Back In December 2012 I decided I wasn't getting any work done so I turned off all my AEVA thread watches. Coulomb just referred me to your latest post re low vacuum switch to remind me we have yet to install ours.
I then discovered I have been missing some great stuff in your thread. Congrats on the BMS. And kudos to Nevilleh for making a successful minimal BMS.
And congrats on the neat dash work including the forward/reverse buttons. And for isolating the charger control circuitry. It's ridiculous that that isn't done by the charger designer/manufacturer.
Please excuse me for responding to some old posts below.
In our engineer's case, not cutting out the tyre well (or boot floor) was about the bracing it supplied between the chassis rails rather than the spare tyre. He's fine with a "patch-kit-in-a-can". And if the battery box itself can be shown to restore that bracing (e.g. some diagonals in the lid) there should be no problem.
I'm sorry to tell you I have seen several of those Australec (made in China) DC circuit breakers failed in PV systems. You find them with one side of the lever sagging and floppy and open-circuit, with signs of overheating. It should not be possible for just one side to trip, as it will only have a 220 Vdc rating in that case. Linking the toggles is not enough.
It is not possible to make a DC circuit breaker with that voltage rating in that space without it being polarised. That's because they need to use permanent magnets to deflect the arc into a long curved path thereby making it easier to cool and break. The magnet on one side is flipped relative to the other side. If the DC current is flowing the wrong way, the magnet holds the arc at the contacts and makes it worse than if there was no magnet at all. So the polarity markings are about direction of current flow, not voltage polarity. Or putting it another way, they must agree with the voltage polarity on the source side and not the load side, and they can't be used in cases where current can flow both ways.
Polarised DC breakers have been banned from new PV systems now because installers sometimes didn't understand this and wired them backwards. So electrical suppliers like Ideal Electrical are selling them off cheap now, and they have more reputable brands like ABB. I recommend you grab one of those.
Actually, when I'm placing SMD parts and trying not to bump the one's I've already placed, or when I'm carrying the fully placed board oh-so-carefully to the frypan/oven, or when I watch parts tombstoning or leaping off the board completely, then I think, "One day someone will invent a system where the parts have wires that go thru holes in the board, so they can't move."Nevilleh wrote:I think that you will wonder why anyone bothers with thru-hole stuff once you've successfully made some smd boards.
As you no doubt intended, that resonated in my mind with some famous quote I couldn't quite place. But Google to the rescue:Renard wrote:Fortunately, I have an oven of just the right size sitting in the shed.
(Oh wonderful cornucopian shed that has such things within it!)
Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 5 Scene 1, Miranda:
O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!
Nothing like a bit of kulcha.