Friday, August 24, 2007

DC/DC converter blown

Well, I ran out to Radio Shack this morning and got some more 5 amp fuses for the DC/DC converter. After plugging a fast-blow fuse in, powering up the car blows the fuse. I tried a slow-blow fuse and that went too. I then disconnected the 12V battery to see if that was causing a problem and it still blew a fuse.

What's sort of interesting is that these glass fuses didn't just melt and break, they really vaporized and completely coated the inside of the fuse glass with metal bits. It looks like there's a pretty serious short in the DC/DC converter.

The car is still stranded at Krista's place. I brought over jumper cables and tried to charge the battery with my ICE vehicle. The voltage drop across the 300amp jumper cables was 0.8 volts so I'm guessing the 12V battery was mostly dead. Since this is my day off, I might take a risk, charge it up some more and try to crawl home for repairs. The distance is only 2.2 miles and the main 144V pack is happy up around 151V. Grrr...

2 comments:

Ross Cunniff said...

Tim, you should turn the "verification thingy" on and you won't get blogger comment spam.

Wow - the DC-DC is blown. What can go *wrong* with a DC-DC converter? Isn't it just an N:M ratio of windings on electromagnets?

TimK said...

Thanks for the suggestion Ross. I hadn't seen all the options until you suggested it. Check out the next post regarding the DC-DC converter.
Cheers,Tim