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[wijnand71]

Hi everybody, I'm new here and I will introduce myself briefly. I am Wijnand and almost a Zero owner. I will receive my first Zero DS after the summer holidays. Its a second hand (2500km) and a dealer demo model with a 11.4 lithium battery. It looks really brand new :-)
I have rode a few years a electric scooter (45km/h) and loved the electric drive from the first mile. Now I go for a higher speed and bigger range. Being a electronics engineer myself I have been spending hours to read all topics on this forum to know and learn a lot of how this bike works. Because I'm gonna use my zero a lot on its range limit I started to investigate the use and availability of the charge tank and/or the DigiNow charger. But whats not completely clear to me is why the charge tank is only available on models from 2015 and later, and the power tank is available on 2014 models though... The dealer couldn't inform me about this. What is the difference in electronics from models 2013 and 2014?

[BrianTRice@gmail.com]

From the Supercharger's perspective, only the capacity of the auxiliary charging circuit changed (ATM30 fuse in the manual, 30A for 2013 and I think 60A for 2014 and ~100A for following years). The Supercharger drops in physically, is then connected up by the port or controller, and is usable after calibration checks. But it doesn't integrate with the onboard charger or play close with Zero's systems.

The Charge Tank appears to use a complicated arrangement, from dealer comments on the install procedure. It's conceivable that Zero made changes in 2015 intentionally to support a design they're releasing now, but I have no way to confirm that. The tank area physically is the same, and I'd say 2015+ models are actually a little more crowded physically there because of ABS systems introduced that year.

[wijnand71]

Thanks Brian for this explanation. i've looked also into the Diginow solution and my only concern is the charge current. You know, to charge with these giant currents.. will it have any negative affect on the battery, will it run hot? I mean of course the engineers will have looked into this but what is the maximum charge C-rate of the cells? And when one use this fast charging method, will my battery wear out  faster? I'm just wondering..
Unfortunately there are only a few pictures on the web of the Zero's with a Diginow installed. I would like to create the same outside "look" like the original charge tank. With the plug in the place of the gas cap. But we'll see how this company develops and produces this monster charger when it really is in production.

[BrianTRice@gmail.com]

Thanks Brian for this explanation. i've looked also into the Diginow solution and my only concern is the charge current. You know, to charge with these giant currents.. will it have any negative affect on the battery, will it run hot? I mean of course the engineers will have looked into this but what is the maximum charge C-rate of the cells? And when one use this fast charging method, will my battery wear out  faster? I'm just wondering..
Unfortunately there are only a few pictures on the web of the Zero's with a Diginow installed. I would like to create the same outside "look" like the original charge tank. With the plug in the place of the gas cap. But we'll see how this company develops and produces this monster charger when it really is in production.

The battery will generate heat if charged faster than 4kW or so, but it takes a lot of 1C charging to overheat the battery unless the ambient temperature is above 90F. The Zero cuts off charging above 1C rate, which is a fast rate and also well within the cells' capacity to keep the battery operating for the designed lifetime. Well, look up the Farasis information on the wiki to see how the cells have changed. 2016 cells are more robust than 2014's.

Replicating Zero's charge tank design would be difficult; Zero obviously put a lot of design effort into it. In principle, nothing stops you from using charge tank plastics with a Supercharger. In reality, the Charge Tank plastics are not as cheap as Power Tank plastics, and they're not offered separately for sale yet (unless your dealer likes you enough to sneak around Zero's ordering system).

What you could do is mount the J inlet on the side of the bike next to the onboard plug and wait for a better design.

I can't help you with photo availability, though I naturally have taken plenty during testing and documentation. I guess I can say that for testing purposes, I dealt with some rough designs.