PING BATTERY OR NOT

Doctorbass

Doctorbass

100 GW
Joined
Apr 8, 2007
Messages
7,495
Location
Quebec, Canada East
This is a little thread i decided to make because i think that some person have various information and opinion regarding the Battery sold from PingBattery.com and i decided to make a highllight on my personnal experiences and opinion.

These battery are a very good choice when people dont have the time or dont want to build their own battery and also want a SAFE battery that they can sleep while it is left connected on the charger
These battery also offer decent power over the standard ebike battery ( about 2-3C easy) so at 48V-15A you get burst power of about 2500W and with a 60V 20Ah you get 3-4kW.

I still today have good opinion about these battery and the seller due to my personal experience and my familly experience and also friend that i have recomamned these battery too.

Ping batery are not perfect but If you buy some Ping battery and do some little mod, they will certainly become one of your best battery for the price!

I bought 7 of the 48V 15Ah with v2.5 signalab BMS 5 years ago( back in 2008) and today they still give above 14Ah all the 7 battery!. These are used by my familly ( oncle, cousin grandma etc) and they follow exactly the advices i recommanded and these battery ALL work good today

btw these 15Ah ping are used with 4C burst( 60A on a 40A controller and 2C constant average and charge at C/3 ( 5A charger)

I can still recommand Ping battery today.
Ping is a great guy and will agree to customize your battery for only few buck and can also sell you some spare cells even if your battery maintnnace skill is not so good.

These battery are good also because they use LIFEPO4 cells that avoid your ebike to have a max top speed affected over the discharge
They also have about 1000-2000cycles compare to 300-500 for the lipo or liMn
Here is some tips:

Maintenance:
- NEVER leave your battery discharged for more than few days
- Avoid fully discharge your battery ( keep at least 1-2Ah)
- in storage mode: disconect the white Balance connector ( this will avoid draining the 4 first cells channel)
- in storage mode: keep your battery between 40-60% SOC ( easy to do, fully cahrge it and make a run of 1/2 of your total Ah)
- in storage mode keep your battery in an area of about 10-20 celsius or close to that
- once all the BMS led are ON, dont leave your charger connected for more than one day
- ensure that you ocasionally charge your battery to get all the BMS led ON ( meanng your battery is perfectly balanced)
- avoid droping it and install some additional foam around it to avoid your bike rack structure to torture your battery due to vibration

MODS
-Replace the stock charging mosfet of the BMS with a 4110 and beef up the related traces ( the stock mosfet is crap and at 5A will burn un the first 100 cycles
-replace the stock discharging mosfet with the 4110 and install a copper plate as heatsink! This will make yor BMS to run coller and might allow a little more voltage output.
- on the aluminum cahrger, remove and replace with a jumper the surge supressor in serie at charger AC input on the PCB ( it look like a ceramic capacitor shape) This component often burn and is not really usefull it only damp the AC surge current when you power On your charger
-replace the crap XLR connector that often end out to melt and make bad contact

total cost of the mods about 30$
Doc
 
If ping has such great batteries why do so many people come on this forum and post problems? Mostly BMS related.
 
Jason27 said:
If ping has such great batteries why do so many people come on this forum and post problems? Mostly BMS related.
Click to expand...

What do you think?

You dont need to be brilliant to be able to keep 7 of these battery for your familly for 5 years and still have them 100% working... I did and most of people on that great forum can.

People that buy pre assembled battery genrerally dont know alot about DIY lithium.... or dont have time to do it. people that buy pre assembled battery of that power are most of the time beginner than get some ebike diy skill over the time and they discover lipo... or limn... for higher power at cheap price...

I agree that the signalab BMS are subject to problem and most of the time it is due to poor mosfet... just replace them with better like the 4110 and it become a very great simple powerfull BMS.

You will always find more thread about problem than appreciations . people are more lazy to post appreciations of their great battery than when they NEED help to solve their BMS problems...

Doc
 
zzoing said:
also... always charge at over 10 celcius!
Click to expand...

Just like any lithium battery recommendations state :wink:

Doc
 
Jason27 said:
If ping has such great batteries why do so many people come on this forum and post problems? Mostly BMS related.
Click to expand...

