williaty

Honestly, 20Ah out of a 70Ah SLI battery is a BIG discharge. It's not risking being stranded, but it's not healthy for the battery in the long run. The typical specs that people compare for batteries don't tell the whole story and the bit that most people don't read is where the TPPL AGM batteries earn their keep. Download the datasheet and look at the performance graphs they provide, you'll see the difference compared to a normal battery. For normal starting duty, the big deal is that they have dramatically less voltage sag when the starter fires. This spins up the engine faster and results in solid starting even when things aren't going well. For example I've started the car from overnight cold at -35F and it cranked and caught as fast as it did at 70F. It also means you can start a 2.5L motor with high compression pistons off a battery the size of my fist, which is why the racers like them so much. The TPPL AGMs also withstand higher rates of discharge and recharge without damage. They also withstand greater DoD with less voltage sag when a new load is added. This translates to being able to do things like forget the headlights, run your fridge/segway/ham radio for a long time, and then reliably start the engine even once you've pulled the battery down much farther than is wise. Like I said before, that old Optima Yellow Top you liked was a TPPL AGM. The new Optimas aren't TPPL anymore. Durability wise, as I said I've installed near 100 of them for clients, largely in race use for performance rally (which is a horridly abusive thing to do to a battery!) without any early failures. Between our two cars, we have 23 years of combined experience with the Odysseys. The only one we've replaced was the very first one we got at just over 9 years after we bought it. It was warrantied with no out of pocket cost. I have, however, seen people manage to kill them in 2 ways. The really common one was people tightening the battery hold-down until the plastic began to creak. They squashed the battery hard enough to break it, in other words. I think I've seen 7 or 8 people do this, all younger guys. One guy also had placed his in a bad spot and it was getting way hotter than it's spec'd for and he killed it in about 3 years of doing that. Dealing with the public's mis-use of cars for the last 12 years, it's the guys who are the most pissed they're not getting a freebie (and then claim the customer service is terrible) who are the most likely to have broken it rather than having a legitimate customer service claim. Now, all of this doesn't mean that an FLA or some other AGM are bad batteries, they're perfectly fine. I'm just pointing out that a TPPL AGM battery will be significantly better for the kind of use brought up in this thread and, as far as I'm aware, the Odyssey is the only TPPL AGM car-application battery still on the market since Optima and Sears (the DieHard Platinums were just rebadged Odysseys) abandoned the technology.

Don't get me wrong, I think AGM SLI batteries are fantastic, especially if you get a TPPL-type one. I've installed probably close to a hundred of them for my clients. Before LFP was an option (and it still isn't allowed by some sanctioning bodies), I installed the Odyssey PC680 into MANY cars because it was the lightest battery that would reliably start the car (and restart it on track if they spun and stalled it) in all weather. Do you know what the power draw (input Watts) is on the Segway charger? I'm curious to see how much you'll be sucking out of your SLI battery if you stop for lunch for an hour, 2 hours, etc. The rest of this is me looking up data and writing it down for future reference but it's relevant to this thread. The stock BXT-96R battery is a BCI Group 96R battery. The BCI 96R callout is 9.6" wide, 6.2" deep, and 6.9" tall. The terminals are auto standard, Right Hand Positive. Don says he fit a Group 48 battery in the stock battery box, which means it'll hold at least a 12.1"x6.9"x7.6" battery. Hawker has the Odyssey PC1200MJT, which is a TPPL AGM that blurs the line between SLI and DC. They claim it's a drop-in replacement for the Group 96R stock battery and has dimensions of 7.87"x6.66"x6.80. Compared the BCI 96R callout, it's slightly too deep but will have lots of clearance for height and width. According to Don's experience, it should fit just fine since his 6.9" deep battery fit.

