Joining the 80% Club

[DaveinOlyWA]

L1 does have its drawbacks in that the charging overhead for cooling is static so you will see about a 10% decrease in charging efficiency at 120 volts. for the money the EVSE mod is a great deal. granted at 10% efficiency gain, it will take me about 8½ years to pay for the upgrade if total cost runs about $300. i figure i would save around $3 a month in electricity with the higher efficiency. more than enough to do it i think but more to conserve than to save $$

 

[TonyWilliams]

I officially am leaving the 80% Club, and going all in.... 100 big ones.

Until the infrastructure is built, sitting around waiting for L2 to give me 1 mile every 5 minutes is already old.

Starting the day at 100% may just be the difference for me.

 

[patrick0101]

I am officially joining the 80% club. It actually appears to be the "83 and a third" club. Most days I drive less than 30 miles and I can plug in at work.

 

[planet4ever]

I am officially joining the 80% club. It actually appears to be the "83 and a third" club.

No, it's really the ten-bar club. The idiot software on the CARWINGS/Owners Portal end sees 10 bars and decides that must mean 10/12 = 83%. Or, perhaps more likely, the idiot who coded that software thought you would be really impressed with an apparent two-digit precision display of source data that only has one-digit precision.

I remain confident that the BMS in the LEAF knows what it is doing, and it really is charging to 80%, even though the silly 12-bar display doesn't have any proper way for it to tell you it has.

Ray

 

[Herm]

I am officially joining the 80% club. Most days I drive less than 30 miles and I can plug in at work.

Why would you even bother?.. as a conversation starter or just to get a few cents free electricity?, or just range insurance in case the wife has a chocolate cravings attack?

 

[smkettner]

I am officially joining the 80% club. It actually appears to be the "83 and a third" club. Most days I drive less than 30 miles and I can plug in at work.

Plug in at work? I would commute home and back from the charge point at work.

 

[davewill]

Patrick, don't listen to these cretins. I'd do it exactly the way you are, bump up to 80% both at work and at home. Then you're ready for almost any surprise or emergency. The cost of the electricity just isn't a big factor in either situation.

 

[LEAFfan]

I officially am leaving the 80% Club, and going all in.... 100 big ones.

+1! After talking with Brendan Jones, VP of Sales for Nissan, I was told that charging to 100% EVERY day and 'topping off', even though the SOC is only 50-60% will not degrade the battery pack any more than 80/20%. They've already done many simulations to eight years of use and the battery pack showed no measurable difference. He also told me that you can DC fast charge (480V) up to 6 times a day without degrading the pack.

 

[davewill]

...After talking with Brendan Jones, VP of Sales for Nissan, I was told that charging to 100% EVERY day and 'topping off', even though the SOC is only 50-60% will not degrade the battery pack any more than 80/20%...

Well, that just begs the question, why did they put the 80% timer feature in the car and list it in the manual, then?

 

[DarkStar]

...After talking with Brendan Jones, VP of Sales for Nissan, I was told that charging to 100% EVERY day and 'topping off', even though the SOC is only 50-60% will not degrade the battery pack any more than 80/20%...

Well, that just begs the question, why did they put the 80% timer feature in the car and list it in the manual, then?

Maybe for the same reason there is a solar panel on the SL trim?

 

[evnow]

After talking with Brendan Jones, VP of Sales for Nissan, I was told that charging to 100% EVERY day and 'topping off', even though the SOC is only 50-60% will not degrade the battery pack any more than 80/20%. They've already done many simulations to eight years of use and the battery pack showed no measurable difference. He also told me that you can DC fast charge (480V) up to 6 times a day without degrading the pack.

Was this before or after the 8 year warranty announcement ?

 

[TomT]

If he put all that in writing, I might be a little more inclined to believe it...

After talking with Brendan Jones, VP of Sales for Nissan, I was told that charging to 100% EVERY day and 'topping off', even though the SOC is only 50-60% will not degrade the battery pack any more than 80/20%. They've already done many simulations to eight years of use and the battery pack showed no measurable difference. He also told me that you can DC fast charge (480V) up to 6 times a day without degrading the pack.

 

[planet4ever]

After talking with Brendan Jones, VP of Sales for Nissan, I was told that charging to 100% EVERY day and 'topping off', even though the SOC is only 50-60% will not degrade the battery pack any more than 80/20%. They've already done many simulations to eight years of use and the battery pack showed no measurable difference. He also told me that you can DC fast charge (480V) up to 6 times a day without degrading the pack.

I might have believed him if he hadn't put the last part in. You say he is VP of what? Not totally incidentally, official Nissan doc calls it 440v, not 480v. Maybe somebody drilled 240 instead of 220 into his brain, so he figured it must be twice that. If so, maybe someone told him "6 times a week" and he got a bit confused on that, too.