Also why I wonder why the BMS comes with such a CHEAP MOSFET in the first place. I mean wouldn't this be standard on the packs. For the price you pay for a 48V15AH pack you would expect the BMS to at least have DECENT mosfets right? Why a person would have to go thru the hassle of buying a plug and play battery to then modify the only possible thing PING probably offers a guarantee on? By doing this mod you immediately void your warranty right? So why not make it standard on all the packs?

Not bashing you Dbass its just frustrating to see all these suppliers make money and not care about improving the product.

Look at ALL the work cell_man (paul) has done to the MAC motors and JUSTIN with the cooling mod and offering cover plates with cooling holes. ALso the CA analyst has been changing over the years.

PING can do the same too. Instead the only change he did was to move from cell type to a newer type. Probably because the supplier forced him to.
 
i found that most of the complaints people made about the BMS were that it was not working because the could not charge their battery. but the BMS had shut down for HVC to protect he battery so they would come on the sphere and some new people would tell them to remove the BMS because it was "broken, and all BMS are junk", and then they overcharged the battery and damaged it.

i think a lot of the problems with the mosfets overheating actually start with the failure of the leds in the optotransistor to continue putting out enuff light to keep the transistor fully turned on so the transistor chain develops more resistance and the voltage drop to the charging mosfet was so much that the mosfet was not fully turned on during charging so it would overheat.

i found some leds in the optos that shoulda worked but were lame and had a big voltage drop across the transistor so i replaced them with new optotransitors and the BMS worked again.

each channel uses about 2mA to run the leds in the opto and to drive the comparators on each channel and the circuit current is about 14mA coming from the top of the 4th cell.

using 18mA for the first four cells, a fully charged 10Ah pack should last 555 hours before it is dead. 23 days.

if it is left uncharged after use, it could be dead in days, even without the risk of the controller left on.
 
dnmun said:
i found that most of the complaints people made about the BMS were that it was not working because the could not charge their battery. but the BMS had shut down for HVC to protect he battery so they would come on the sphere and some new people would tell them to remove the BMS because it was "broken, and all BMS are junk", and then they overcharged the battery and damaged it.

i think a lot of the problems with the mosfets overheating actually start with the failure of the leds in the optotransistor to continue putting out enuff light to keep the transistor fully turned on so the transistor chain develops more resistance and the voltage drop to the charging mosfet was so much that the mosfet was not fully turned on during charging so it would overheat.

i found some leds in the optos that shoulda worked but were lame and had a big voltage drop across the transistor so i replaced them with new optotransitors and the BMS worked again.

each channel uses about 2mA to run the leds in the opto and to drive the comparators on each channel and the circuit current is about 14mA coming from the top of the 4th cell.

using 18mA for the first four cells, a fully charged 10Ah pack should last 555 hours before it is dead. 23 days.

if it is left uncharged after use, it could be dead in days, even without the risk of the controller left on.
Click to expand...


That's interesting observations dnmun :) I just dont catch your 18mA measured on the channel.. I think that this current is probably alo lower than that. on the 7 packs my familly are using, i recommanded to them to fully cahrge their battery every 3 months during storage and after 5years they all work nice.

Are you sure about that 18mA draw on the first 4 cells?

Doc
 
should be 2mA for each channel for the two leds in the optos, there is 1k0 resistor on the top of cell 4 that takes the current for driving the circuitry. it could be less, maybe as low as 4-6mA, i never actually measured inside the circuit.
 
I would not go with ping. Dbass says just swap this with that. Would you buy a car and change the motor so it is now reliable? I had so many problems with both ping batteries and bms'. With 2 batteries (cell problems) and at least 1/2 dozen bms' pain in the neck. Ping even instructed me to change mosfets ! He thinks we are all techies on this site. People who are just as interested in modding their ebike as they are in riding it. Some of the techies are problematic for us normal folk since they don't look for reliable products but just put up with and modify existing crap.
 
but your problems originated with the split pack and the loose connection between the packs and not because the BMS or pouched themselves were defective.

this is a common problem where there is a split pack and the BMS is damaged at the channel above the split. the shorted p channel mosfet that is used as the shunt transistor then drains the cells down to zero. that was why your led was on all the time.

at least ping is generous enuff to replace the parts when they do go bad. i think that is part of why he charges more for the initially product since he includes his cost of providing replacement parts.
 
el_walto said:
Maybe ping should consider upping his price by a bit and providing a BMS with better FETs.
Click to expand...

