Jonathan Stewart is live! battery usage report for the new lithium battery and maybe some soldering

[00:00:01]Okay, what we're going to do in this video is I'm going to do a little report and about two minutes. Two to in two minutes I'm going to give a little report about the battery usage. And I just took a ride and I got some numbers to show. Just give me about two minutes and I'm going to be ready to show it.

[00:00:18]I'm going to clean up a little bit while we give it two minutes. Let me check my stopwatch.

[00:00:25]All right.

[00:00:27]Hey, watch. Set alarm for two minutes.

[00:00:31]Google Pixel Watch. Hello.

[00:00:36]How do I work you? Alarm.

[00:00:40]New alarm.

[00:00:43]Uh, okay. I'll set it for to go off at 10:39.

[00:00:49]There. 2 minutes.

[00:00:53]Quickly. I want to clean up.

[00:00:59]Get ready for the next big thing.

[00:01:06]Not that much to clean up.

[00:01:14]Now I'm going to give a report on that battery. I just took a ride. Oh, shoot.

[00:01:20]She turned it off. We didn't get the final number. I'm pretty sure we did 20 miles, though.

[00:01:26]It was 15 when we were at the bridge.

[00:01:27]Yeah, we did 20 miles.

[00:01:32]That was 12 miles.

[00:01:42]Mainly what I'm going for is um it's hard to judge miles because I am so heavy that um I can go onethird the distance that can go. It's not about miles. It's about It's about um Is the battery capacity good?

[00:02:03]True.

[00:02:06]This is a little bit cleared up. I can't think.

[00:02:14]Also, the MV 11 filter is not good enough for filtering out solder gases. I also learned that when you're using lead solder, it does not make the lead get into the air. It's not hot enough to make it do that. So, we don't have to worry about breathing in lead when you're soldering. It's the flux that's the problem. And so, the flux is built into the solder. So, that's why I didn't never need flux.

[00:02:50]Also trying to get better about these live feeds to make sure I give a good introduction and purpose at the beginning so that way I don't have to delete it if I know what to expect.

[00:03:26]I do want to do some more solder work.

[00:03:35]Time's up.

[00:03:40]All right, that's clean enough.

[00:03:53]Oh, no.

[00:03:55]You're not supposed to hear the alarm.

[00:03:59]Sorry.

[00:04:01]Supposed to do it in the watch.

[00:04:04]Here's what I ended up doing last night.

[00:04:07]3 hours and 20 minutes I spent replacing all these connections cuz EC3s suck.

[00:04:12]See, it's just you know, very hard to work with. I didn't show this last night.

[00:04:19]Here, let me get them out.

[00:04:43]EC3 connectors.

[00:04:49]There's a ton of them in here somewhere.

[00:05:02]Well, looks like they never made it into the box. They're that bad.

[00:05:13]Oh, well, they're going to be thrown away.

[00:05:17]So, the EC3s are no good. We need to stick with the instead of the EC3, the blue ones, we need to stick with XT60s and XT90s.

[00:05:28]They are much much much much much safer.

[00:05:34]You can kind of see You can you can easily push this in backwards. See, it's touching the metal.

[00:05:47]So, it doesn't do a good job.

[00:05:50]Trash.

[00:05:55]Now, here's the report about this battery, the new battery that I built.

[00:06:04]All right. Um, I've been riding I don't have a time of how long I was riding, but we did 20 miles. Pretty close to 20 miles. Um, very hilly ground. Um, oh, next time I do this, I need to tell the watch to keep track because it'll tell us how much altitude we climbed.

[00:06:24]We probably climbed a total of 1,000 feet. But, um, so 20 miles, that doesn't matter. That's irrelevant. What matters is that um like to get myself up a hill takes a lot of energy. I'm pretty heavy. What we're looking for is battery capacity. And I guess I'll trust this to be accurate.

[00:06:44]Oh, got to flip it there. Closer. All right. There's the amp hour. Okay. 680. Well, 679. That's how much watt hours I've used so far.

[00:06:55]This logs how much watt hours we use.

[00:06:56]And it said 600.

[00:06:59]We need to see it again.

[00:07:02]We did almost 14 amp hours of use. Okay.

[00:07:05]679 watt hours was used. We don't want to get the number of the amp hours. We can't trust it for the voltage because you have to multiply amps to the volts and the volts keeps changing. So, one more time because I keep forgetting.

[00:07:19]679 watt hours I used. Now, we're gonna try to figure out how much voltage drop there is.

[00:07:26]um we can't trust the voltage reading.

[00:07:29]We started at 54 volts. Now we're down to 48.7.

