Our Blue Think Died

[steve....@gmail.com]

So sad! 

We bought "Po" in June 2012 for our daughter but it has been my wife's daily driver for the past ~8 years. It has about 55,000 miles on it.

It died with flashing "Power Limit" and gas tank lights in the middle of an intersection and we had to tow it home on a flatbed.

It won't take a charge. The 12 Volt battery was a bit low (12.1V) but I fully charged it and see no change. All 12V systems work fine (windows, radio). I had relocated the battery to the hidden compartment behind the seats two years ago, so it's a smaller sealed battery.

We saw the same symptoms in 2017, and Randy Bryant determined that moisture in the battery pack caused an RLEC board to fail. He replaced it and that solved the problem. Before that (in 2014?) Randy did the precharge resistor fix for us -- adding a fuse I think.

We're in Los Altos, CA, and Bryant's repair shop is no longer available.

Any suggestions?

  -Steve

[steve....@gmail.com]

…crickets…

[Jacob Field]

Probably an issue with the traction battery would be my guess.

The best way to diagnose it would be to use the PEAK PCAN adapter and SavvyCan to record a CAN trace, and interpret it to look for errors. 

If you were having moisture issues, seems like it could be something related to that or complications from it. It sounds like the BMS is refusing to let the battery start, which could be a couple of severe faults, but which exactly you'd be able to see with the adaptor.

- Jacob

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[steve....@gmail.com]

Thanks very much Jacob!  (For some reason I didn't get notified of your reply.)

I recall John Mayer had a "Traveling Diagnostics Kit" that he would send around the country.... do you or anyone else have a set of tools (PEAK PCAN, CommTool, SavvyCan, etc) that I could borrow/rent to diagnose my problem?

  -Steve

[Jacob Field]

John Mayer's kit included a lot more than just the PCAN tool, but you can get a lot of diagnosis done with just that. 

I do have a tool I rent out, there's currently a bit of a wait-list though. If you want your own, they're usually available on eBay for around $150.

The software is freely available and I could send you the right files you'd need. 

- Jacob

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[steve....@gmail.com]

Thank you Jacob. I won't be able to get to this until later in the summer so yes, please add my name to your waiting list.

Steve.schmidt at gmail dot com

  -Steve

[Myles Twete]

And if RLEC (BMS) cards are needed, send me a note...I still have dozens of essentially "new" RLECs that were removed from new THINK Enerdel packs that were bought out of the bankruptcy sale, then mostly parted out here in Portland.  I bought all the remaining RLECs a few years ago.  I've sold over 100 to customers in Europe but strangely only 1 here in the US...tres bizarre.  With my most recent sale to a gentleman in Austria we found that the RLECs in his battery pack were of an earlier vintage (1st half of 2010) and evidently were programmed with firmware that uses the DIP switch to select CAN address.  I think every one of the ones I have here are from late 2010 and use software programmable CAN addresses.  I'd guess that other issues were addressed with the later RLECs also.  Given they sold most of the 2011 THINKs before bankruptcy in Europe , it makes sense that we'd see most of the earlier RLECs there---and possibly also most of the problems.  OTOH, it could be that these power users in Europe know their way around identifying bad RLECs better than folks here in the States.  I recently bought a THINK pack from someone who no longer trusted the battery despite the mechanic telling him it just needed to "dry out".  When I hooked up my computer to the RLECs I found that 1 RLEC was totally non-communicative and another one reported jibberish for about 8 of 12 cell pair voltages (reporting some 5v per cell on some and near zero on the rest---replaced that RLEC to find the battery was just fine).  That failure is fairly common.  And yet, how this car managed to drive to the shop is baffling to me if a single RLEC failure can keep these cars from running.  I'm guessing that is not actually the case.  Most of these THINK Enerdel modules I picked up are now powering my 1920 Milburn Light Electric www.evalbum.com/348 . My friend Dan added a couple modules to his electric boat pack too---setting that pack up I discovered another failure mode for these RLECs---when powered (12v), one of the cell channels on one RLEC was draining its cell pair at a noticeable rate.  So despite running automatic cell balancing software, that one cell pair kept drifting away.  After replacing that RLEC, the problem went away.  One customer in Europe suggests that he's seen RLECs which will drain a cell pair even without powering up the RLEC.  I've not seen that, but surely it could happen---but again, their RLECs are likely on average older and with earlier firmware than the ones we see here...speculation.

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[steve....@gmail.com]

I have been busy and our poor Blue Th!nk has been sitting under our carport untouched (except I keep the 12v battery charged).

Would anyone be willing to take it and give it a new home?

   -Steve