With the price he is asking and the volume he sells I would think that having his supplier change the fet value would be no money added but he should take time to update his products and not just sell sell sell.
 
but that assumes there is something wrong with the mosfet. i have seen many of the ping BMS which never had a problem with the mosfets even after years of service at 48V.

the problem with the split packs was the biggest source of failures from what i saw. when the shunt transistor and comparator were damaged by the current surge then the shunt transistor is shorted on, and the led would remain lit and drain down the cell on the high side of the split.
 
Jason27 said:
If ping has such great batteries why do so many people come on this forum and post problems? Mostly BMS related.
Click to expand...

Well mainly because people that have problems search the web for people with similar problems and report their problems and people that have not had problems are not bothered to search the web for places to recommend a good product.

My old 3 year (almost 3 year ) old ping that I sold to a friend is still working perfectly.

Never a BMS problem, I think a lot of BMS problems could be cause by people charging in enclosures or bags with little air flow.

Pat's cell-man 8T Mac is set to around 40 amps so on 48 V that's around 2 kw on acceleration and the same amps I ran with my magic pie with 40 amp controller form ebikes.ca. Climbs steep hills pretty good.

The reason I got rid of the ping and pie was weight and speed was 25 mph max. I then went with 16s Lipo and an 8T mac. The mac and light Lipo allowed me to pedal like a real bike.

An 8T mac and a 20ah 48V Ping is a terrific combination for a commuter bike or anyone who couldn't be bothered to peddle. Max speed 31 mph 26" wheel.

A recent trip I made with Pat's bike was 33 miles @15-20 mph with a few 30 mph stints and a few steep hills, no peddling.

I highly recommend Ping batteries !
 
My 48v 15 ah PING is in fine shape in its 4th season. The use is conservative, I usually discharge no more than 10 AH, and recently more like 5. I did break (physically damage) the BMS a couple years back and replaced it, had to put on a new charging FET on the new unit. I leave it on charge whenever I'm not riding. As far dealing with the vendor - replies to emails are prompt, goods are shipped in a timely manner and generally work fine.
 
what did you use for the charging mosfet?

do you wanna repair the older one that broke? we can repair most problems, and i have repaired some bad ones.

that is what i like about the new BMSs from these guys at Bestechpower.com. they do not cover the transistors with black goop so if something breaks it can be replaced by unsoldering the bad part and putting a new part on.

but they are better BMSs than the ping signalab BMS though. they are better than the BMS battery BMS too. and twice as cheap.

people really like the leds on the ping v2.5 signalab. it gives them that visual feedback about the status of the battery. i think that is what gives people confidence that the pack is functional.
 
Whan dnmun said:
people really like the leds on the ping v2.5 signalab. it gives them that visual feedback about the status of the battery. i think that is what gives people confidence that the pack is functional.
Click to expand...

For me this feature makes the Pings worth more than other similar batteries. Two of my version 2.5 Pings are 3 years old now. Right from the start, one of the batteries always lights all the leds within a few seconds of each other while the other would take much longer, sometimes not even lighting all the leds when the charger goes into balance mode. The longer the battery sits between uses, say for several days, the longer it takes to get it fully balanced.

I always make sure all the leds light up during each charge cycle, and the performance from both batteries still remains equal. Lots easier to glance at the leds than poking at each of the 16 pins to check voltage. This is also helpful when these two batteries are used in parallel.

With the BMS battery that I had, and have given away, you couldn't even get to the BMS without cutting into the main battery shrink wrap. And then of course you would need to probe the sense wires to check balance.

Are there other batteries besides Pings that use a BMS with leds for each sub pack?
 
i remember seeing a small BMS that was on yellow pcb with some leds partially covered with the goop except it was transparent but obsure but you could see the leds, nothing like the ping.

i never saw it working though.


also, on his hi current design, other people use the same pcb for the BMS but he is the only one to use the leds on it.
 
