11. I ‘m playing with idea of putting some flexible sollar pannels on the roof of my Zoe.
    Is it possible to turn on main battery contactor an leave all other computers on sleep ?

  12. for charging while driving it is not a problem, from whole roof of sollar pannels there would be 200 to 300 W of power so cheap modified 12 or 24 to 230 V conver will do the job but when pareked ,if you want to charge the main battery the car has to be on , if the car is on ,the computers drain 300 W continuosly so no net gain :(.
    So it would be nice if someone finds out what command to send throu canZE to switch off the car but leave main battery contactor on.
    There is another way.
    if you change 12 V battery for 100AH 4s li-ion type and charge that battery with sollar to 16 V when the car is parked then the battery will have higher voltage and the dc dc converter will not charge it until the voltage drops to 13.2 V .
    You can save 1 kwh of power in 3 hours of driving 🙂 wich would be used for computers, fans, lights…
    I have tryed 16 volts on my zoe for short, time it works fine.:)

    • Someone would have to reverse-engineer the Electro Canbus. I am pretty sure I located the connector, will make a main post of that tonight. As for doing the actual frames reverse engineering……..

      I don’t think there is a need for all the ECU’s to stay on. I would have to check in the car which frames are send during charging and then work backwards which ECU’s do send that data. If the instrument panel is on though, all ECU’s fire up.

      Apart from that, I’d venture to say you’d probably max out on 300 Watt for a PV rooftop. Assuming 15 kWh/100km you’re looking at 1kWh (=6km) per 3 hours, so a charging equivalent of 2km/h in bright sun, so maybe 10 kilometers per day, on a good day? Here we say: all little bits help……… a little!

  13. And you would have to do a pretty good job installing pannels not to spoil aerodinamic of the car,it is pretty horrible as it is.

    • Exactly! So unless the goal is to be able to “escape from a charging disaster at all times (albeit of LONG duration!), a wiser approach might be to fill rooftops, meadows, office and factory roofs to the brim with solar panes and, for now, accept the losses of the DC-AC-DC conversion. Personally, I do expect to see deeper integrated inverters on the commodity market within 5 years, meaning cleverly balancing PV, grid, car (through CCS and yes, using your contactor trick) and home storage systems.

  14. I have notes another interesting thing the other day.
    I stop on a motorway charging station without taking a charge ,just stop for 10 minutes .
    When I arrive, the soc was 31% but 10 minutes later the soc was 34%,without charging.
    Why?
    It looks that the battery computer measure capacity with voltage and not only energy in-energy out.
    If this is the case then a small sollar pannel would not be a problem if connected directly to the battery.(with overvoltage cuttoff)