Trolling Motor powered by lithium ion 18650's?

[sikeston34m]

The 180 cells that make up the 6S pack, took back 45,000mah to become fully charged again.

Whew! I need a bigger charger. LOL

This means all day fishing used 63% of the pack's total capacity.

Now we have enough data to figure efficiency losses.

The watt meter measured 65,500mah worth of useable energy going to the motor.

On the high voltage side, this translates into 32,750mah of energy

Hmmmm..........73% total efficiency. That's not very good really.

I think a large amount of the losses came from the wire that I'm feeding with. 10Ga. Silicone does get warm when feeding 50 amps continously for extended periods of time. The wire was probably 95 degrees on a 70 degree, fairly windy day.

Traxxas High Current connectors are used to attach the silicone leads to the trolling motor lead. I noticed the trolling motor lead was a little warmer than the silicone portion of the lead Entire lead length is about 7 feet.

Hmmm........perhaps replace the entire harness with 8Ga. Silicone.

I could detect very little heat coming from the converters.

This pack does still serve a good purpose and I'm looking forward to the fact, this setup could live and give for 10 years.

[sikeston34m]

I forgot to show the almost completed version.

This picture shows the 5 - 200 watts Vicor Converters wired parallel. 1000 watts of power at 13.8 volts DC.

The parallel hookup was interesting. One of them is the brain of the operation and the rest are booster slaves.



I still intend to add a true sine wave AC inverter to help things when the power goes out.

I did add an outlet to the outside of the box which will channel AC power to the outside. The switch you see, disconnects the 6S pack from everything.