Since there is more current draw on the 4 first led to supply the 12V to the gates chip and that cause imbalance over the days, it would be great to try adding a very small load resistor on all the other channels to compensate and have the same average mAh drained on all the channels

Doc
 
i have seen only one BMS that uses full pack voltage to supply the circuit current. the old ebikekit 36V10Ah alloy cased batteries had a BMS that used the O2 micro OZ790 processor to control the BMS. it took the current from the top of the pack through a big surface mount power resistor to the big 64 pin chip and had an internal regulator to create the circuit current that was used to control the mosfets.

i prefer to use a switch to turn off the circuit current when the battery is not in service, but after Otmar explained how to use the depletion mode mosfet to allow the efficient regulation of the voltage to the linear regulator on the cellogs, i thought of trying the same thing to create a regulated voltage for the circuit current on the ping signalab but taking the current from the top of the pack through the depletion mode mosfet to a linear regulator that would provide the 15V to use to drive the circuit current. another project, another day.
 
I just received a ping battery 36v 15ah for my Lee Iacocca ebike. Im noob with aspirations of building my own ebike in the future so im using the bike to experiment. Is there thread here that im not aware of on instructions how to modify the bms with the details you posted?

Doctorbass said:
This is a little thread i decided to make because i think that some person have various information and opinion regarding the Battery sold from PingBattery.com and i decided to make a highllight on my personnal experiences and opinion.

These battery are a very good choice when people dont have the time or dont want to build their own battery and also want a SAFE battery that they can sleep while it is left connected on the charger
These battery also offer decent power over the standard ebike battery ( about 2-3C easy) so at 48V-15A you get burst power of about 2500W and with a 60V 20Ah you get 3-4kW.

I still today have good opinion about these battery and the seller due to my personal experience and my familly experience and also friend that i have recomamned these battery too.

Ping batery are not perfect but If you buy some Ping battery and do some little mod, they will certainly become one of your best battery for the price!

I bought 7 of the 48V 15Ah with v2.5 signalab BMS 5 years ago( back in 2008) and today they still give above 14Ah all the 7 battery!. These are used by my familly ( oncle, cousin grandma etc) and they follow exactly the advices i recommanded and these battery ALL work good today

btw these 15Ah ping are used with 4C burst( 60A on a 40A controller and 2C constant average and charge at C/3 ( 5A charger)

I can still recommand Ping battery today.
Ping is a great guy and will agree to customize your battery for only few buck and can also sell you some spare cells even if your battery maintnnace skill is not so good.

These battery are good also because they use LIFEPO4 cells that avoid your ebike to have a max top speed affected over the discharge
They also have about 1000-2000cycles compare to 300-500 for the lipo or liMn
Here is some tips:

Maintenance:
- NEVER leave your battery discharged for more than few days
- Avoid fully discharge your battery ( keep at least 1-2Ah)
- in storage mode: disconect the white Balance connector ( this will avoid draining the 4 first cells channel)
- in storage mode: keep your battery between 40-60% SOC ( easy to do, fully cahrge it and make a run of 1/2 of your total Ah)
- in storage mode keep your battery in an area of about 10-20 celsius or close to that
- once all the BMS led are ON, dont leave your charger connected for more than one day
- ensure that you ocasionally charge your battery to get all the BMS led ON ( meanng your battery is perfectly balanced)
- avoid droping it and install some additional foam around it to avoid your bike rack structure to torture your battery due to vibration

MODS
-Replace the stock charging mosfet of the BMS with a 4110 and beef up the related traces ( the stock mosfet is crap and at 5A will burn un the first 100 cycles
-replace the stock discharging mosfet with the 4110 and install a copper plate as heatsink! This will make yor BMS to run coller and might allow a little more voltage output.
- on the aluminum cahrger, remove and replace with a jumper the surge supressor in serie at charger AC input on the PCB ( it look like a ceramic capacitor shape) This component often burn and is not really usefull it only damp the AC surge current when you power On your charger
-replace the crap XLR connector that often end out to melt and make bad contact

total cost of the mods about 30$
Doc
Click to expand...
 
This is your first lifepo4 ? Just plug it in and charge it overnight. Don't mod the bms. You will give yourself a headache and problems.
 
yep, you don't wanna modify the BMS unless you know what to do. if you knew you would not be asking how. most of us have never had problems with the stock BMS. but the 4 mosfet BMS will not like handling 60A. so if you can blow them up you can fix it then.
 
Ping has a high discharge 10 fet 48v BMS. Does he have a high discharge BMS for the 36v ? Oh oh with the led's, just love those things. Blinky blinky blinky. Hour's of fun.
But yes Ping does say he had a problem with some fet's. I have burn up a couple of signalabs balancing traces and surface resistor's ect. But with great support I do thing the cells are under rated.
 
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