hey this is Frank and I'm here today as part three of a multi-part series in
which we're in the process of upgrading my portable power pack from 2.2
kilowatts to over 4 kilowatts I hope and this is the DIY engineer channel on this
channel we do everything DIY everything from batteries which is what we're doing
now to construction projects concrete countertops framing remodeling even car
work so we'll do a whole gamut of fun things
DIY my goal is to post every Tuesday so that's my goal and my commitment to you
is to post on Tuesdays if this channel is helpful to you or if you find it
interesting please subscribe below and please leave any comments you might have
that I might be able to assist you with today we're gonna be going into a couple
different things we're gonna follow up again on the spreadsheet I left with you
last time that you can see how calculations are done we're gonna do a
really quick calculation to make sure we're on track for putting together the
portable power pack upgrade then we're gonna actually take some of the
information that I've already gathered in tearing apart all my cells and
organizing that and we're gonna take and run those through repack ER to create
the small cell packs that will go into each of the three big batteries that
we're gonna put together and with that let's go to the computer so here we are
in the computer we want to look at the cells that I'm going to be using for
building out this rebuild of my portable power pack in here is my cell harvest
spreadsheet my master spreadsheet which has all of the cells that I've harvested
I'm right now upwards of just under 2,200 cells that I've harvested in total
the greater majority of that is going to go towards my power wall which I have
currently about 1400 cells that will be used for my power wall in here what you
can see is just a bunch of cells what I did is if you remember I tore apart my
my portable power pack the previous cell blocks are the batteries tore them all
down and now I've taken and I've organized them all in numeric order so
what's in what's the key here is is the cell IDs over here on the right in the
blue not the green but those are the IDs for each of the cells so every cell has
its own unique ID and what I'm interested in from this spreadsheet once
I've toilet packs apart I put them into these packs here in numeric order so
that I know which cells I'm going to be using and so to get that total what I
had to do is come over here into my calculator and I put in 12 volts for my
desired voltage because that's what my inverter runs for my portable power pack
and each of the cell groupings is gonna be 40 cells well that gives me a grand
total of 480 cells that I need so out of my reference pack here out of all of
these cells I needed to come up with 480 and I did just that I was able to put
together 480 cells and this is the cell listing here so you can see starting
this column a is all of the cell IDs all the way down through and then in this
right-hand column here under in is the milliamp hours for each of those cells
it's all I'm interested in I do have all the other demographic information here
but I'm only interested in the cell ID and it's compatible for the the size the
milliamp hours for each of those cells so going from here what I needed to do
was I'm going to go back up at the top here
and I'm gonna grab all 480 so I have 480 cells in here I'm going to grab all 480
of these and so we'll just copy those over and what I need to do is bring
those into a text editor so I can make them comma delimited so let's let me
show you why this is repack er so if you want to do these cell packs they're
designed for you know taking recycled cells and building you know ebike power
wall etc just stuff for 18 650 projects and it's our EP ACK our comm there's
another one that you can use as well if that one isn't available at DIY power
walls comm they have a cell they have a pack builder as well it's the same
script so you can go to either one and they're both very helpful gives you the
same information I've just used repack err longer than this sites the DIY power
walls has been around they came online quite a while after repack er was
already there so anyway so what I needed to do is in there it needs it to be
comma separated for each cell and currently in my list they're not they're
all vertical and are stacked on top of each other so what I'm going to do is
I'm gonna use let me delete that I'm gonna use text wrangler so if you know
of a better text editor for a mac I'd like to know I don't loved the text
Wrangler but it's what I got so anyways go ahead and paste those in here and
you'll see they're all just vertical and I need to make them comma delimited well
the quickest way to do that is just to do a confined search for any /n which is
newline and I want to replace it with a comma and if I go replace all it builds
out my my full line of string so let's go to the beginning of the
control shift to the end or command shift to the end and we're going to copy
it so now I have everything common delimited and those are all of my
milliamp hours for my cells back into Chrome and over here to repack I'm gonna
add those cells income delimited so now I have 480 cells in here
just really threw them all in and repack er gave me some errors up here saying I
needed to add series the number of series or cells in series than a number
in parallel and I'll just show you a couple times I'll actually do this a
couple times I want to leave the 480 cells in here because it it'll take them
when we feed this either way so going back over here to the calculator we had
40 in parallel so if I come back to repack er and I go down to parallel I
put in 40 it recognizes it and one of the error messages goes away and if I
