Title says all. Can I charge my cells individually with a keenstone c1-Xr? If so at what charge and discharge amperage? Would .4A be good?
First off, I have never tinkered with Prius modules, so any advice is NOT based on actual Prius Module Experience. Second: ALWAYS keep the cells clamped. From what I gather, they can expand if (over)charged and will never go back to their original size Having said that, From what I read about cycling the cells, people deep-discharge them sometimes down to 17V (iirc) for the entire pack, which equates to less than 1V per 'module' of 6 cells... I personally use 1V or 0.9V per cell as the lower threshold. So that would be 5-6V per Prius module. If you can program the charger to discharge to that voltage or even cycle it, then I would think that would work. They are 6.5Ah, so my B6 chargers can be programmed with a chargecurrent (0.4A sounds OK, I'd go with 0.325 which is 1/20 C (1/20th of the capacity)). But I always also add a total limit: if you can do this, make the charger stop at e.g. 7.5Ah. It should automatically stop when it puts in 6.5Ah, because once the battery is full, the charger shoudl detect this by something that is called DeltaV: the voltage of the battery DROPS slightly when it is full (iirc!!!!!) and the charger detects this as the battery being full. But this didn't work on my chargers... So that is why I set the limit so it only overcharges them for a limited amount of time. Setting the chargecurrent to 1/20 C means that no or very little harme is done during the time the battery was already full, but the charger kept charging them. Discharge: anything up to 3A would be no problem. The higher the discharge current, the less energy you will get out of them (due to both internal resistance and resistance of connectors). So 1A would also be fine. The Prius itself discharges up to 100A I think... In short: You can't go wrong with: 0.3A chargecurrent. Limit total amount of energy to <8Ah, 1A discharge current and 6V discharge voltage. Cycle this 5 times and note the Ah's the Keenstone says the module has. From the Googlesearch I did, it should be able to do (most of) this. If you let the modules be connected to eachother, be EXTREMELY careful not to short anything.
