Lithium Battery Conversion

[Volt_Ampere]

Glad to hear you are having such good success with your Leaf batteries, interstate! I have only had mine for 6 months and they are great. I especially notice the performance improvement - virtually no voltage drop under full acceleration. I too could have gotten by with 60 AH but I wanted plenty of margin and I actually did not want to shed any more pounds than I already did. The suspension is designed to carry all of those FLA batteries so it rides like an empty pickup when I am the only one in it.

[Grinds6]

Originally Posted by interstate

I have been using the nissan leaf batteries for two years with great success. This will be my third season.

7 battery modules are used in my cart, so only 60ah. This has proven to be plenty for me.

I know for certain I can drive over 15 miles on local roads.

I shaved 500 pounds off of my golf cart because I was previously running 8x6v battery packs.

No more battery acid, checking water levels, fumes, and long charging times.

Acceleration is better, braking is vastly improved, and changing time is less than three hours from depleted with only a 15amp charger. My lead acid batteries took 8+ hours to recharge with a 30amp charger.

Ya that's what I was thinking about, buying the set that I had showed and then maybe adding a couple extra batteries to get me up to the 60ah. Then I can gauge how many more I would want to add to get my desired run time. I just don't want to be having to spend $1000 for batteries every 3 years with how often I use my cart, and not having to check water levels and refill and be worried about charging it everynight would be a plus too!

[interstate]

Adding batteries later is not recommended. Best practice would dictate that all batteries in a system are the same age and same number of cycles. Adding batteries at a late date could cause considerable balancing problems, ultimately destroying your entire battery pack or even causing a fire. These lithium fires are staggering, to say the least.

I'd advise to commit all the way.

I converted two golf carts at that time. Our plan was to try 60ah and quickly add another parallel pack if needed. Both of our carts are achieving enough range to satisfy our needs. However, we were NOT going to drive the carts for several months with the initial packs before adding more capacity. We knew we would have to make that added investment within the first few test drives/cycles. We had money in the budget for 120ah, but found we could save the funds.

[interstate]

We also used gps to drive our carts throughout the community to track our distances on a "this is the most I would possibly drive in one day" scenario. The gps tracking helped up calculate battery capacity needs. We also measured our maximum acceleration amperages, full speed for long distance run amperages, and towing/pulling amperages. We found extreme differences between the two golf carts, but ultimately we found 60ah to meet our needs.

[Grinds6]

Originally Posted by interstate

Adding batteries later is not recommended. Best practice would dictate that all batteries in a system are the same age and same number of cycles. Adding batteries at a late date could cause considerable balancing problems, ultimately destroying your entire battery pack or even causing a fire. These lithium fires are staggering, to say the least.

I'd advise to commit all the way.

I converted two golf carts at that time. Our plan was to try 60ah and quickly add another parallel pack if needed. Both of our carts are achieving enough range to satisfy our needs. However, we were NOT going to drive the carts for several months with the initial packs before adding more capacity. We knew we would have to make that added investment within the first few test drives/cycles. We had money in the budget for 120ah, but found we could save the funds.

Oh, ok...I guess I was going off what Volt had told me that I can add batteries at a later date to achieve the 120ah if I so desired...so this is not recommended even if they were balanced?

[interstate]

Not recommended.

Consider a set of tires on a car with 60k miles. You Can replace one with a matching new tire but the tread wear will never be the same on all four tires. The newer tire will never catch up to the wear of the three older tires.

With batteries this is not good because the changes that occur are internal resistances of each battery. Batteries charge differently and discharge differently as their internal resistances change.

Charging all these varied batteries together can cause a severe explosion and fire.