look over here I need 4 in series and so if I go when I select 4 in series even
though I have 480 cells in here it still likes it and I can say all right
generate the packs and it'll go and it'll build out 4 packs out of the cells
above so what I'm looking at here is my four separate packs this is going to
create or this could create one battery so I have 40 in parallel in each of
these series packs and or in serial so anyways this is kind of neat because it
shows a breakdown of what the capacity is amongst these cells and it looks to
me like it took my top rated cells and it dumped out all the lower end ones so
it even had some telogen stew it so it could get rid of ones that out of that
480 cells it stripped out all the ones that were like 1,800 milliamps and only
took the high ones like this 27 12 and 25 19 my average capacity for these
packs we're looking at a hundred and twenty
amp-hours so that's that's actually quite a bit for each of these different
packs and you'll notice that there's just a little bit of divergence here
this isn't has a negative one these here are zeros so this is zero zero and zero
meaning that the capacity for each of those is the same which is nice now why
do this I mean really why do this well when it comes down to is if your battery
cells if your battery pack when you have these these cell packs if they're
consistent on the volume or the amps or amp powers that are in each one of those
you're going to get a consistent drain you're going to get you're gonna have a
battery that's more consistent than just guessing it's not guesswork we're
actually using logic to make them physically the same size so this is very
very handy all right once I had that information I down here there's a
section where you can go and copy all that data into a spreadsheet and we'll
do that after I get the other 40 cells all right so back up here we need not
just four of these packs because what it comes down to is I'm building out so
what you have is you have 40 in parallel and so that will be one pack and then
we're going to take three of those packs or for those packs to create the battery
and then we're gonna take three batteries in parallel to give us our
total of what we're gonna have whatever that might work out to be so instead of
it being four I actually needed to be 12 because if you have 4 times 3 it's going
to give you 12 and that's what we need to figure out we need 12 series of packs
in series so I'm gonna go back and they're not gonna be in series total
they're only before but I'm gonna have three separate batteries just to be sure
we're clear on that so it's not too confusing and hopefully I'll show some
pictures that'll help simplify that back over here and read Packer instead of 4
I'm gonna put in 12 and no errors so repack or recognizes that I'm still
using this hundred and cells appear underneath this that was
160 no it's 180 that's a lot of cells I'm telling you that's a lot of cells
all right so generate a pack and and so it's gonna
use the cells the milliamp hours that are up there it's gonna create four in
series and 40 and parallel so now if I look down through here
the pack sizes are a little smaller but you'll notice that there's just a little
bit of divergence it's not a lot - one some of these are zero so this is
actually pretty good and there's 12 separate packs now that we can utilize
so this separate data down here is the the data that we can copy into a Google
spreadsheet or Excel or wherever and I'm going to do is just use my my keyboard
here and highlight these I can probably use a command a as well and copy so once
those are copied we go back over here to my master sheet and I have this section
here I created a new tab and I called it new cell packs and just selecting cell
a1 and I paste those in and there is all my milliamp hours for my 12 for my 12
separate cell packs so that'll got really well we'll be able to have
that capacity or have the the sells online down now how do I go about
finding these to build out so this this here would be we can call this you know
cell pack a and its total capacity and I need to go and find each of these cells
well this isn't actually very difficult because of the way I organize my cells
so if I go in here and I select one say this one for 2166 okay if I copy this
here and then I come back over to my cells these here are my identifiers for
each cell and these are the milliamp hours and I'm looking for a milliamp
hour so if I go find that 2166 right there its cell ID is 68 so I can go
right into these packs start going in numeric order and I'll it'll be a lot
faster for me to find 2166 then trying to dig through 480 cells looking for one
single cell that has the capacity of 21.6 or 20 2166 milliamp hours alright I
hope that's helpful I'm going to show you I'm gonna go ahead and build out a
couple of these packs so I build out four and so I can show you what they
look like in a battery and so I will be right back
all right so I finished building out the first view okay so I have finished
building out the first battery I've got four cell packs that I've put together
and you can see them here I divided them into cell pack a B C and D and each of
those have 40 cells in them and so you can kind of see how that comes together
and that that completes one battery and then I'll do two more after that for a
total of three three batteries altogether so that will complete a
single battery and it is a 40 p4s battery pack so we have 40 in parallel
and 4 in series so it's a 40 p4s battery pack so hopefully this was helpful if
you have questions about building out battery packs or if you have some
suggestions on ways that you'd like to see it done or ways that maybe you do it
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