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Chevrolet Volt Battery Used For Home Energy Project: Video

Chevrolet Volt batteries have been used for many various purposes aside from providing power for the car itself. However, we haven’t seen many second-generation Volt batteries repurposed.

David Poz is a perhaps a trendsetter in that fashion because he’s using one to build his own energy storage system at home. His goal is to eventually integrate the Volt’s battery with his home’s solar panels for complete off-the-grid power.

Poz found the battery at a scrapyard and yanked it from a second-generation Volt for $2,033. The video above is simply the first part of the series and shows Poz removing the battery management system cover to take some voltage measurements. He admits he’s never undertaken a project quite like it, so it should make for an interesting series.

Former GM Authority staff writer.

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Comments

  1. “He admits he’s never undertaken a project quite like it” + potentially high current/voltage + a newborn strapped to your back…What could go wrong?

    Reply
    1. At what point did he say he was unfamiliar with electricity? He’d just never done that particular thing before. If you look at the rest of his channel, he does all kinds of electrical things.

      Reply
  2. $2,033 for a 18 kWh battery is an excellent deal!

    Reply
  3. I’m doing a similar project using battery modules from a Chevy Volt as storage for solar panels. Here’s what I have done so far and the issues that have come up. Main one is battery management I have a good quality power inverter from Power Jack that produces 800 Watts of both 110VAC and 220VAC from 24VDC input (actually anywhere from 20 to 30 VDC input.) This unit is desirable because it withstands high temperatures in Fresno, Calif.– over 100F most summer days– due to use of old-fashioned copper windings rather than modern heat-sensitive mosfet transistors. I would like to use a 48 VDC inverter but Power Jack doesn’t seem to make one. Consequently, I will physically separate the 48 volt modules into 24 volt sections by cutting through the crimp-on connectors on the tops of the modules that hold together each pair of cells. The crimp-on connectors make it impractical if not impossible to remove a bad cell from a Volt battery the way that you can do with a Toyota Prius battery, by comparison. So each 48 volt module will become two 24 volt modules, and the 24 volt modules will be used as-is. Another reason for using 24 vdc modules is that it is hard to find solar panels that produce over 48 volts, or voltage controllers that accept over 50 volts in order to generate 48 volts from the solar panels to feed the power inverter. So the system design is to use enough 30VDC-40VDC solar panels to produced the desired Wattage (2KW?), then a DC/DC voltage controller that will step down the panel voltage to precisely the voltage required by the Volt batteries (nominally 24 VDC, but actually a bit less than that), and then the Power Jack inverter to produce 110 VAC and 220 VAC. For the DC/DC converter I will try one or more Newmar model 32-24-50, which inputs 30-50VDC and outputs 24.5 VDC up to 50 amps. This unit is precisely regulated on the output side and can be adjusted about 1 volt up or down as desired. The nice thing is that it is about 90% efficient, which means that if it reduces the voltage passing through it, there will be a commensurate increase in the amperage coming out of it, For example, 40 VDC at 40A from the solar panels will become about 24.5VDC at 60A coming out of the DC/DC converter.

    The hard part is preserving the batteries. I have read reports about battery management in the Volt car which state that the desired objective was to keep the batteries between 30% and 80% of charge capacity at all times, which means not charging above 80% capacity and then letting the batteries discharge to 30% before charging them. The Volt battery management system involves sensors monitoring the state of each battery cell every second or so, and then a cpu adjusting the charge to each cell so as to keep them all equal in voltage at all times. Supposedly it takes more lines of computer code to operate the Volt car than to operate a Boeing 737 aircraft. The difficulty stems from the fact that the lithium ion battery in the Volt has a very flat discharge curve, so you can’t just measure the voltage to tell the state of charge. By comparison, the typical lead acid battery is fully charged at 12.6 volts and is 20% discharged at 12.0 volts and fully discharged around 10 volts, in a fairly linear trajectory. Whereas each Volt cell, I believe, measures around 3.83 volts at all points between 100% charged down to 30% charged.

    So how to control this beast? The previous owner of the set of used Volt batteries that I have put them into an electric pick up truck and I believe tried to charge them like lead acid batteries, causing about half of them to swell up, explode, short-circuit or otherwise be damaged. I think that it was done by charging them at a voltage higher than 3.83 volts per cell but I don’t know. I plan to charge the batteries constantly at 3.84 volts per cell in blocks of 6, which would be about 23.0 volts per module, and to isolate each module from the others while charging by putting low-power Schottky blocking diodes on the input and output of the positive lead to each module, thus reducing the voltage coming into each module by about .6 volt from the DC/DC converter and again by about .6 volt on the output from the module to the inverter, and preventing any current flow in the opposite direction. But I haven’t done it yet. Comments, anyone?

    Reply
    1. Hello
      Any info on using my operating 2012 chevy volt batteries “as is” ( in the car ) as a back up system to store excess home rooftop solar panel power ? thanks R Harley email [email protected]

      Reply

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