A customer called me yesterday to order more battery cells for another battery after building a 16s LiFePO4 battery with cells that we had sold him.
We got chatting and he told me about the fantastic discovery he had made by using some 25mm Deta PVC trunking from Bunnings!
When he first told me that he was using this trunking I imagined a fairly standard wall mount with his cables running on the inside, but no, that’s not what he used it for. He made the discovery that if he put a little bit of heatshrink around his busbars (which is always a good idea) this trunking would snap in place quite firmly on the bus bars, so much so that it could not be pushed without unclipping it first.
Further, given that it was sitting on the plastic surface surrounding the terminals of the cells, there’s just enough room for the balance wires underneath the trunking meaning that you don’t need to cut it for those.
But even when you do have to cut it, for bus bars that are at right 90 degrees, this can easily be done with a Stanley knife.
It really does seem like the trunking was custom-made for this purpose, just waiting for our customer to stumble upon it, and the other function that it could be used as trunking as well was just a positive coincidence! 😉
It’s always great to see ingenuity like this, especially if it’s safety related, given that I recently had to post about a fire caused by another customer dropping a metal spanner onto the terminals. This $14.19 solution would have almost certainly prevented the ensuing fire!
