[Driving] MG F - Outlander Rear motor and inverter.

[arber333]

running a diesel webasto water heater to the oem heater matrix and a water to water heat exchanger to the battery VW GTE water Outlander Rear motor and inverter system plus a radiator bypass, works great

I am testing this Diesel heater now. Seems to work OK on desk. I have to install it.
I will post feedback when i know more...
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004 ... 1802qOQMEM

[tom91]

It just went to -1degC here... i can see heating coolant to 50deg as being rather inadequate.
When i have a bit of time i intend to add an option in aot93 VCU code for serial menu. A parameter for heater_temp.
My idea is to have a temperature setting that is terminal and inside that function is equasion to drop power the last 5 deg before reaching heater_temp. Now this is set to 55degC whereas at 50deg heater goes from 4kW to 1kW power for the last 5deg.
I will let you know...

This literally has nothing to do with this build thread. Please keep on topic in build threads.

[arber333]

This literally has nothing to do with this build thread. Please keep on topic in build threads.

Haha... sožrry i must have had multiple threads open and when i copied in by accident .
Deleted...
EDIT... grr... cant just delete post.

[LRBen]

With the worst of the winter probably over and the first top down drive of the year done I thought it would be a good time to install a cabin heater.

I'm using an MG water heater, slowly been preparing everything in the last few weeks so that I could get it installed all in one day.

Here it is half way through the install, I have it plumbed into the original heater matrix outlets in the engine bay with a small header tank. At the end of the day I only had the canbus wiring to do, then I could fill it up and do some testing.

Unfortunately it didn't quite go to plan. I went to move the car before heading home and it didn't complete precharge which was very strange. A bit of investigation and long story short, I managed to reverse the polarity on the heater HV and blew the precharge resistor in the Sbox. Even more unfortunately I can't remove the Sbox without dropping the front subframe.
So next week it's up on the lift to drop the subframe and replace that resistor. While it is out I will do a bit of an inspection of everything to see how it is holding up. This was something I was planning to do at some point anyway.

On a different note, I have thought about swapping the front and rear suspension spheres. Originally the rear spheres were design to take the extra weight of the engine, however now there is more weight at the front, so swapping the two should hopefully level everything out. It doesn't look like all that much work to do especially with the front subframe out and the suspension lines drained anyway.

[arber333]

..... I managed to reverse the polarity on the heater HV and blew the precharge resistor in the Sbox. .....

Can you please confirm if correct HV orientation is the one on the pic here?

[tom91]

Can you please confirm if correct HV orientation is the one on the pic here?
image.png

Yes it is, this is how mine was wired on the bench and powered for reverse engineering I done.

As per wiki https://openinverter.org/wiki/MG_Coolant_Heater

[LRBen]

Can you please confirm if correct HV orientation is the one on the pic here?
image.png

I can tell you for certain having them the other way around doesn't work.

I think one reason for the mix up was that I used a cable not from the MG heater originally, in this cable the red and blue are swapped compared to that photo, so somewhere along the line I got it in my head that the cable was correct.
I should have confirmed before with a multi-meter before plugging it in to check once again.

[Alibro]

With the worst of the winter probably over and the first top down drive of the year done I thought it would be a good time to install a cabin heater.

I'm using an MG water heater, slowly been preparing everything in the last few weeks so that I could get it installed all in one day. PXL_20250228_131509860.MP.jpg
Here it is half way through the install, I have it plumbed into the original heater matrix outlets in the engine bay with a small header tank. At the end of the day I only had the canbus wiring to do, then I could fill it up and do some testing.

Unfortunately it didn't quite go to plan. I went to move the car before heading home and it didn't complete precharge which was very strange. A bit of investigation and long story short, I managed to reverse the polarity on the heater HV and blew the precharge resistor in the Sbox. Even more unfortunately I can't remove the Sbox without dropping the front subframe.
So next week it's up on the lift to drop the subframe and replace that resistor. While it is out I will do a bit of an inspection of everything to see how it is holding up. This was something I was planning to do at some point anyway.

On a different note, I have thought about swapping the front and rear suspension spheres. Originally the rear spheres were design to take the extra weight of the engine, however now there is more weight at the front, so swapping the two should hopefully level everything out. It doesn't look like all that much work to do especially with the front subframe out and the suspension lines drained anyway.

Isn't it strange how all these "one day" jobs end up taking weeks?

Would it be possible to change the plumbing for the spheres to be front and back rather than left and right? Or maybe even have a valve for each sphere? I'm pretty sure I heard of some people fitting TF suspension to their F in order to remove the hydrolastic all together but maybe that is going too far.

[LRBen]

Would it be possible to change the plumbing for the spheres to be front and back rather than left and right? Or maybe even have a valve for each sphere? I'm pretty sure I heard of some people fitting TF suspension to their F in order to remove the hydrolastic all together but maybe that is going too far.

I did get some individual valves at one point but never managed to get a good seal with them. Might give those another go now I have a couples days with it off the road.

I was thinking of getting Metro front spheres, but that's a bit of big extra expense I don't want to spend. Apparently though those are the same part number as the MGF rears, which is what gave me the idea of swapping them back to front. I just need to hope the rear doesn't drop too much! It does lift the rear very high now even with normal pressure so I think there is much less weight at the back than there used to be.

[Alibro]

You might not need to change anything if you could reconfigure the plumbing but I've no idea how difficult that will be.

[LRBen]

Back on the road again! Made an attempt to swap front and rear spheres but it was a bit too tricky to get the rears off without dropping that subframe as well. So i've left it for now.

This time I managed to wire the heater correctly and so the new precharge resistor is still intact. I was able to get a good look inside the battery box after almost two years and I'm happy to say there is no sign of water ingress at all. I threw in an extra bag of desiccant before sealing it all back up just to be safe.

With that all done I just need to wire the heater into the canbus lines and we should have some heat in the cabin finally.

[LRBen]

Another MOT passed a couple weeks back and yesterday we hit 20k electric miles. 18k of which has been with Zombie and the BMW hybrid pack. Probably on somewhere close to 800 charge cycles on that pack now with no noticable loss of capacity. Although I generally don't take it below 3600mv per cell resting and it charges up to 4050mv ish. Which is about 8kWh. So I am quite gentle with it.

Quite a bit of wear and tear this year. Replaced the rest of the wheel bearings, front lower and upper ball joints, the rear callipers also started to seize up so I replaced those as I could pick up a pair for not that much more than a rebuild kit. I also treated a little bit of surface rust coming through the sills and started to lanoguard areas as I work on them.

I recently got some individualising valves for the suspension, so I plan to get the ride height nice and level finally. Still not got a heater in the car, after the drama in the spring I didn't bother to finish off the installation because it was summer. Now I think it might be time to finish off that wiring!

Oh and one exciting/potentially stupid development. I sent off the paperwork to the DVLA last week to change the vehicle type to electric. The new system seems a little easier to go though with less hoops. I was honest about the modifications to the spare wheel compartment so let's see if that comes back to haunt me. Should hear back in a couple of weeks if the timeframe matches a recent car we did at work last month.

No recent photos. So here's one from earlier in the year when I picked up the hardtop. I can't say it's any cleaner now.

[Alibro]

It's hard to believe you've driven so many miles, I had a Petrol MGF for four years or so and probably did one or two thousand miles per year.
It would have been great to have EV torque in an F, I had a 140ish hp F that was fun but you had to rev the tits off it to go fast.
The height looks OK on this side but I guess your problem is that one side is higher than the other.