It took a bit of googling, but the NiMH battery pack in a Segway has a 220Wh capacity. The pair of them together then would need 440Wh if fully dead. Hopefully, you're not running them that hard because even NiMH batteries don't like being run to 0. An 80% discharge of the NiMH batteries would require 352Wh to recharge the pair. If you want to use an AGM DC battery, you need a nameplate rating of 704Wh, which would be sold as a 60Ah battery. The 3.5A at the 20-hour rate would lead to a nameplate of 70Ah so it will keep the AGM battery above 50% Depth of Discharge (DoD), which is fine for a DC battery. However, the Duracell battery you're talking about is not a DC battery. It's an SLI battery. It's designed to be used in the 5-10% DoD region. Using it repeatedly to 50% DoD is not what it's designed for. A little more googling shows that a normal 12V minifridge draws about 480Wh over an 8-hour night while a REALLY good one, like thousand-dollars-for-a-small-one level of good, can get that down to 220Wh over an 8-hour night. The normal fridge would require a 80Ah battery to last an 8-hour night and the super efficient megabuck fridge would need a 37Ah battery for the same period. Next thing to consider is recharging it. First, the car's "charge controller" on the alternator (and that's in quotes because it's very, very half-assed) isn't designed for recharging a DC battery from a deep discharge. Second, a typical FLA battery is designed to take 10-14 hours to recharge without damage from a 50% DoD cycle. A top-level TPPL AGM battery like a Hawker Odyssey can cut that to 4-6 hours without long-term damage. Of course, blowing them all away, the LiFePO4 battery bank I'm designing right now for install into the van can fully recharge in as little as 10 minutes if I can find a high-power charging source. Recharging from the engine of the van, realistically I probably can't draw enough current from it to recharge the LFP battery faster than about 1 hour without frying the alternator and stalling the engine.

You're confusing AGM with DC. Not all AGM batteries are DC. You can buy both SLI and DC AGMs. DC batteries do perform badly as SLI batteries in cars because they don't like the treatment. They're not designed for the repeated large outrush nor the charging profile. The car won't notice. It'll start happily even under poor conditions. The battery just won't be happy about life. The Duracel AGM battery you installed is a SLI battery, not a DC. As long ago as you make it sound, your Optima Yellow Top would actually have been a TPPL AGM battery, which absolutely do blur the line between DC and SLI. However, the Optima product line today is junk and you wouldn't get anything close to that performance out of one. Which is quite sad, actually.

Addendum: AllDataDIY.com claims to have TSBs. Does anyone have a membership?

We do amateur astronomy and this van is super unwelcome anyplace telescopes are found due to this idiocy. I'd love more details on how to turn it off as well.

You guys also need to remember that starting/lighting/ignition (SLI) batteries are a different design than a deep cycle (DC) battery. SLI batteries are designed to support VERY LARGE amp draws for just a few seconds as the starter runs and then immediately be recharged at a high rate by the alternator. The total storage capacity that a SLI is designed to cycle through is just a few percent. A DC battery, on the other hand, is designed to be cycled to 50% of nameplate capacity but NOT designed to support the huge current draw and rapid recharge of automotive use. Use either battery in the wrong situation and you'll have reduced performance and short service life. As far as better batteries, take a look at Thin Plate Pure Lead (TPPL) AGM batteries. Optima batteries used to be good examples of this this tech but have long since cut corners and cheaped out. The only SLI TPPL AGM batteries I know of on the market today are the Hawker Odyssey batteries. The AGM Duracel listed above is not a TPPL design. It's better (in some ways) that a traditional Flooded Lead Acid (FLA) battery, but it's not as good as a TPPL AGM battery. I don't know if Hawker makes an Odyssey battery to fit the weird Ford box, but I'll be checking shortly. Just remember, the kind of use you guys are talking about is BAD for SLI batteries. If you really want to run a fridge or charge Segways while the engine is off, you need a secondary DC battery system.

The distance between columns only adjusts for the width of the van, which is no problem at all. The spread of the arms adjusts for the distance between the front and rear jacking points on each side and that IS a potential problem. With the arms parallel, you'd get 80" of spread. Obviously, with the arms parallel, they won't actually get under the van. The van needs 75.2" of spread, which might mean the arms have to be close enough to parallel that they won't reach under the van or would require the posts to be so close together that you could barely drive the van between them.

The MJ is a smaller in every dimension version of a normal 2-post lift. That's a critical detail because the arm spread isn't as large as on a normal 2-post. That definitely becomes and issue with the Connect. Like I said, I've got an email in to the company to find out if they think it's safe or not. Generally speaking, trying to jack from any part of the moving suspension is a bad idea. It's unstable at best and easily causes damage at worst. Functionally, there's also the point that having to jack the car one corner at a time to get all 4 corners in the air is a real pain in the butt and somewhat dangerous as it's VERY easy to get the car teetering on 2 stands without warning. It also means that you REALLY should have jackstands each rated to support the entire weight of the car since you can transfer extreme loads to one stand given the weird angles the car will transit through.

