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I Bought A SALVAGE TESLA With A DESTROYED Battery Pack Cooling System. Here’s How I Fixed It At Home

Feb 27, 2020
Well if you don't already know, I shared a 2015 Tesla p85d with my good friend Sam, you may know Sam. He has a channel

here

on YouTube called Sam Crack w

here

he plays with cows and other farm animals and likes all kinds of explosion type gadgets, he also occasionally buys a car at auction and rebuilds it and he just revealed our project on his channel as well which I will link to below. We've created a great little series that I hope you all enjoy and in one. In some of the episodes, I even tried to make Sam throw up in the car on our first ludacris plus test drive.
i bought a salvage tesla with a destroyed battery pack cooling system here s how i fixed it at home
This car needed a lot of work, but the sub-three second zero to 60 time was a big motivation for me. We shipped the Tesla from the auction yard to my house and when it got here it was dead on arrival after plugging in my little jump

pack

I was able to give it enough juice for the handles to come off. I was quite excited to say the least, she was actually pretty. proud of myself because this took several tries before it woke up, that's ridiculous, next was getting the car off the trailer, so we got the vehicle

system

service mode over the temperature limit, jack mode enabled and the zero mile range service mode on the screen the group had.
i bought a salvage tesla with a destroyed battery pack cooling system here s how i fixed it at home

More Interesting Facts About,

i bought a salvage tesla with a destroyed battery pack cooling system here s how i fixed it at home...

Almost every warning light possible, but the one that worried me the most was the zero mile range indicator. Now Tesla builds in a buffer, so zero miles doesn't actually mean the

battery

is completely discharged, but this buffer can also run out, especially on a car that was at auction for who knows how long a fully discharged

battery

, especially without refrigerant, can become an expensive paperweight in no time. Fortunately for me, the car started, but I had to be very careful due to a broken front subframe and a hanging lower control arm, not to mention the A/C condenser and fan were hitting the ground, which In hindsight I probably should have temporarily secured it to something, but I was too excited, this is the nicest car I've ever half-

bought

.
i bought a salvage tesla with a destroyed battery pack cooling system here s how i fixed it at home
Although it is totaled, I'm normally more of a budget person so this was a big splurge with the car coming off the trailer under its own power. I limped it to the driveway of my neighbor who had just

bought

a model 3 and wanted to try charging it. This battery died and of course someone took the Tesla charging cable out of the car and I didn't have my old Chevy Volt/Nissan Leaf charger on hand since I sold my last electric car to a family member to switch to diesel. I know, I know. That doesn't make any sense, well I actually really like Mercedes diesels so I bought two of them before trying to charge them.
i bought a salvage tesla with a destroyed battery pack cooling system here s how i fixed it at home
I needed to refill the coolant tank and was happy to see that it wasn't completely empty. circulates within the battery

pack

as they get very hot, especially while charging, so it is important that you do not try to charge when it is low. At this point I thought the radiator was just leaking a little, but I soon learned that was the case. It's not the case at all times of truth, that's fine, that's fine, so let's see if we still have our warning that we can't drive. I don't know if we should so I'm looking for the low coolant warning, it should be.
He's already gone, he hasn't shown up until now, so I think we're fine. The battery is very low. Kevin over here, okay, we haven't reached any range yet. It's been plugged in for I don't know, only about 10 or 15 minutes. so I don't think it's a big deal but it's flashing that it's loading it's giving us time remaining so I think we're good so I'm pretty sure the reason this isn't loading is so soon since it's going below the minimum line it says it can't charge so the problem is definitely the

cooling

system

and what's happening now is I haven't caught this on camera yet but it's basically gushing out of there as soon as the pump turns on because We're outside, it's like 85 degrees, so what I have to do is avoid the radiator so that the hose that goes to the radiator and there's also one right here, we have to avoid that in this tea, so we basically cut it out of the loop. that this is just running around without a radiator, I think it'll be fine just to get a few miles of charge and get us going, so let me do that and cross my fingers that our charges, oh there it is, look at that, oh god .
God, it's not good, oh, and the bomb went off, good. Tesla radiator removal is complete. I filled it with our organic milk water, huh, but this is what we did. I got a huge piece of heater hose, a plastic 90 degree elbow I had. lying around the garage and this is the factory hose that feeds 80 right there and it branches off to both legs of that radiator, so now it's overlooked and this hose goes under the car and then connects right down here, where this radiator side hose used to be. plug it in, so basically all we've done is completely bypass this radiator.
I filled it up and it's ready to go, so I hope this was all our problem and we can at least get some miles on charge. It's been about 15 minutes, let's see if we have any charge from more coolant or water leaking. At this point, we are totally full, still, let's check. Yeah, look we have two miles of range, which is amazing after getting a great. with a total of three miles of range from my neighbor. I took the car back to