[00:07:34]So, but to get the true reading, we need to give it some gas and um we need to give it power and squeeze the brake at the same time. So, set you like this.

[00:07:48]Here we go.

[00:07:51]I'll call out the numbers. Got to get a good grip on this thing.

[00:08:01]Okay, it was dropping. The voltage dropped to 45 to 46 and now it's back up to 48. So, if that voltage was dropping really low, then you got you know you got some dead cells. That's important to know. So, it's dropping to 45, but it's sit it's sitting comfortably at 48.5. And it still has plenty of power to get me up the hills. So, it's the battery is still super good. Now, we need to do a calculation. We're going to do 10 * 5.52.

[00:08:33]10 * 50. Is that right? 52. Yeah. Um, no. No. We're going to do 10 * 3.76.

[00:08:44]10 * 3.6. That's going to be 36. Then, we're going to say 3 * 3.6.

[00:08:52]3 * 3.6 that's going to be 9 then 18. So that's going to be um 10.8.

[00:09:01]So 10.8 + 36 is 46.

[00:09:10]46 volts.

[00:09:15]That doesn't sound right. 46 volts. We need a calculator.

[00:09:23]a pen and paper.

[00:09:27]This is important. Well, actually, what we really need to calculate is when is it dangerously low? So, it's dangerously low when we get down to um let's see 13, 10, and three.

[00:09:44]That's a three.

[00:09:47]So, we got to say it's dangerously low when it gets down to um if each cell is at 3 volts, three time um 3 * 3 is 9 and then 3 * 3 10 is um 30 39 volts. So, if it gets down to 39 volts, it's getting dangerously low or we're going to be hurting the batteries.

[00:10:13]And we are at 48 volts, so we're good.

[00:10:16]This thing should be able to It starts to get super weak when you get down to about um 43 volts or 44 volts.

[00:10:25]So, we're good. So, the numbers 10 and three. So, the average voltage that this thing is made for is um it's it's going to be I feel like I did the numbers wrong. 3.6 * 10 is 36 and then 3.6 6 * 3 is um 9 6 * 3 is 18.

[00:10:50]Yeah, it is. I did get the numbers right. 10 uh 3 * 6 is 18, right? Yeah.

[00:10:59]So, add those together, we get 46.8.

[00:11:04]Oh, that. So, that means the the average voltage for this battery that I built is 46.8.

[00:11:14]So, there should be tons of energy left in there when it's at 48 volts. I didn't realize that. So, this thing can go much, much longer.

[00:11:22]That's the nominal voltage. The nominal voltage for these cells is 3.6, not 3.7.

[00:11:28]The max charge is 4.2.

[00:11:33]4.2.

[00:11:38]That's the max charge you can go. So, that's how you get the you take 4.2* 2 * 13 and then you'll get 546 54.6 volts, but it doesn't stay there very long. So, this thing seems like it still has half the energy left. The battery is um RA is supposed to be about um 1,200 W hours.

[00:12:03]We used 681. Now we're at 681. So, we used 681 watt hours. We should be able to use another uh 400 or no not 400. We don't want to go too low. We can get it down. We can use 10 1,000 watt hours and still be good with the battery probably because it'll still be over 20%.

[00:12:25]So that's that that's the numbers. 680 watt hours I used. See that this has to be turned into a YouTube short that really makes sense.

[00:12:37]No, I don't work for the government.

[00:12:40]I do not work for the government.

[00:12:45]We're documenting the numbers right now.

[00:12:48]So, this thing still has a lot of energy left after using nearly 700 watt hours.

[00:12:53]I'm charging up my old battery over there. And that one I need to do the same kind of test to see how much capacity that has left. Um, that thing's been dropping voltage sooner earlier.

[00:13:06]Um, that's 9 years old. It's been used quite a lot. I don't think I ever charged it when I was freezing. Yeah, I never charged it when I was freezing.

[00:13:17]Taking good care of it.

[00:13:20]It won't be done charging till like 6 hours probably.

[00:13:26]Oh, we have the same tester for it. So, we can see voltage it's at right now while it's doing its thing.

[00:13:40]So, it's at 50. It needs to get to 54.

[00:13:44]6.

[00:13:49]That should take probably 3 hours or 4 hours. Then I can do my test. And I have to do like a an hour and 30 minute bike ride unless I push it hard.

[00:14:00]And then I'll do another live feed like this similar to this to get the numbers crunched and then make the YouTube short eventually. And the YouTube shorts, it's going to be important and useful to know cuz I have the real data here. I made that I made the battery myself about 9 years ago and we really need to know how long these things really last and is it really worth building it.