AVGuy, it's not entirely clear that the MaxJacks will work with the Connect. The Connect's jacking points are a whopping 75.2" apart. With the arms on the MJ only extending to 40", you may have to spread the arms so far away from each other that they don't angle towards the center enough to actually get safely under the van. I've got an email in to the people who make the MJ about this issue right now. The QuickJack BL-6000XLT will just barely get long enough to do it. Later today, I'm going to measure to confirm that the collapsed jack will actually fit under the van. I owned a race shop (that also started doing repairs after the recession) for years and I have never before seen a single car where there wasn't an easy answer for how to jack it up. The Connect is the first car I've ever seen where it really looks like Ford designed it to only be able to be lifted by a full-sized 2-post lift.

To my disbelief, both the owner's manual and the service manual basically say that you can only work on one of these vans on a lift because the only approved jacking locations are the 4 corners of the side sills straddling the pinch weld. Every other car I've ever worked on has specified those locations for the use of the roadside emergency jack but also listed locations for lifting it in the shop with a floor jack. They're usually on a crossmember, rear diff, etc, something that's well supported to the unibody. Since Ford left us twisting in the wind on this one, has anyone found a place both front and rear where there's enough body strength to use it as a jacking point for a floor jack? If I get the OEM trailer hitch, is it sturdy enough to serve as a rear jacking point?

Thanks Don, I found that same answer last night on a Fiesta forum. I fixed the van today but I forgot to come back here and post about it.

As delivered, my 2014 would, from the driver's door control panel, run any window automatically all the way down if you pushed the button all the way down. Similarly, if you pulled the button all the way up, any window would auto-up all the way to fully closed. I had to disconnect the battery today and now the auto-down works but the auto-up doesn't. Any idea how to reprogram it to do the auto-up function again? I can't find any section in the manual talking about this.

Thanks! That's going to be extremely helpful here shortly. I hope you manage to get the CAN controller for the lighting worked out as well as having to run wiring from the battery all the way to the back and then splice wires is just not my idea of a good time.

Is this for a SWB or LWB? Which row of seats does it go behind?

Only Jeep owners, huh?

On a single-friction surface, ABS will stop the car in a shorter distance than most drivers while at the same time preserving steering. This is because most drivers have no frickin clue how to threshold brake and use everything the tires have to offer without locking up one of them. So for the average driver, ABS reduces stopping distances. For the professional driver, ABS increases stopping distances in a laboratory-perfect scenario. In the real world, the single brake pedal can't brake all 4 wheels to different amounts even with a professional driver yet modern ABS systems can. This means that ABS can out-brake even professional drivers when, say, two wheels are on the road and two wheels are off on the gravel shoulder or when, on a racetrack, the inside rear wheel goes light at turn-in under trail braking. Top-grade ABS is effective enough that many race bodies ban it because of the competitive advantage it provides. Most of the negative impressions people have of ABS are from early generation systems or from systems over which the lawyers have run amok and overridden what the engineers figured out. Sadly, this has resulted in modern cars getting MUCH worse to drive and being MUCH less able to avoid an accident. When ABS first debuted, it was advertised as a way to keep braking and steering at the same time so you could swerve around the accident. Sadly, engineering achievements rarely survive contact with the enemy (the public). What happened when the public got ah hold of the first ABS cars is that they'd "stomp, stay, and steer" so violently that they'd spin the car and the car makers lost a string of very expensive court cases. In response, they modified all the cars to have terminal understeer, even with ABS, so that you couldn't spin the car no matter what. Of course, this also means that you can't dodge an accident either, or potentially save the car/yourself when you encounter some kind of dangerous situation mid-corner. Sadly, juries routinely convict the car makers if the car spins (oversteer) because "clearly the car was unsafe" but, if the car understeers, juries routinely conclude that the driver was an idiot and was driving too fast. So because of juries made of bad drivers, we now have cars that are demonstrably less safe (in terms of accident-avoidance).

53T is the order code to add it during the build of the van. It's not a parts code in the parts chain.

