Menke Projects

I now have both of Willie's 12V wooden power boxes containing mostly dead 260 AH LiFePO4 cells, plus a spare cell.  The 4 cells in the box I got yesterday are all dead, reading only a few millivolts. Since Scott Little and Willie had previously worked with a load of dead cells from the Escort, I looked at his messages, and here is what I found (so far): Mar 31, 2018, 1:28 PM to William , me I have not had good luck so far with the super-dead 260’s…ones that have <0.01v initial voltage.   I first tried a 50A charge rate and that cell got up to 3.3 volts but hung there and started to get hot instead of going up to 3.7.   I disconnected it and, by the next morning, the voltage was less than 1 volt just due to self-discharge. A second 260 was charged with a constant-current supply set to 10A.  After the voltage got above 3.0, I disconnected it and observed a similar self-discharge rate.   I then charged it again t...

Ever noticed all those little blinking blue lights all over your house after the sun goes down?  They are on the microwave, electric stove, network routers, mini-split, indoor-outdoor weather station, washing machine, and If I include the power draw of the ceiling fan in the bedroom, these little "vampire drains" add up to almost 400 watts every hour, although it does depend on what speed the ceiling fan is set on. So, the purpose of this blog is to collect everything I can find concerning whether or not an Enphase M215 Micro-inverter can be connected to a large 24 volt battery, and the 240 VAC grid so it would feed several hundred watts into my household grid all night long. From the data sheet the input voltage range can be from 16 to 48V, but the MPPT voltage range (voltage range that the switching supply will convert the solar panel voltage to a signal that can be useable for the AC output voltage stage) is limited from 27V to 39V. So if you want to use this wi...