[00:14:26]These this battery I built crazy cheap because I get there. The cells are being sold. They're on huge sale, but the sale kind of went back up and it's not as great of a deal, but it's still around $3 a cell. Those cells cost me five bucks each. At one point, these cells were going for 265 each. Now they now they gone back up though to about three or 316.

[00:14:49]So, I made this battery, which has the same capacity as that one over there and better cells for around under 200 bucks.

[00:14:57]That battery cost me 500 bucks to build, not counting all the nickel and all that hard work.

[00:15:05]So, that's that for those numbers. That's enough about the numbers about my ride and how well it did. Um, I'm going to go ahead and leave it on so that I can keep that data and cuz I want to see how much energy this thing like I want to let it go until the the BMS cuts off and I want to get a reading of that.

[00:15:28]So, we'll leave that thing powered on. Now, it's time to fix something else.

[00:15:40]Like I was saying, I hate these connectors now. They spark too much.

[00:15:46]This whole There's so many of them. This I can't use. It's not powerful enough.

[00:15:50]This is uh something that can take 72 60 volts and 48 volts and bring it down to 12 volts and still be able to push 360 watts or 30 amps. The trolley motor pulls unfortunately 35 amps.

[00:16:07]It might melt the connector.

[00:16:10]So replacing this is not really worth it to make it have the new connectors.

[00:16:16]Not expected the last.

[00:16:20]What else needs to be fixed?

[00:16:38]A 16.8 volt battery. Can't use this for any anything except for um systems that are rated for 12 volts to 24 volts like this light.

[00:16:54]So building batteries like this is no good.

[00:16:57]It's a no-go where you got four working together.

[00:17:02]Um unless we can get a hold of cells that nominal voltage is 3.2 volts. The nominal voltage of this the average is um is 14 volts about that's too much. It's 3.6 time 3.7 for this cell time 4. So it doesn't work for 12 volts of these cells. It needs to be the iron. I think when they started doing the lithium iron the lithium FE those cells are 3.2 average voltage. And then you can put four of those together.

[00:17:39]So 3.2 time four, that's going to be 12.

[00:17:43]Four time two. 4 point 4 12.8 volts.

[00:17:49]That's going to hold that pretty well.

[00:17:50]12.8 volts. Got to get some lithium irons. And I have not seen the lithium iron fees in these sizes. I've only seen them in those block sizes like that. And that's just going to be too big. But I think it might be cheaper if we can get a hold of those than buying one that's ready made. But then I have to buy the BMS.

[00:18:13]That's the tricky part. It might be better nowadays to just buy one of those chin batteries. Chins.

[00:18:21]But get four packs like that and make my own lead battery or I mean battery that's like a lead acid.

[00:18:31]Other thing that Lopez is the lead acid batteries are more like closer to the 13 volts. They go all the way up to 14 volts when charged.

[00:18:43]I will make that eventually or buy it.

[00:19:04]Everything's just about good to go.

[00:19:07]All these systems here.

[00:19:19]Yeah.

[00:19:20]Yeah. No need to solder. So, one more thing about the fan idea.

[00:19:26]I think it's going to work good for sawdust.

[00:19:30]It does not have a good enough good enough flow rate to work well with two of them. And um the solder dust the smoke makes particles that are um 0.1 nanometers I think it is 0.1 to um 10.

[00:19:49]And this thing filters out 3 to 10.

[00:19:53]Not very well either. 3 to 10. So it's like um if this is a particle from smoke from the solder, the flux smoke um the size of the holes in this thing is like this the filter. It's that big. So this is useless for trying to filter out the smoke. It but does help redirect it.

[00:20:14]Maybe some of it sticks to it, but we can't trust this for protecting our lungs. So we're going to trust this for um capturing sawdust. Sawdust is pretty big here.

[00:20:28]So, it doesn't have good enough flow.

[00:20:30]So, I'm going to go ahead and pull off the front one.

[00:20:38]Doubling it up really does make a huge difference and I'm sure in catching it.

[00:20:49]I'm not going to put it on. It blows this way. So, I'm not putting it on this side.

[00:20:55]That will cause it to um get dust all over the blades more.

[00:21:00]In fact, see how the flow is now.

[00:21:07]Oh yeah, it's pushing much more much more flow.

[00:21:16]It comes out, but it's it's like making it so that it's like 10 times slower having two of them on there.

[00:21:26]There's still one on the back, a filter.

[00:21:29]That's a good flow. So, when I'm cutting, it should be able to capture all that dust off.

[00:21:42]Perfect.