So, I design performance suspension and brakes for a living. 1) Yes, doing a BBK almost always screws up MANY things, including the ABS/TCS. I say nearly always because a VERY FEW aftermarket BBK manufacturers design intelligently around this problem. 2) Doing a BBK almost always INCREASES STOPPING DISTANCE. There's two reasons for this: a) almost all modern disc brake systems are capable of locking any wheel/activating ABS if you're man enough to push on the pedal that hard (most people won't push hard enough, weirdly) so the car is traction limited, not brake limited. The BBKs alter the brake bias/balance, which pushes one end of the car into lockup/ABS activation sooner while allowing the other end to do less work. Result is that your braking performance gets worse. I say nearly always because a VERY FEW aftermarket BBK manufacturers design intelligently around this problem. 3) BBKs are NOT about getting more braking force, they're about having more rotor surface area to dissipate heat. Unless you already have high-temp brake pads and high-temp brake fluid and you're STILL getting brake fade, you DO NOT NEED A BBK. 4) BBKs reduce suspension performance, even when you're not touching the brake pedal, because they increase unsprung mass and unsprung mass is ALWAYS bad. BBKs are almost never a good idea. If you're doing a race build and you need more cooling, your first step should always be to duct air from the high pressure zone in front of the front bumper into the center of the brake rotor to provide cooling. Only once you can't get any more air blowing over the rotor should you finally give up and put a bigger rotor on there. There are extremely rare exceptions to this and they all revolve around putting a larger rotor on the rear to shift brake bias rearwards since all production cars today have a heavily front-weighted brake bias. Shifting the bias rearwards reduces understeer and allows more brake force to be applied to the road before any tire locks up/activates ABS. THIS IS A RARE CASE THOUGH.

I too am following this with interest. I looked at the instructions here for the after-delivery Ford trailer wiring part and couldn't believe how stupid it is! When I wanted to add a hitch to my Subaru, I just plugged in the light controller to the existing wiring in the rear end and instantly had a trailer hookup. No splicing, no removing trim, didn't take more than 10 minutes.

Are you saying the 1.6L has shorter or taller gearing than the 2.5L here in the US? I'd assume you mean taller geared, based off the fact that you say it's for fuel economy since a taller geared rear end would cause the engine to turn lower revs for a given ground speed. I would suppose that's worse for towing since the forces on the gears would be larger. However, if they're focusing their economy efforts on starting in town (coming away from many stoplights), I could see them using a shorter rear end so the tranny would upshift sooner and get the engine sped down during acceleration (at the expense of worse fuel economy on the highway due to higher engine speeds while cruising). I would think this would be better for towing. So which did you mean?

Man, I hope that article is wrong about towing only being allowed with the 2.5L engine! Looks like the only real change from the 2016 is going to be SYNC3.

I would imagine that we'll start hearing about updates for the 2017 USDM Transit Connect sometime soon. Has anyone seen any press releases about what they're changing?

I have yet to see a SCC that isn't capable of limiting current to protect itself. Perhaps if you got a sufficiently cheap Chinese knock-off, but even the $20 SCCs from eBay have current limiting. Recharging the battery at 30A might not be a bad thing. For a house battery, you'll want a deep cycle battery, which don't like to charge as fast as a Starting/Lighting/Ignition battery. Most traditional flooded lead acid deep cycle batteries want to charge at C/10 to C/20. With a 30A input, a C/10 charge rate means you'd have to buy at least a 300Ah battery, which is a BIG mother to fit into something as small as the back of a Connect. You might actually want an even smaller SCC to get down to a battery size that you can package more easily into the back of a Connect. Of course, if you're using a AGM or other sealed battery, your charging current usually is allowed to be much higher so you can charge a smaller battery at a higher current. Of course, then you won't be able to supply that 1.7kW inverter from the battery, but that's a different story. Not to mention the parasitic drain from the idle current of an inverter that size will run the battery down rapidly. Honestly, that's an insane size of inverter to use in a compact automotive installation. What on earth do you want to run from it, Sean?

Ok, so I'm confused as to what path to take to try to find my van. I have a very specific setup I want, but I can't figure out how to search for it. Wagon XLT SWB EcoBoost Engine Swing out rear dorrs doors, not tail gate Engine block heater Tow package 16" Wheels (alloy) No SYNC (not a deal breaker) Charcoal black seats Either of the two blue colors for exterior paint So what's the best way to go search for that set of features?