Samsung’s 35E cells weren’t available when I ordered TW560’s new Dreifels 51Ah battery pack. Thanks to a very kind offer by Ralph from dreifels, I was still able to go on my yearly TWIKE adventure and experience a large pack / range with his personal 29E/45Ah pack.
During my vacation Dreifels sent me an email telling me that they had received the cells and were having them spot-welded at a third-party supplier. After receiving the welded cell-packs, Dreifels then builds battery-blocks consisting of multiple cell-packs, adding up to a standard voltage of 180V and 17Ah.
I’m really looking forward to my new pack – energy storage technologies have come such a long way since I started with my TWIKE: TW560 had about 6Ah capacity @ 353V when I bought it years ago – weighing a total of 105kg!
Today’s blocks are tiny in comparison!
Today, a total of 6 blocks @ 17Ah in a 3p2s configuration will give me a total of 51Ah @ 360V and weigh only 75kg!
Ralph’s loaner-29E-block has the same dimensions as my 35E-block. Mounting the new block is therefore very easy, remove 6 blocks and replace with 6 new ones – a 20 minute exercise.
When buying something this expensive, trust in the product is everything – this situation is as good as it gets: Ralph, the TWIKE inventor himself mounts the battery packs and makes sure that his newest product gets installed correctly!
After just 20 minutes TW560 is ready to hit the roads again with dreifels’ newest (and currently largest intalled) pack size in use. I still have the option of adding another 17Ah to my pack at a later time, although I really cannot see myself needing 22+kWh of capacity in my TWIKE right now 🙂
Being the first to have this pack and no-one really knowing what the exact capacity of the pack is, I will have to drive one full cycle sometime soon to find out. Only with this metric, TW560’s controller will be able to tell me about my remaining range with its usual razor-sharp precision. 🙂