That's *Important* Blah-De-Blah to you Soldier!
The PakTrakr is the battery monitoring system, and therefore pretty darn important to the regular and successful operation of the car. Plus there's a nifty little fuel gauge thingy that's kinda like the gas gauge in them regular Polluto-Mobiles. Reads from F down to E, reasonably accurate too. Problem is ours would reset to 100% full every time we moved off from a stop. Not so useful.
I gather that EMI (electro-magnetic interference) is frequently the cause of this behaviour, and the best 'fix' is to have the sensitive wires as far away as possible from the wires that are doing the heavy lifting, like say traction pack or batteryEQ wiring.
When we got the battery cover off we found the PakTrakr wiring bundled together with other wires and the remainder stuffed down between the battery sets along with many other wires.
Since all the PakTrakr wires were somewhat to extensively longer than they needed to be, we shortened each one up to a reasonable length for it's run out to the battery post and then routed them to be as far away from the other wires as possible.
Did it work? Almost. Instead of 20 resets on a 12 mi. run around town, we had only one. I went and got some little snap-on ferrite cylinders that are designed to suppress EMI/RFI and put them on each set of wires running out to the battery pack halves and another where they all come together (PakTrakr 'Remote') and that seems to have done the trick.
Another thing we noticed when we had the pack all apart was that some of the washers that hold down all the wire lugs on each battery terminal weren't all sitting straight. Since it's really important that the big high current (300+Amps) battery wire lugs have good contact with the battery terminal underneath I was somewhat concerned. Note that there was no indication that this had caused any problem to date.
This is an example battery terminal and the inset in the photo is the underlying terminal after it has been all cleaned and spiffed-up. We found most of the problem could be attributed to crimp on wire lugs that were the wrong size. It's hard to keep those centered and they tend to get everything above them skewed off a bit.
The thin lug shown here with the large hole is an example of the ones I cut off. The one above with the smaller hole and the larger contact surface area are the ones I used. All lugs were cleaned and flattened and the battery terminal surface was cleaned and everything coated with silicone spray to try and reduce future corrosion (I'm not sure how well this works).
Each terminal was assembled in order: Battery Terminal, Main battery wire lug, lug-size washer, smaller Accessory wiring lugs, smaller lug-size washer (shown above), crush washer, Battery Bolt. Torque to spec. Hope it works...for years!
Edit: A week later. Still some resets. Removed the external display and TaDa...no more problems.
Additional note: the BattEQ system got recalled by the manufacturer. I heard there was a car burning down problem. Anyway, that's outta there too. Simplicity is nice and the fancy new (non-stock) charger should keep things in good shape on it's own.
Edit: A week later. Still some resets. Removed the external display and TaDa...no more problems.
Additional note: the BattEQ system got recalled by the manufacturer. I heard there was a car burning down problem. Anyway, that's outta there too. Simplicity is nice and the fancy new (non-stock) charger should keep things in good shape on it's own.