Ray

 

[EVDRIVER]

Unless it's in writing don't believe it.

 

[thankyouOB]

I officially am leaving the 80% Club, and going all in.... 100 big ones.

+1! After talking with Brendan Jones, VP of Sales for Nissan, I was told that charging to 100% EVERY day and 'topping off', even though the SOC is only 50-60% will not degrade the battery pack any more than 80/20%. They've already done many simulations to eight years of use and the battery pack showed no measurable difference. He also told me that you can DC fast charge (480V) up to 6 times a day without degrading the pack.

If this is the case, then they should send out some big, fat notices to everyone with an existing manual -- with big letters around the 80% and limit QC sections:

NEVER MIND!!

 

[ebill3]

After talking with Brendan Jones, VP of Sales for Nissan, I was told that charging to 100% EVERY day and 'topping off', even though the SOC is only 50-60% will not degrade the battery pack any more than 80/20%. They've already done many simulations to eight years of use and the battery pack showed no measurable difference. He also told me that you can DC fast charge (480V) up to 6 times a day without degrading the pack.

VP of Sales? Gotta watch those marketing folks. Present company excepted, of course.

I wonder if engineering concurs with that pronouncement.

Bill

 

[patrick0101]

I fell off the 80% wagon today. I charged to 100% last night since I had a lot of driving planned for today. I drove from Beaverton Oregon to:
1) Wilsonville
2) Beaverton
3) Hillsboro
4) Longview WA
5) Back home to Beaverton

In total, I drove 156 miles today. I was able to charge at each location. Hillsboro was at level 1 charging, all the other locations were level 2. One of the things I thought was cool was that I had 1 to 3 hours of things to do at each stop, this gave the car plenty of time to charge at each stop and I was never waiting for a charge before heading to the next stop.

I made it home with 3 bars and 21 miles to spare. I am now officially rejoining the 80% club and will be driving less than 30 miles tomorrow.

 

[Herm]

Congratulations Patrick, you made it work instead of whining about range issues.

+1 to you.

 

[GaslessInSeattle]

Two nights ago I charged to 80%, knowing I'd want to top off to 100% in the morning (figuring there was no need having the car sit at 100% any longer than necessary). In the morning a little scheduling snafu with my wife kept me from being able to top off to 100% and instead having to drive 14 miles. I had planned a hike with a friend up Tiger mountain in the afternoon, and figuring it was a 70 mile round trip I'd want to charge to 100% for a confortable cushion. I plugged the car back in as soon as I could and left it charging for about an hour, getting the range back up to an estimated 68 miles.

I drove the 70 mile round trip and returned home with 3 miles to spare, and that was driving up 1-90 with a substantial elevation gain. Having gotten to know the guesometer more, I was able to trust the range and not get all worked up... I knew I'd make it back home, minimal stress.

I was impressed that the guesometer was so close to accurate and that the range on the car seems to be improving, presumably because the battery is now fully conditioned. I don't think my driving habits have changed much.

I now have a new benchmark of 70 miles in eco mode moderate highway speeds and elevation gain on an 80% charge.

g

 

[walterbays]

I'm an involuntary inductee into the 80% Club. Well no, not quite, but I've learned to check and double check those charge timers.

The first few days I always charged to 100% as I got a feel for what the bars and the range predictions meant for me. Then I changed to 80% on weekdays when my predictable driving needs are well within that range, and 100% on weekends for contingencies. Several times I had little or no driving and didn't charge at all. [Edit:] 80% is particularly desirable since I live on top of a (small) hill and would rather recapture much of the energy spent to get up here, and regenerative braking is limited with a full battery.

But today was a new trip on the freeway, following a day of normal commuting, so I wanted 100%. I just reassigned days to put Wednesday on the 100% timer2. But I must not have saved my change properly because this morning I woke to find the car charged to 83% as usual. I had time to add a few more kWh of off-peak (as opposed to super-off-peak) electricity, and my experiment was underway with a bit less margin than I had hoped for.

I needn't have worried about highway speeds quickly depleting my battery. I drove in the right lane, but kept up with traffic, and returned with 24 estimated miles to spare. Which means I could have made the trip with an 80% charge.

Still I always like having a margin so I'll continue for now charging at 80% normally, and 100% for special trips or unknowns. And I will learn how to change the timer settings and make them stick!

Thinking of the long promised and seldom seen rollout of public charging infrastructure, I realize how much easier that will make it to leave the house with 80% charge, or less. A 40% charge would normally be plenty for me. And if something unexpected happened and I could just drop by the Arco station for a fill-up, then I wouldn't need to charge to 100% just in case.