Installing Flow-Rite battery watering in an EV

Hi all,

I've been lurking for a good long time, and have benefited a lot from your knowledge. I just wrote this blog about putting battery-watering in the EV and thought I'd push some info *into* the forum for a change. :)

UPDATE: one month later and the results are in

Wow. This is a complete success. We just watered the batteries for the first time and several things stand out. First, the batteries required dramatically less water — only a few ounces on each bank of four batteries. Second, the batteries didn’t require any cleaning because there was no spillage at all — unlike before where the battery tops were always covered with battery acid and needed extensive work before starting to do the watering. Third, as a result the job only took 5 minutes instead of the 3 hours we used to spend. Pry these out of our cold dead hands. Now, back to the original post…

Project start: 3pm



Standing on the driver’s side. There’s the diagram of the finished system (see below), an example of the gizmo that’s going to go into the batteries, the battery compartment and the really-useful ratchet box wrench for loosening the battery hold downs.

Bag of watering gizmos




The kit came disassembled, which I really liked because we only needed to loosen the battery hold downs, not take them off. We could thread the hoses under the hold downs and wires before hooking them to the watering gizmos.

First couple watering gizmos



We picked the easiest ones to learn on (the hardest ones are at the back – you owners already know this). Having the hold downs loose was helpful for wiggling the gizmos in, but the breakthrough came when we started twisting the lockdown handles of the battery caps a bit. The little handles are what really collide with the hold downs, twisting them out of the way made a big difference.

Cutting and installing the tubing was easy — we mostly used the measurements on the diagram, especially the 8-inch lengths. Some of the longer runs (10-14 inches) had to be custom measured because the diagram didn’t match the layout of our batteries. We’d just stick one end of the tube on, hold it close to its destination and then snip it to fit. We wound up with about a foot of tubing left over, but we were prepared to steal some from the water hook-up hoses if we ran short.

It goes a lot faster with two people splitting the tasks




Here’s Marcie dropping gizmos into the batteries. It’s way more than twice as fast when two people can each be concentrating on half the job at hand. Otherwise there’s lots of changing position/tools.

All done: 5pm



This is the way the finished product looked. This is the first side, just to keep things straight. The whole project took a couple hours and we could do it much faster now that we’ve done it once and learned some tricks.

Layout diagram




I know, the copyright notice is pretty intimidating — but hey, this diagram’s on their web site for all to see. Here’s the link to their site:
https://flow-rite.com/sites/all/file...OLARIS-96V.PDF

The part number for this rig is BG-U96V-1G

You also need the little squeeze-bottle filler that drops into a gallon of distilled water.

Results: The next morning



We watered the batteries (and cleaned them) this morning, remembering to charge the batteries before filling them. What used to be an “all morning project” was a short job that fit in before Marcie headed off for her real all-morning project.

Here’s an action shot — showing off my battery-watering pants. They’re more like a battery-watering apron these days. I think they can now be retired.



We splurged and spent a few minutes cleaning the batteries so they’d look spiffy for this final photo. Compressed air to spray off the debris, liberal dose of battery cleaner, rinsed them off with the hose and another round of compressed air to dry things off.

We were wondering if we’d be able to tell when to quit pumping water and accidentally overfill the batteries. No worries there — the little squeeze bulb just quits, we could both feel the really abrupt transition to “no more room” as we went to full-batteries. Those little floating shut off valves work great.

Today’s watering took about a gallon of water (pretty normal) and 15 minutes (pretty nifty!).

UPDATE - one month later - the next round of battery watering went even better. The batteries look exactly like they do in that last photo -- absolutely no spillage even though the EV goes over hill and dale around here. I suspect that part of the water-loss problem is due to the standard battery caps (those while triple-gangers that are up in the first photo). I think they leak. The batteries only took a few ounces of water this time, and the whole job took 5 minutes

The EV



Here’s a picture of the compleat EV — purple collecting bags, wide/smooth tires and a watering system.

Winter Tips:

I talked to the folks who sold us the kit about what to do in winter. My main concern was that trapped water would freeze and rupture the tubing. They told me that the water finds its way into the batteries as the water level drops enough to open those valves back up. My plan is not to water the batteries in winter, just to play it safe.