Recent content by electrongeek

I’ve had this Chins Smart 100 Ah battery installed for a few months now. Seems to have been performing well with the three Chins “dumb” batteries in parallel. However, the Bluetooth functionality has gone dark, while I’ve confirmed the battery is still supplying power.

Less than 10%

I have four Chins 100 Ah 12V batteries in parallel, one of which has the BT BMS. The whole bank is monitored by a Victron BMV-712 battery monitor. While the parallel wiring is not the ideal, I think the BT BMS overestimates the state of charge, compared to the BMV-712 tally, but I have not tried...

Herb - you are confusing cell level balancing within the battery to the battery to battery balancing you have been doing. Yes, batteries hooked up in parallel, of the same type and voltage, will tend to balance with each other when charged up. However, what is happening within that battery, at...

The new app for the current build of Chins “Smart” batteries has a button labeled “Autobalance”. When you charge the battery up to above 14 V you can tap the button, and the button seems to respond to the tap, but there is not any indication that top balancing is occurring, at least to my eye...

On another note, how did you learn that the built-in BMS for the Chins batteries does not balance? Just curious, but not surprised. I had thought that since Chins recommends charging to 14.2 - 14.6 V it was to allow the BMS to top balance. If that isn't the case, I'm not sure I would routinely...

One of the cells in battery 1 might be triggering high voltage cutoff before the remaining cells in that battery are fully charged. I’m not sure how Chins would handle that. Obviously if you had the version with cell level monitoring you would know. I would capacity test that battery and see if...

I think it would be quite a project to tear open those Chins and use a different BMS. Are you completely off grid? If not, I would just use a 12v charger with LiFePO4 settings, or a bench power supply, to top each 12V pair in turn.

They sent a UPS label. Put it back in the original box and off it went.

I recently ordered the Chins Smart 12.8V 100Ah drop-in battery from Amazon for evaluation. This is the version with a heating pad to warm the battery if less than 0 C and Bluetooth BMS interface, and paired with the EE-BMS app. According to the app, it had a tested 105.5 Ah tested capacity and...

Yes, that is a great treatise by Rod Collins. I am interested specifically in how and how well the CHINS/Enjobot/AmpereTime BMSs do ther cell balancing. Chip

I would like to understand how the CHINS batteries cell balance. From what little I have read, they do it when the battery is somewhere above 14.0V, and do so passively. How quickly do they balance? Has anyone tested by drawing a single cell down, and then measuring the balance current vs...

I purchased three of these batteries to replace the Firefly carbon foam LA batteries I damaged. At a 5A discharge rate, using an Itech programmable electronic load on the first, and a Graupner Polaron in discharge mode for the second and third, they delivered 103, 108, and 108 Ah. I suspect the...