Finally got a few days off and built two 5s 8p battery banks. Put the finishing touches on it this afternoon and went ahead and hooked them up to the system and seems to be working out very good.
These are built onto some plastic that is much like 1/4 inch thick truck bed liner. The Check & Balance wiring comes off the top, the Charge & Discharge wiring comes off the bottom. They are designed to stack but will be used on their sides.
After I built the 18650 charger a month ago, all the batteries were topped up to 4.2 volts. Today I tested them and sorted them all by voltage High to Low. When putting them into the battery holders I the series rows with the high volt cells and worked across ending with the low volt cells, so each parallel section has a mix of low to high volt cells. After a month sitting, the cell volts varied between 4.10 - 4.18, not a big difference. when installed I will put half the batteries in each bank so they will have more even loading.
Every single cell has it's own dedicated 5 amp fuse to prevent disaster if any cell shorts or goes Reverse Polarity. The battery holders were not made for these longer 18650 cells originally deforming in order to accommodate the batteries. I just used some pliers on the Terminals and squashed them enough to work great fully loaded.
Here is the terminal strips that will distribute the Negative and Positive power Ins and Outs. The yellow XT60 connector is part of a temporary setup to allow me to plug this into the system from here inside the house for testing.
This terminal strip is the Check and Balance connections. For testing it has two JST 5s test and balance connectors on it, one is plugged into the BatteryGO monitor/balancer, the other is for the charge controller which is also a balancer. Once installed there will also be another set of wires going into the house so I can use the BatteryGO monitor in there too. In the picture the readings are ...
20.36 volts total
19 mV difference between the lowest volt parallel bank and the highest
97% battery capacity
4.067, 4.064, 4.083, 4.066, 4.081 - individual Parallel bank voltages
It's all on my desk here, hooked up and powering the system. seems to be some good stiff power. Getting dark outside so I'll be looking at it closely over the next few hours to see what it's got ?