I bought the cells from your partner provider in Europe and I’m ready to start building the battery. The thing is, I don’t have a multimeter. Do I really need to check the voltage? Could I damage the cells or mess up the battery if I skip this step?
I can buy one if it’s absolutely necessary, but honestly, I probably won’t use it for anything else after assembling the battery. So unless it’s really important for safety or preventing damage, I’d rather skip it. What’s your take on this?
You can get multimeters for as cheap as 10€, and I would definitely recommend each household to have one.
If the cells are not charged to the same voltage, it could cause high currents once you connect them in parallel.
But the battery can actually be used to measure the cells. To measure individual cell voltages, place only one cell per group, leaving the other slots of the same group empty. Then you close the battery and should see the voltage readings in the app. Then you open it again, remove the cells and place the next batch of single cells. Once you have confirmed that they are all the same voltage within 0.1V tolerance, you can place all cells into the battery case.
Good to know that the battery can be used too. It’d be added to the how to documentation. I’ll try get a cheap one then, save time. Thanks.
I definitely also agree on the usefulness of a multimeter and would recommend getting one and I would personally not skip this step.
But that being said, for what it’s worth: I also bought my 2023 Samsung 35E cells from NKON and did a full test (capacity, IR, voltage) on every single cell and they were very nicely matched. I still have the excel sheet where i noted this down and the shipping voltage was ~3,53v and the range was +/- 0,004v as tested with a Fluke 117.
I got a cheap one and all good now. I got the same batteries from NKON and all were within 0,01 difference. Thanks 