"Lithium" jump start battery tear-down

Sep 28, 2017 8 Replies

One of mine has gone flat, and won't charge with the supplied charger. Turns out not to be too difficult to strip; four concealed screws, a clipped-together case that needs to be forced quite firmly, and WD40 applied to the sticky foam that holds the battery pack into the case.



As I think TNP guessed in a previous discussion, these contain three cells in series for the main "jump start" supply. There's also a switched mode power supply that provides the various higher voltages required for laptops, as well as the supplies to the "torch" and the "emergency flashing red" LEDs. No *obvious* sign of why it won't charge.



It turns out that the batteries can be charged directly through the big "battery clips", and it is currently sitting on my desk being fed from a small (half amp max) lab power supply. It was taking 300 mA but has now dropped to about 150 for some reason. Supply is giving about 10.5 volts. For obvious reasons I am being gentle with the batteries, not using a car battery charger for example! But as they are about 125 x 45 mm and the stack is 20 mm thick I can't believe that half an amp will bother them.



It looks rather like one of these



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although mine claims 18000 mA-h and 600 amp peak, but only has one USB socket.


I beleive that it can be dangerous to attempt to recharge a Lithium Ion cell if the cell voltage has fallen below a threashold value. It may be that the charging circuit has detected an under volt condition and refused to charge the cell because of that.

Mine needs to be switched on with it's on/off switch before it will charge.

They are lithium, if you don't charge them correctly they have a tendancy to explode and if you overcharge them they will burst into flames.

You need to check the voltage on each cell. If one cell has died, you may be over charging the others, which risks turning them into a giant firework.

Noted, thanks! I wasn't planning to leave them unattended while experimenting.

With it stripped, I have access to each battery terminal. Wikipedia suggests that the safe maximum cell voltage is 4.2V, is that correct?

After a little bit of charging, the cells are currently showing 3.72,

3.73, and 3.71 volts. There's a little "floating" circuit board which, to judge by the layout and wire colours, takes the charging current as input, and has charging wires going to each end of the stack with sensor wires to the intermediate junctions. This must be the "safety" circuit, tomorrow I will check whether that has gone open circuit.

I can live without the other features of the unit, if the safety circuit looks OK I might just rewire it direct to the charging socket, and dump the control board which does all the other stuff. (I don't normally use it for jump starting, I use it to power CCTV).

I had a blinding CREE LED 1800Lm bike lamp with 2s2p battery pack. I swear it was as bright as a Cibie motorcycle halogen headlamp (the sort with a concave lens). Then after about a year and maybe 100 uses the battery pack stopped working, it was the PCM module. I bought a 2nd battery but it's blown the PCM in that up as well. It seems something has happened in the CREE LED lamp so it now draws too much current. So now I have a somewhat less blinding replacement 1200Lm LED lamp.

It's probably the charger, one for each cell. They manage each cell separately so that none can get reverse polarised. Didn't you see the burning Sony laptops on the news a couple of years ago? You would be much safer simply replacing it. Keeping an eye on it won't really help because the first thing you notice will be it roaring into flames!

Depends on the construction. Often if one has already go an internal short then its almost impossible to blow it up as it will not charge enough. However depends on how they are charged, ie, I seem to recall the cells are monitored completely seperately to stop overchaarging ones fully charged if one is shorted internally. Brian

2 series 2 parallel PCM only has 3 connections to batteries. Ground, mid and full voltage. Only the series battery voltage is monitored and controls charging. The individual cells of a parallel pair isn't controlled.

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