What have we been working on?

To say we've been busy here at Higherwire would be a dramatic understatement. There's no shortage of applications for our products or batteries in need of our services. Check out a few highlights.

Battery Repair

We've been repairing and refurbishing quite a few batteries for e-bike and scooters direct to the manufacturers, often for their rentals and refurbished chassis. We're able to identify and replace weak cell-strings, maximizing battery life and savings them hundreds in the process. Following repair, each battery is load tested and serialized before leaving our shop. This allows us to track failure modes, work performed and capacity and internal resistance.

Do you have an e-bike, scooter or deep cycle battery needing repair? Let us fix it! Contact us today and check out our process here.

Golf Cart Upgrades

Even used lithium batteries work well in golf carts. We just replaced six Trojan 8-volt batteries with four* of our 12v deep cycle lithium iron phosphate packs. As a general rule of thumb, you only need half the rated capacity of lead acid batteries when replacing with lithium. That's because lithium is much more tolerant of depth of discharge (DOD); in fact, many of our batteries can sustain 100% DOD as compared to 50% for lead acid.

We installed our 12v 1280 watt-hour batteries into an EZgo cart for the Superstition Mountain Lost Dutchman Museum in Apache Junction, Arizona. The Museum sits on hundreds of acres of Sonoran desert, so it's essential that they have carts capable of reliably traveling dozens of miles each day. The difference in acceleration was immediate; of course, dropping more than 250 lb will do that! Additionally, lithium iron phosphate has a much more flat voltage curve than lead acid. Combined with lower internal resistance, this means more usable power and faster charge times.

Rugged and Ultra Portable Energy Storage

Our friends at Aravaipa Running put on some of the most epic trail races in the world, and they're based right here in Phoenix! Ultramarathons often cover up to and sometimes even more than 100 miles and transverse some of the most rugged terrain in the area. Racers may be out there for 24 hours straight and often run through the night. Aravaipa use wireless timing systems to track runners throughout the race. As you can imagine, there aren't many outlets in the middle of the desert to power these systems, so they use portable solar-powered systems. We've helped Aravaipa replace the heavy 12v lead-acid batteries with lighter lithium iron phosphate. Not only does this save 7 pounds a system (quite a bit when you're riding dozens of miles of uneven terrain to setup the system in the middle of the wilderness), our batteries also have nearly twice the capacity. This means that they can handle long race nights with ease; we've calculated that they could power a race for more than an entire day without needing a charge.

These are just a few of the many things we've been working on. I haven't even touched on a big off-grid project we're developing, lighting installations or the development batteries that we built for our SBIR.

As you can see, we have a great deal of capabilities when it comes to manufacturing, analyzing and rebuilding lithium batteries. Contact us today and we'll help you with your energy storage needs!