home

base and the next day I was not only greeted with zero miles of range - these things can eat up a couple of miles overnight depending on their configuration - but I also discovered that my coolant tank was empty and There wasn't a big puddle under the car, just some remnants from installing that big hose for my makeshift radiator.
Eliminate now, at this point I think there is air trapped in the coolant circuit, just as you can have in a normal internal combustion engine, so the fact that the tank was empty was actually a good thing, this means that He burped it. I filled it up and headed back to my neighbor's house to steal some more free juice thinking it was all blood, but the car would only charge for three miles before stopping on its own. I called my good friend at the Tesla dealership, who was going to call Tesla Tommy to protect his identity from Elon, who would surely put him in chains for helping me.
Tesla Tommy confirmed. that he probably had air in the system and they would need to bleed it with the Tesla computer, but he couldn't drive the car, he had a broken control arm and subframe, so it was up to me to figure this out. I did not do it. I want air pockets in the battery pack as I wasn't sure if they would create hot spots over time and damage the expensive battery, so every time I plug that cable in I hear this pump activate, I hear this kick in this diverter valve. like it's doing something and sometimes this one does too, so I get the feeling that when you use the Tesla computer to bleed the

cooling

system, all you're doing is running these pumps and opening the diverter valves, probably at some point. special sequence, but I think we can get this to work, so now the coolant level is basically full, so I'm hoping we can get another big bubble out of this because we can only charge like two or three miles at a time before we this happens.
It's probably because it's overheating a cell and there are sensors all over the battery and if it starts to overheat it will stop charging and that's a good thing, at this point it was time to test my theory so I took off the reservoir cap and just plugged it in. , I would run to the front of the car and sometimes watch the coolant go down a little bit, then unplug the charger and plug it back in and repeat this process probably about ten times and every other try. I was pleasantly surprised by a lower coolant level haha ​​there is no Tesla computer at all and the coolant level keeps going down and that is because all these valves and pumps are running so they are on and fluid is flowing and sometimes , you can even hear some bubbles.
In these lines I also fill the tank with water when it's low and I'm using water because we still have a radiator to replace and when we do that we're going to lose coolant anyway, but I really wanted to capture this. live bleeding procedure so I set my camera to record for about 20 minutes while plugging and unplugging the charging cable a few times and as you can see here the water level is going down pretty fast what we're looking at is a bag of air. came loose and fluid filled that pocket in the battery pack or somewhere else in the coolant circuit, after recharging again I let the car charge for several hours and it seemed like we were on the right track until about One hundred and sixty-five miles, I stopped charging again, so it stopped at 165 miles of range.
Open the lid. I don't know if you can hear this. Well, here we go. The pumps just shut off and the coolant went down a little more so I think I just need to start charging this or trigger the system a few more times to get all the air out and then we should be able to charge up to about. I think this gets about 250 miles of range or something like that. Oh, and here's my upload settings. This is actually a first generation Nissan Alif charging cable that has been modified to work with 220 and I also have a couple of adapters that I rarely use and then of course we have the Tesla adapter on the J 1772 connector.
So This is a leaf loader that I bought to use with my Chevy Volts and have now modified for my Tesla. Now, after getting pretty far with this whole charging fiasco, I took out my pen and notepad and started inspecting the entire car. a month before Sam came to town, so I had to have all the pieces lined up and ready to go. I made a list and started sorting, although most of this stuff came out of a nasty brown p85d that said underwater for about 10 days before. some youtuber bought it to rebuild it or something like that.
The most important part of this section is to make sure your pen matches the marker they use. It makes sense with all the pieces in hand. Sam and I had to replace that cracked front subframe so the control arm was gone. It doesn't hang anymore, we also replaced the cracked radiator, the broken air conditioning fan and condenser and the entire front plastic core support frame and even a headlight, what are you going on here? Sam. I'm changing out our fan motors that we almost missed because seriously, without hitting these things, yeah, they're just these little flaps, they're just closed, this is out of our donor's heart here, why do you look so clean?
Okay, now Sam's rebuild took place about a month after I bled the system and charged the car and then drove it a bit, so our range was getting a little low. Now charging at

home

is great, but I wanted to know if this car would be supercharged not only to make sure the battery didn't get damaged while sitting. at the auction yard, but also to see if Elon had blacklisted the car, which may be a

