[jdsuowner]

Where is everyone buying there 12V SLA batteries from aftermarket for cheap? Any good reputable places well known in the electric bike community? Looking for either the 8a/9a/or 12a

[chi6er]

you can try this place. This where I got the 3rd sla battery to make mine 36volts, what a difference.

http://www.nycewheels.com/batteries1.html

[jdsuowner]

Great, I was also thinking of going to a 36v system. How do you like yours so far and do you have any current pics of your setup? Are you using one 36v 7a battery or 3 12v 7a batteries? How do you wire the 3 12v ones to the current controller and switch?

Thanks!

[chi6er]

sorry took so long to reply...I love the 36v system, I use three 12v 7a batteries, only problem if any, is the batteries weight about 20#s now, but it doesnt hinder the ride at all.

I am not sure how to post a picture, but I got them lineup side by side, and wire in series.

[fndtn]

Will be heading over to Ping Battery - www.pingbattery.com since I'd like to try a different approach. Maybe keeping 24VDC the same (since I have 3 chargers), and increasing the amperage instead.

Here's my blog entry on the decommission of the old battery:

http://jhlui1.wordpress.com/2012/01/03/ ... m-battery/

[fndtn]

Ended up buying the Ping 36V 10AH version since it made sense for US$360 shipped.

Here's my blog on a very successful and fast replacement.
http://jhlui1.wordpress.com/2012/01/20/ ... ontroller/

Longest part was unsoldering the 4-pin chassis-mount DIN from the Clean Republic battery circuit so I could re-graft it onto the new battery leads. Once freed and re-soldered and shrink-wrapped, everything else was plug-and-play.

The Clean Republic old Controller works great with the new battery and so far, the freewheel speed is up by 20-30%. Need to pick up a nylon rack case for the new battery and it'll be good to go!

Mike - this works and Ping Li is a really great guy to deal with - I'd recommend him any day as a source for your power needs - his designs are really simple, practical and affordable. I'm sad that my original CR battery finally died, but I'm happy that there's a little less environmentally impacting option than re-purchasing another metal case, nylon bag, controller, battery circuit - etc. I would have liked to have been able just to swap out the existing Li-Po pack with a new one and sent it in for recycling or whatever, but based upon its condition, I can see why that's not an option.

Of course, none of this is warranted or supported by Clean Republic, but I'm happy to report that their hardware works really well with 3rd party batteries!

[robert1389]

Excellent post James ! I just purchased a new CR Lithium replacement and wish I had the opportunity to get the Ping instead. I love the 2000 recharge life instead of the 500. And the 36v instead of 24. Mike, time to step up the battery inventory.

Bob

[dkw12002]

Bob, if you buy a battery from a vendor that didn't supply the bike/kit don't you have to worry about connections, dimensions, wiring, etc ? That would be my problem. Do you know of any good discussions of the type of connections there are and how to adapt or change them? Or do you just order the battery with a compatible connector? So HT has a 250 watt motor and a 24 V controller and charger, but that's about all I know. What kind of connector is there between the battery and controller, for example? I appreciate there are people out there building battery packs by soldering them together themselves even, ordering a controller from some other source, and the charger from yet another source, and obtaining wires and connectors and getting good results. What I would need to do something like that is detailed instructions from A to Z on one system. All I find is piecemeal discussions. For now, if my battery died, I'd go back to CR for a battery I know will just hook up to my controller. Thanks, dkw

[fndtn]

Do you know of any good discussions of the type of connections there are and how to adapt or change them? Or do you just order the battery with a compatible connector? So HT has a 250 watt motor and a 24 V controller and charger, but that's about all I know. What kind of connector is there between the battery and controller, for example?

The tricky part is the battery pack supplied with the HT is quite a bit more than just the battery.

It also houses within the nylon pack, an aluminum protective box for the battery and it's charging/management circuitry (with the LEDs for the front panel charge level display, and the test button and 24V coaxial plug for charging, and the thermal sensor to cut-off power in case of over-heating), and the controller box which provides power relay switching to/from the throttle button, supply voltage to the wheel motor, and I'd imagine some kind of diode protection for the power pack.

I wouldn't get into adapting the main (looks similar to an Amphenol C091 8-pin) connector unless you were also going to switch out the throttle circuit for something different.

Inside the pack, you have the 4-pin threaded connector going into the battery box from the side-mounted power switch. That one just disconnects power to the controller by switching the negative feed wire - 2 pins are wired positive, and 2 are negative.

