expoweb/handbook/charging-pre2018.html

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<title>CUCC Expedition Handbook: Drill Battery Charging</title>
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<h2 id="tophead">CUCC Expedition Handbook</h2>
<h1>Drill Battery Charging</h1>
<h2>Instructions for charging</h3>
0) <li>If a battery has green insulation tape on it it has been
modified by us and will not charge on a Makita standard charger. It
must be charged on the balance chargers (or RC chargers). Untaped
(standard) batteries will not charge on the balance chargers, so must
be charged on the Makita chargers (or RC charger). All batteries will
charge on the RC chargers, but not as fast as on the Makita
charger. Go to <a href="#RCcharge">RC charger</a>.</li>
<p>New for 2018 is varying battery capacity. We have 3Ah, 4Ah and 5Ah
packs. Bigger packs will take longer to charge from empty. The
capacity is on the cell label next to the yellow connector.</p>
<p>Each pack has a sliding indicator on the side. This is entirely
manual, but is very useful for indicating when a pack is known to be
charged, flat, or partly discharged. Slide the slider to show green
for full, red for flat, half and half for 'partly used'.</p>
<h3>Using Makita charger</h3>
<p>This is blue charger with 3 LEDs, and diagrammatic charging info on RH side. CHarges at up to 100W.</p>
<ol>
<li>Make sure charger is powered (flashing green LED).</li>
<li>Plug batt into Makita charger. It should start charging.</li>
<li>Look at the LEDs for status - the legend is printed on the charger.
If it flashes 'broken battery' (flashing red and gren LED) at you
after a few seconds, use the yellow (Pro-Peak Prodigy II) RC charger instead.</li>
<li>Eventually it should show '100%' (steady green LED) (in about 1
hour max). You are done.</li>
</ol>
<h3>Using Balance charger</h3>
<p>This is the set of 3 (2 half-width) chargers made from old Makita chargers. They have a set of 4 LEDs. (The full-width one only has 1 LED in 2018). Charges at 40W.</p>
<ol>
<li>Make sure charger is powered (flashing green LEDs).</li>
<li>Plug batt into charger. After a few seconds it should start charging.</li>
<li>Look at the LEDs for status - the legend is printed on the RH end charger. Steady red for bulk charging to 80%. Steady orange for last 20% charging. Steady green for finished. If it flashes red and beeps (repeated 5 times) something is wrong - see table. If you get an 'undervoltage' reading, use an RC charger instead to get the charging started.</li>
<li>Eventually it should show '100%' (steady green LEDs). (1hr 50 max possible charge time). You are done.</li>
</ol>
<h3 id="RCcharge">Using Accucell 6 RC charger</h3>
<p>This is black all-purpose charger with blue LCD display. CHarges at up to 50W</p>
<p>The Yellow Propeak chargers do the same job, and insturcuctions are
similar, but have no fan, no backlit display, and if pack is low
voltage will charge at C/10 (10% of normal) until voltage rises
sufficiently. Ensure that charge rate is set to 4000mA otherwise
charging will be very slow. Charges at up to 50W (5W in C/10 gnetle start).</p>
<ol>
<li>Make sure charger is powered (display lit up)</li>
<li>Connect charger to battery (either hardboard adaptor or empty
Makita base adaptor). Check polarity is correct with hardboard
adaptor.</li>
<li>Check display says 'Lion' or 'Lipo' and '14.4V' and '3A' and 'CHARGE'. Hold
down 'start/enter' button (on right). It will do a battery check.</li>
<li>If it shows '4' as the number of cells, then press 'start/enter'
again. Charging will start (fan comes on, display changes). If it
shows anything else like 'polarity reversed' or 'connection break'
then fix the connection to the battery. If it shows '3' as number of
cells it is probably knackered, but possibly can be coaxed back into
action. Find a battery expert - don't just use the charger anyway.</li>
<li>Once it beeps and says 'FULL' (flashing) then you are done (should
be less than 2 hours). Display shows number of mAh put in in
bottom right. Should be a number like 250 for each hole drilled
(between 50 and 2900 depending how discharged it was).</li>
</ol>
<h3>Can I tell if a battery is already charged?</h3>
<p>Simplest it try to charge it again and find that it says it is done
in a couple of minutes (Up to 4 mins on the balance chargers). This
may 'waste a life' on batteries that still work on the Makita
charger. Checking it on the RC charger will not waste a life. It will
quickly rise to 16.4V, and the current drop to 0.1A or so. That
indicates a full pack. It will tell you so after a while (1-5
mins).</p>
<h3>What sort of batteries are they</h3>
<p>The drill batts are 4S2P 14.4V lithium ion packs (8 18650 cells: 4 in
series, each being a parallel pair). This means that they are charged
as 4-cell packs, to 4.1V per cell-pair. They can be charged at up to
3A rate. Battery 1 has connector wired as balance connector. No other
packs have this yet (2017). The official Makita packs use Sony SE
US18650VT (1.5Ah, 20A high-drain) cells, and we have a few with with Samsung
INR18650-13Q (1.3Ah high-drain cells). All give a reliable 2.3-2.6Ah
capacity in practice, even after 9 years expo useage.</p>
<p>At end 2017 we bought two 4Ah packs. The non-makita one uses LG
DAHD21865 cells (2Ah, 25A). I can't read the Makita cell type without
unwelding the pack. For 2018 we made 3 new 5Ah packs from Samsung 25R
cells (2.5Ah, 20A) (Sponsored by uk18650.com).</p>
<p>The drill discharges at 26A current draw when drilling (~400W), so
that's 13A per cell in a 2P configuration.</p>
<h3>Makita charging protocol issues</h3>
<p>Makita have put very 'conservative' software in the batteries which
will stop them working on the Makita charger, even when they are in
fact fine. The monitoring board is powered off the 1st cell pair so
that one tends to get discharged more than the others when left
sitting for the 11 months of not-expo. If an unbalanced (or
over-disharged, or too-hot) pack is inserted into the makita charger
the charger and battery will do serial-coms negotiation, the charger
will refuse to charge the battery and the battery will remember this.
If you try this 3 times, the battery will mark itself bad and will
never charge again on a makita charger. Only a replacement monitoring
board can fix this (or new software if we knew how to nobble it).</p>
<p>Such batteries are normally still fine and charge on a sensible (RC
- Radio Control, because RC people are the main market for these
chargers) charger, possible after a balance charge to get the cells in
the pack in sync again. Expo has a couple of these (Yellow Pro-power
Prodigy II). Unfortunataly Makita don't build the 14.4V packs with
balance connections to the cells, so the PCB has to be replaced to
make this work easily for expo. For 2018 this was done for 7 of our
packs, and 3 automatic balance chargers built.</p>
<p>Note that the drills have no battery-voltage monitoring at all, and the
monitoring circuit is bypassed when conected to the drill (the charger
uses a different connector-pair from the drill - that's why there are
3 slots). Thus the drill can easily be used to over-discharge a
battery, so please stop drilling when it gets slow and put on a new
batt, unless it's an emergency. Drilling with an excessively-sagged
voltage is a good way to knacker the weakest cell-pair. If your battery
does get to this state, try to charge it up as soon as possible. Cells
must not be left at &lt;2V for any length of time as they rapidly
(hours/days?) degrade to useless in this state (and that pair will
need replacing).</p>
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