salvage

d and rebuilt Tesla title, so I took the p85d to a Tesla supercharger station to find out and, To be honest, if this doesn't work.
I don't know what I'll do if this doesn't work. I don't know what I'll do if this doesn't work. I don't know what I'll do. Hello, this Tesla road service. It's pretty good, not bad, eh, okay, so I brought my Tesla Ranger with me just in case, but let's go ahead and die in good shape, see what happens, how many will there be with that, though thanks, thanks, ready. let's see what it says ready to charge starting to charge ring it's processing if it turns green it's good it turns red that's not so good we had a problem screen baby screen is green yeah hey look what's there to detect she's super charging Wow look buddy That is, if we could get rid of the warning that it is a wave faster than the garage, then how many kilowatt hours is that?
So these are the urban ones okay right now the Tesla is supercharging at about ten times what it was in my grad that's true yeah like a 20x20 okay yeah so you have to imagine that It's heating up like crazy right now and that overlooks something in the car, right, yeah, so what does a supercharge do? It actually bypasses the onboard charges and goes through the battery okay, I know whatever that way so we're heating up like crazy, if this is going to fail it's definitely going to fail here and not in my garage later that we repair coolant leaks and all that and we actually have a radiator, a function that is not.
I no longer have a hose, okay, now we are one hundred and thirty-five miles away, but keep in mind that in my garage, on a 20-minute serviceamps, this stopped at about a hundred and sixty-four miles and then I had to like it, you know. My bleeding procedure again I finally got it to fully charge to 200 in about twenty five miles at eighty percent, but because we're generating a lot more heat, we may still have a problem here because when Sam and I put the front end together, this has a battery cooler so you have a cooler that uses coolant from the air conditioning system to supercool the water/antifreeze mixture that goes into the battery and here's a little explanation that I filmed while we were replacing that subframe so the demon Dodge has something similar to this part because of its air to water intercooler system and in the aftermarket world on cars like my e55 basically anything that has a water to air intercooler you can use the AC coolant to supercool the coolant that goes to your intercooler, so In this case, Tesla has used this technology to supercool the antifreeze that goes to the battery pack because that thing gets very hot, so this is an expansion valve, we have two lines of AC and this is our cooler and we have two hoses that run the antifreeze.
It gets very very cold around here and then it sends it directly to the battery pack so I didn't know these cars had this but it's pretty impressive and it's very very simple and efficient. In the design now we're trying to charge the AC system before supercharging, but we had some issues with a can adapter we bought and, coming out rich a few hours after filming this, we simply didn't have time to alter it. It's like 75 degrees outside, so there's a good chance he's not kicking us out because it's just not that hot outside. Pretty cool if you look at the other cars that are charging here, none of the other cars have that condensation drip. the air conditioning system, so it seems that even though these cars are super charging, the air conditioning hasn't turned on at all, so the temperature is probably low enough that it won't have to kill you, but it's still well to 5050, so it's the same.
The AC refrigerant circuit is what cools the cabin and if you remember this condenser was completely

destroyed

so you lost all of that so obviously we definitely have to charge the air conditioning in this car and then when the temperature reaches around one hundred degrees here, that's really when you're going to use that and probably also when you're driving, maybe hitting it a little bit, especially in ridiculous mode, you know, driving when it's really hot outside it's going to stop holding the batteries, right? that and winter actually heats the battery in the separate unit in the car okay it actually heats the coolant and then carries it to the other lines too okay separate modules right right oh and that heater that Rich was talking about is buried in here you can't really see it, it's under the hood, but that's what heats the coolant and sends it to the battery when it's cold outside or in the winter because you don't want the battery to get too hot, but They don't want a battery to get too cold which will definitely damage it and cause a higher rate of degradation so they want these things to last a long, long time and that was a big problem with the Nissan Leaf is that it didn't. .
I had a system like this, it was air cooled and those batteries degraded pretty quickly. Well it's been a little over an hour and I'm not going to lie, I didn't think this would load completely because of the issues we were having. in my garage, but the charge is full, we have charged up to 80%, so in this case it is now 222 miles, obviously we are going to recharge the air conditioning system so that that way it charges when it is much warmer outside , so cooling in the cabin, but there may come a day when you can't supercharge anything, that's right, yes, many times what Tesla will do is look south like they're auctions and look at the registered VIN numbers recovered from the automobiles. and they will actually disable the cars supercharging, so what they will do is send a signal to the car and it will stabilize all the supercharging shafts on them.
Now is there any rhyme or reason to this? Do I know when this? it's going to happen, if it doesn't happen, you might be lucky, okay, it might be like a year, it might be a couple of years, but eventually, at some point, I might disable it, yeah, so making these YouTube videos probably isn't a good idea, not a good idea, I wouldn't see myself as a good number, just in case I think I'll delete this part for them, yes, but it could happen, it could happen to some people already, but what they're trying to do most is that they They are trying to do it. preserve the integrity of the supercharging system because they really don't want people fixing cars that you know incorrectly and a lot of times it's a free service that they offer to people and they want to limit who could use it and prioritize it. people who have actually paid on legit cars, guys there you have it, our recovered Tesla will be supercharged, it has not been blacklisted, the lack of refrigerant in the air conditioning system has not affected us yet either, so we are ready to start right now. you guys are enemies, yeah, I want to give a big special thanks to this guy here, our ranger duty man, this is Sam, the intern, he's now my official cameraman, whatever he ever lived, now he lives in my basement, so it's really very nice.
I got these guys to help me, you know, I'm just trying to help them with their channels, they're just getting there, they're coming in, girl anyway, like and subscribe to these guys, I don't really need like the peek, yeah eight bucks an hour that'll be enough for this video the rest is basically us making fun of each other for another minute but next up for me is a cool video about the air conditioning putting the car back together and some testing Crazy or should I say ridiculous driving. Thanks again for watching and I'll see you all in the next video.

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