It's inside the metal box where a lot of extra magic circuitry is happening, and where I chose to re-connect my Ping to graft it to the existing HT circuitry. However, the battery charging/management circuit is attached to the existing Li-Po packs in 2 different ways - one is the main 24V serial pack voltage, and the other is individual cell feeds to the charge monitoring circuit. That's where replacing the existing pack becomes problematic unless it was a direct replacement of the entire internal circuit+battery (which I figure Mike has them custom-built for HT under the CZ292LIP Lithium-Ion Battery Pack 24VDC 8500mAH specification).

So instead, I chose to de-solder the one external connection (4-pin DIN) from it's circuit board, and replace it's connection with the main leads supplied by the Ping battery pack (which already has it's own charge management circuit on-board and wired in-line). You could also choose to cut-out the DIN connectors entirely and just wire directly to the red and black wires going into it using solder or crimp connectors. But I was going for something retaining an ability to swap out the battery pack later. Maybe mating bullet connectors might be more appropriate in the future.

Chargers seem to be closely matched to their counterpart charge management circuitry, as I tried 2nd sourcing a different 24-28VDC Li-iON charger used for laptops to use as a secondary charger for the HT battery pack, but it's charging circuit didn't detect the supply voltage as being correct, so it never turned on the charging circuit internally. But buying a 2nd one from Mike worked fine. The Ping comes with it's own charger (in 2 different amperages) as well, and is connected using a 3-pin XLR (microphone) style connector.

Anyway, Mike's price for a replacement battery pack isn't unreasonable at all. It's just, for me, I wanted to avoid throwing out all the extra packaging, nylon bag, metal enclosure, etc. associated with another whole pack, and at the same time, for a similar price, found a battery with 36V and more amps, which worked fine once connected.

But I'll stress that going the custom battery route is not a plug-and-play solution - for that, just buy another HT battery pack from Mike and away you'll go.

I just wish the pack was designed with a little more recyclable features, so you could send back the old unit to Clean Republic and they could swap out just the foil Li-Po pack inside.

[dkw12002]

So when you buy a new battery from CR, they send you a new black bag with the controller and the connector?

[robert1389]

Yes. I just received my second CR Lithium. New bag, controller, and connector.

[dkw12002]

Yes, I see now from their web site you get the whole thing. For simplicity, which is what they are shooting for, this makes sense. They set out to make a kit that is fool-proof. I bet there are still people who do not get that wheel in the dropouts properly though, or snug up the axle bolts.

On my farm, I once decided to put a couple horses in an area that wasn't fenced. I strung wire and steel posts with insulators around about a 2 acre area, and attached the end of the wire back to a fence charger which I mounted on the wall inside my barn. So I put the horses out to pasture and was inside the barn, when BANG, the charger gets ripped off the wall and heads out the window. I looked out and there is my mare with the dang fence wrapped around her legs running with my wire, 30 fence posts and the charger bouncing behind her. I figure something like that is what would happen if you didn't get a snug fit on those dropouts.

[dynodan]

Someone should likely point out that, aside from the worry re: danger of long term 36V damage to the 24V HT motor controller, I see that "E" front wheel conversions are generally discouraged by OEM manufacturers of sprung forks. Even if the HT wheel does fit the dropouts properly, the extra 36V torque may shorten fork life. Not to mention what could happen if improper alterations are performed to the dropout slots in order to adapt the HT wheel?
Regardless, I find that 18-20 mph on my 24V/HT equipped 700c bike is plenty fast enough. Unless you need to regularly exceed the limited useful range of the CR/HT LIB with a significant battery AH increase, the whole idea of the Ping conversion effort seems rather moot.

[dkw12002]

I agree about the speed, especially given my 200 lbs, old Trek bike with poor suspension and caliper brakes, our deteriorating streets, and of course the law of not >20 mph. Mine goes 17 mph on the flat with my 26" wheels. I just checked it with one of those police radar kiosks in my neighborhood. Now tomorrow I am going to test ride a Zero motorcycle over at AF1 Racing. It's a 2011 S model. The one I am interested in is the 2012 S in red with the big battery and regenerative braking that can go a max of 88 mph and up to 114 miles per charge. Zero claims the Li batteries last for over 300,000 miles. Now why don't we have bicycle batteries that last that long? I mean assuming you did in fact get 114 miles per charge, that's 2631 charges. BTW, if you saw the President's State of the Union Speech, he mentioned we should soon become the leader in hi-tech battery manufacturing. Who in the US makes those batteries? It seems like they all come out of Asia.