I spent extra money making sure I wouldn't overcharge my batteries and kill them. That's the most common cause of battery death among EV owners, after all.
Meanwhile, my YellowTops have self-discharged over the long period I've been ignoring the car. When I finished wiring them up today, everything looked fine; but when I turned on the charger, all the regulator warning lights came on.
A quick check of the most accessible batteries (the four under the hood) showed voltages around 6V each. That's dead, dead, dead: 10V is regular dead. 6V is irreversible damage.
It's odd, because there was no load hooked up to those four batteries. The others had regulators attached, but I haven't checked them yet. The E-Meter registers 72V, which is consistent with 12 batteries at 6V each. (The E-Meter was disconnected, along with the DC/DC converter, at the emergency disconnect switch -- it wasn't a load while these batteries discharged.)
It's possible I can get them back to half their capacity. I'm talking with the EVDL to find out how. That may actually be sufficient: since my workplace installed an electrical outlet for me, I only need 6 miles of range or so.
Otherwise, I'm going to need a new battery pack.
It's so depressing.
How completely frustrating this recent battery-cide must be after all the work you and your brother have put into the vehicle! A kind reader wrote to me when I was feeling depressed about our struggles with the e-van, "I know how you feel, I have had plenty of projects fall short of that wonderful mental picture that I went in with. Then I remind myself 'oh yeah this is an experiment.'"
I found that encouraging, so I'll pass it on. Congratulations on all the work you've put in already on your EV and I wish you a speedy and cheap resolution to the battery problems! Were you using Optima Yellow-tops? I had wondered if they might make good traction batteries ... we have one in the van for the DC system. Our current batteries severely underperformed expectations. Oh well. It's an experiment, right?
Jenny
I am using YellowTops. When I got started, they were supposed to be good batteries; by the time I purchased mine, they had been sold and quality had supposedly gone way down. Nowadays, the EVDL recommends Hawkers or Exide Orbitals.