[Oeva-list] Soneil 1214S charger experience your high-voltage EVs

[Tim Kutscha]

Hi All,

I hope you're out enjoying this beautiful weekend.  On Friday night I installed a full bank of Soneil 1214S chargers on the open-source Civic and fired them up.  When I woke up the next morning, five of the 12 chargers had blown and died. (??!!)  I thought these were isolated!  Well, they are, to a certain extent.  After opening up and looking at the circuit for one of the failed chargers, I found that the capacitors across the isolation boundary don't have a high enough rated voltage on them to handle the AC waveform from the wall PLUS the high voltage (144V) of my battery pack.  For smaller banks of batteries (24,36,48V), these chargers should would work just fine.

I'm sending this out to let folks who are considering individual chargers for their EV battery pack.  I really like the Soneil design for smaller pack voltages, but I don't think it has the isolation to handle > 48V.  

You can get more info on my experience here:

http://civic-ev.blogspot.com/2009/06/dark-day-with-soneils.html

http://civic-ev.blogspot.com/2009/06/sleuthing-soneils.html

I'm working with electricrider.com now to see if their brand (Joule) of chargers can handle the higher voltage isolation.

Cheers,
Tim
http://civic-ev.blgospot.com