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[akore]

Had a brand new lithium battery installed in my Energy Motion Ocean e-moto that replaced the 6 12 volt GEL batteries. They tell me that the charger will automatically stop charging when the battery is full. Not sure how much I trust them or the charger since it never "automatically" stopped charging on the GEL batteries but that might have been because they where very old and could no longer fully charge?

[Crilly]

I would find a charger designed for lithium.

[akore]

I was told that they reprogrammed the control unit system so that the same charger works with the new battery

[Crissa]

The voltage curve for lithium is different than for gel or liquid batteries, so the charger would have to be reprogrammed, yes.

But since the time to charge is dependent upon how the charger is built, there's no way for us to say how long it will take without knowing that.

-Crissa

[akore]

Ok, Thx Crissa. I had it on the charger for close to 7 hours yesterday and it never turned green like it is supposed to so I disconnected it as I didn't want to explode the new battery pack. I will check the voltage of the battery today and see if it is at full : "A fully charged 72 volt pack is 84.0 volts"

[TheRan]

According to the manufacturer's site it takes 7 to 9 hours. However they say it has a lithium battery, as your's came with gel batteries it's presumably an older model so they charger could be different too. Chances are if the charger is different the newer one isn't any worse so your's shouldn't charge in less than 7 hours, I'd leave it for at least 9.

[JaimeC]

Wouldn't the battery CAPACITY make a difference?  It takes a lot less time to fully charge a Zero S with the 7.2kWh battery than it does to charge it with the 14.4kWh battery...

[akore]

Thank you TheRan.... didn't think to look at the manufactures website as the last time I looked there it was still showing details on the GEL battery bike so they must have updated the site recently... Good call!

http://energymotion.net/Pages/p.ocean.htm

So looks like I should put it back on the charger for a bit longer and watch for it to turn green... hopefully... :-)

[akore]

Well I just reconnected to charger to let it charge some more and it was flashing green and would not charge anymore so I guess the battery magically finished charging overnight on its own. 

If only it would magically charge every time I would save a lot of money on electricity. lol

I was told by the manufacture that it would not charge if it is full but that charger still scares me as I had hoped that last night it would have kicked off on its own after close to 7 hours of charging. I don't think the battery was completely dead as it was still showing one out of 4 bars on the indicator.

That is the other problem I have, the indicator on the moto only shows a 0-4 battery bar and no % or time till dead. When I drive down to town it will show 3-4 bars when the battery is low because it has regenerative charging (at least that is my theory) but when coming back up from the town to my house it will drop down to 1 or 0 and if I have the wife on the back and we have some groceries it will start flashing a blank box around where the bars normally are, which I think means its about to die. If it gets too low the motorcycle will just shut off. I can then flip the circuit breaker off and back on and it will show one bar again and I was able to get back to the house (but had to make the wife walk up). The odometer can't even help me as it resets the Km every time the moto is shut off so there is no running total or trip meter I can use to keep track of distance on it.

[Crissa]

Yes, battery capacity and charge rate and ambient temperature and...

Lots of things matter to the charge time.  But the charger is probably the #1 thing we'd need to know before we could even estimate the others.

-Crissa

[akore]

Thanks again for the reply Crissa.

It is a 72 Volt 30 Ah new lithium battery. The charging unit is a Black Box that only has on it: Battery Charger P/N:C600. Other information on it says: "72V6A" So I would say a 72 volt, 6 amp charging unit.

As for the Control Unit inside the Motorcycle I have know idea what model it is or how to program it other than it has a connector that you can attach a computer to it and reprogram it which is what they did back at the shop in Medellin. Not sure if they changed anything on the Battery Charger itself but it does not look like it so my guess is everything was reprogrammed on the Control Unit and recalibrated and setup for the new Lithium battery that was installed in place of the old GEL batteries.

http://energymotion.net/Pages/p.ocean.htm

[Crissa]

I suppose what you want is 'how long can you leave it on the charger'.

Well... It could take a long, long time.  Twelve hours isn't an unreasonable time.  (Well, it is kind of unreasonable...)

My S takes 6 hours to charge.  But a similar battery X takes up to ten hours!

-Crissa

[akore]

Yeah, I really just don't want to do damage to battery. When I first picked up the bike a few months ago it charged fine and the charger started blinking green and I disconnected it. The second time I went to charge it the LED never turned green and it over charged the GEL batteries to the point the bulged and probably killed them completely but they where already 4 years old and on there last leg. I was hoping to get a years worth of use out of them but ended up only getting about 2 months of use and that was charging them every time I wanted to go to town. With the new Lithium battery I was able to using the moto for about 3 weeks before it needed its first charge yesterday but like I said I have ZERO faith in this charging unit and I know Lithium batteries can explode so I am being overly paranoid about it now.

So yesterday afternoon I put in on the charger for the first time with the new battery. Started at around 1:30pm, then at 8pm I disconnected it as it still had not turned green and shut off. The charger has a fan in it. This morning I reconnected it to see if it would charge more but it just flashed the green LED and the fan never kicked in so it must be fully charged.

I did ready that new Lithium batteries have to settle in or some such thing so perhaps it is just a break in period and after a few charges it will be fine and will automatically kick off when it is fully charged.

This is my first electric vehicle after having petroleum vehicles all my life but I am very glad I found this forum as everyone is so helpful here!   

[TheRan]

Is this an external charger? If so there are plenty of others that you could replace it with, designed for lithium batteries and potentially faster charging. One I do know of that's supposed to be rather good, used by a lot of ebike riders, is the Cycle Satiator. 360W (72v 5A) so should take around 6 hours for a full charge (72v and 30Ah is about 2kW/h). Potentially you could charge in an hour with a 2kW charger, my understanding is that most lithium batteries can handle 1C charging (a rate of 1x the capacity per hour) but don't take my word for it.

[akore]

It is an external charging unit but I don't think it is the only factor of how the moto charges as it feeds into some sort of programable control unit. This Control Unit seems to be the key to the whole moto.

I have attached a few photos of the charge and the Control Unit in the moto.