[00:21:50]Works on the low speed, too. So, I could just leave this thing here for 10 minutes, leave the room after doing all the cutting, and it'll probably get all the dust up now.

[00:22:02]A really cheap solution, but we can't trust that for a smoke.

[00:22:11]That is not going to do anything for smoke except for make it blow away from me.

[00:22:17]Just want to be clear about that.

[00:22:20]not showing this yesterday.

[00:22:34]That's about it for now. There's nothing left to no projects right now till I get the big lead acid battery. So, it's just a summary of the battery report for that thing. And eventually I'll get all the information after I test out both batteries and publish that as the most as informative and as quick as possible. I'll explain how well that battery last back there. The nine um the 9year-old battery.

[00:23:06]That's that's about it.

[00:23:09]It's going to be a report on how well these things lasted. The which they still sell and they're very popular. the 18650 35 E. Yeah, 35E cells. They're rated for a capacity of about they said 3,500, but then they changed the data and said it was 3,200, more like that. People were reporting that, so it's like 3,200ish.

[00:23:34]And um I've broken apart packs I used in the pack and in the past. And I had a range when I tested them of um they were lasting they they their capacity went to 2,700 to and some of them still had a capacity of 3,200.

[00:23:51]So that was my range when breaking these apart and testing them. Some I destroyed.

[00:23:56]But it's a it's a battery pack over there I'm charging up. It's going to it has it's a 50 max charge goes to 54.6 6 volts and um the nom average voltage is uh 52 volts and um its capacity was um it's 104 of these cells. So whatever that capacity is, the numbers are 104 * 3.3 * 3.7 3.7 volts time 3.3 amp hours times 104 of them. That's how many watt hours it is the battery pack. So that's about it.

[00:24:40]I'll have that test done and the video by probably by tomorrow. I will do the same thing though after I do my ride.

[00:24:47]I'm going to just go on live and punch the data into the phone like this so I can watch it later and get it.

[00:24:55]So that's about it. Unless you have a question. Goodbye for now. Go clean up.

[00:25:00]If I see a question in there, I'll answer it.

[00:25:24]All electrical stuff goes in the big drawer.

[00:25:32]It's getting kind of full.

[00:26:11]This is the thing I use to char um test the batteries. Takes a long time.

[00:26:17]Um it can charge at um a rate of one amp times three. So, and there's four slots.

[00:26:27]So, if you try to do all four slots and charge at an amp, it will just cut off.

[00:26:32]It's it I know that because it's the power plug says it's rated for that 3 amps somewhere. It says it it says it well output is 12 volts at 2 amps.

[00:26:49]That sounds like it should be enough. I don't know. All I know is that you can't do three four batteries at at the full max power of 10 um one amp charging or discharging.

[00:27:00]So I you set it to 500 500 and 500 500 when you want to do all uh the whole set of four or just do three at a time.

[00:27:10]But it's worked very well.

[00:27:14]This BT-C 3400 Opus should be about um around 50 to 60 bucks this thing.

[00:27:24]It's a musthave if you're trying to break and apart cells and recycle them, but it takes it takes all day almost.

[00:27:31]You're you need to give it like three hours to discharge and 3 hours the charge. So, 6 hours for three cells, it's not worth your time. You're better off just finding them and buying them, it seems.

[00:27:48]But very convenient when you need to match the cells for small packs.

[00:27:53]Like I have a pack over here to power this light and that pack has match cells that are recycled from my other projects and it's using six cells.

[00:28:08]I'll match it for the six cell battery builds to make 12vt systems or three cell battery systems. I could do I could do a I could do a four cell battery system to simulate a high voltage system.

[00:28:25]It also I found out this is very useful to know. Um the RC cars that say that they're pulling so much power, a lot of those RC cars are not doing much usage of the energy. So for my rock claw rock crawler, I built a battery pack out of two of these cells and that thing's working excellent. It's been able to go for an incredibly long time compared to the storebought ones, the soft packs.

[00:28:55]And these things are much safer because they're they got a metal casing. And then you I did a three cellled version of it to do the 3S, you know, the 11 volts. And it's just that rock coll crawler can run for an incredibly long time. So, making your own RC car batteries, you just got to make sure that it's not going to require the 60 amps and stuff because these things will not handle 60 amps. These things are rated for 10 amps and like maybe a little bit of a peak of like 15 or so.

[00:29:27]But, um, you got to read the data sheet.

[00:29:29]These are But that rock collar turns out that it's only drawing like it's drawing less than 10 amps unless you're like really making it struggle. It's because it's got a worm gear. The rock crawler.

[00:29:51]I don't think those batteries would hold up. I think they'll blow their burn up on the inside. If you try to use it for a like an Arma Typhoon, those things draw huge currents. Like they're they're pushing 120 amps for a couple seconds when you're accelerating.

[00:30:09]We'll definitely fry those.

[00:30:13]The Arma typhoons are way too much.

[00:30:23]Too many apps.

[00:30:36]Now I can only find this on the internet. Before there was duct tape, they used to sell an wax screen. This is not wax string. This is like all I can find is twine.

[00:30:53]But if they could bring back wax string or we could make our own and put wax all over this. Um, it turns out wax string is what they used to use in the old days to hold everything together instead of duct tape. It really works well. You wrap it around it and because it's waxed, you can let go of it and it stays tight. I really need to get to that stuff.

[00:31:16]But for now, I'm going to use this nonwax string for this task. Let me show you.

[00:31:30]Get the light on. I don't know why it does that.

[00:31:34]goes offline when I'm trying to get to the menu.

[00:31:38]Lighting.

[00:31:40]No, not lighting.

[00:31:44]Oh, it's on the wrong screen there. Flashlight.

[00:31:49]All right. So, this plank of wood has grooves cut in it. So, it's resting on some screw heads here of the bulkhead.

[00:31:57]And then there's an arch carved into the wood, a nice rounded arch. And so it's just not the string's not holding up tight enough.

[00:32:06]I wish I had that wax string. I just got to get myself to order it. It's kind of expensive. Like they went like 20 bucks for something like this.

[00:32:15]This works.

[00:32:17]It's just hard to tie.

[00:32:21]It got a little loose. So I need to fix it on this side. I got a little wiggle.

[00:32:31]See, I ran the wire through the wood to make that onoff switch.

[00:32:48]This is not very strong stuff.

[00:32:53]It'll get the job done.

[00:33:03]There's the wires.

[00:33:14]This light is incredible. Having this light is it gives a wide field of view beam.

[00:33:22]So, it's not really it it goes it will blind people at a distance. It's off-road use only, but um that's really good for up close. Really making us a wide field of view. I need to get a one of those hologen lights or something that is made for a car so then it can be onroad use. I need to build that eventually, 3D printed or whatever.

[00:33:47]Something that's low watt.

[00:33:50]Um the Xeon headlights are so nice, but I think they use too much energy. But this battery will power it.

[00:33:58]Then I can have a nice carlike light for my bike, keeping me safer.

[00:34:05]It's really nice to ride the bike out there during the summer.

[00:34:13]After the hot day is over, it nice and tight.

[00:34:20]This is doable.

[00:34:25]It's just tying the knot is the tricky part. I know nothing about making good knots. Like I know the basic ones for rock climbing, but I don't know the knots that you may use to make it stay put when you're trying to hold it tight like this. So, I just hold it tight.

[00:34:45]For sure there's some way out there to make it so it stays on tight. There we go.

[00:34:51]Got to stop the wiggle.

[00:34:54]enough of these. It just keeps getting tighter and tighter. Like when they're doing those rubber bands around the watermelon to make it explode.

[00:35:05]Long as they keep the tension on. Right now, we're almost out of string. I got to tie it off somewhere. That's the hard part.

[00:35:15]Keeping it tight.

[00:35:20]There's a spot here to pull on the orange one.

[00:35:24]Just got to keep one. This is why we need three hands. One hand to hold it and the other two hands to work it.

[00:37:00]overhand knots.

[00:37:02]As long as I keep everything tight, it will not loosen.

[00:37:07]I need a way to pull it through.

[00:37:22]That'll work.

[00:37:29]We'll grab her.

[00:37:42]Now we're getting better at this.

[00:37:45]I have a pair of pliers now. The things I didn't have when I was little make life easier. Little tools like this.

[00:37:53]That's making it so I can really grab it.

[00:37:58]That's so much easier.

[00:38:01]And this this this is actually kind of grippy, too. This twine. It's not really slipping.

[00:38:09]Just from one little overhand knot was enough to keep it from slipping.

[00:38:14]Did not expect that.

[00:38:17]That wax stuff is supposed to be so good.

[00:38:22]There we go.

[00:38:32]I solved another problem.

[00:38:35]Still got a little wiggle. Slight wiggle, but it's much tighter. Let me see.

[00:38:45]That's fine. It's not going to hurt anything.

[00:38:49]I should have put this foam rubber on this part, too. It looks like I didn't do that.

[00:39:01]I go shop around for a better light now.

[00:39:09]All right. Goodbye for now. I'm going.

[00:39:10]I'm done.

[00:39:12]I'll be back on when I get a report for that battery how well it did.