No Charge to 80% option in 2015 model?

I have been reading Leaf owners recommend not to charge to 100%, instead only charge up to 80%. ...This is so that battery life would last longer. I do not see charge 80% as an option on my Leaf SV. Is that option only available in previous year models?

Does anyone has any other tips for taking care of the battery?

Thanks!

scsc168 said:

I have been reading Leaf owners recommend not to charge to 100%, instead only charge up to 80%. ...This is so that battery life would last longer. I do not see charge 80% as an option on my Leaf SV. Is that option only available in previous year models?

Does anyone has any other tips for taking care of the battery?

Thanks!

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Yes they removed that feature in 2014. It is widely considered that general aging of the battery is a larger detriment than full charges to the Leaf pack. So charging to 80% is not only annoying in range, but provides almost 0 benefit.

Some people here feel that stopping at 80% unnecessarily "babies" the battery (and I agree), so I wouldn't and don't worry about that. I think the biggest concern and condition to avoid is overheating the battery. So if you live in a hot climate or during hot spells elsewhere, try to garage or shade it when parked, and of course don't do multiple quick-charges in a short amount of time. Keep the battery temperature meter away from and definitely out of the red!

I just got a 2015 S and don't see a way to set it to 80% either, in any case.

Thank you for your replies! I was concerned that I am charging to 100% every time .... Now feel a bit reliefed.

Keep in mind that we don't know that charging to 80% is useless, just that there is no hard evidence (that Nissan is sharing, anyway) that it helps a lot by itself. The pack temp is indeed the more important factor, so I charge to 80% when I don't need the car for a long tip, and charge to 100% - even if it means restarting the charge at 79% - whenever I need it. What I mainly watch, though, is the battery temp bars: I don't charge if there are more than six, and only charge if necessary if there are more than five.

It should always be stated that the change to no 80% option is most likely because the EPA punished the rated range. The EPA in all its infinite wisdom used the published range to be an average of 80% charge and 100% charge because the 80% charge option was there. Remove option and the range is listed just at the 100% level. They made the change in 2013 and Nissan changed it with the next model year.

Around that time, Tesla switched from a fixed option that would have punished the listed range to a slider allowing infinite adjustments. The EPA couldn't punish that option.

It is well known that heat damages batteries. It is also well known that batteries are more susceptible to heat related damage when they are at higher SOC levels. So of course an 80% option makes sense. The reason it was dropped was government interference - pure and simple.

An option on newer cars is to set an end time a little later than you need to leave. You can play with this to get something less that 100% each time if you have a fixed departure time. Of course being at 100% for an hour each morning is probably a near zero problem. But at 100%, you don't get regen if that matters in your drive.

Using end timers also helps because the battery can cool from being in the sun and being driven maximally before starting to heat up again with charging. And lastly, it helps (most of the time) with grid issues because you start charging in the middle of the night. In moderately cold climates with electric heat/hot water, the grid starts getting taxed at 6 am in the winter. But other than that, you are usually doing well to charge between 4 and 8 am. Helps both battery and grid.

If you want to charge to about 80%--to keep regen when you first start driving and perhaps to help the life of your battery somewhat--it isn't that hard to do. When a Leaf is new, 10 minutes of L2 charging (3.3 kw) increases the state of charge about 3% (up to about 80% SOC, slows after that). 6 kw charging will probably increase about 5.5% per 10 minutes (you can fine tune that number by watching the numbers). You can use this information to time your charging to keep the SOC lower. It is a bit more work to set the charging timer each time you charge, but only takes me about 20 seconds.

I think that charging to 100% may cause more degradation than we think, although obviously heat is the major factor. We don't have any good data on this, but some who live in the greater Los Angeles area have lost 3-4 capacity bars, while I have so far only lost one. There are some differences in mileage/climate, but I don't think that is the whole explanation. YMMV.

LeftieBiker said:

Keep in mind that we don't know that charging to 80% is useless, just that there is no hard evidence (that Nissan is sharing, anyway) that it helps a lot by itself. The pack temp is indeed the more important factor, so I charge to 80% when I don't need the car for a long tip, and charge to 100% - even if it means restarting the charge at 79% - whenever I need it. What I mainly watch, though, is the battery temp bars: I don't charge if there are more than six, and only charge if necessary if there are more than five.

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Something else to remember is that new battery technology was introduced with the 2013 model and again with the 2015. We don't know a lot about the 2013 battery differences, but we do know that any 2011 or 2012 LEAF which gets a battery replacement needs an adaptive harness. We also know that the 2013 got more range on the EPA and other tests, although not on a constant speed test an MNL user reported.

Therefore it is possible that older cars did get some benefit from the 80% charging practice but this benefit became negligible with the 2013 model. Unfortunately, this is all speculation because Nissan refuses to tell owners of 2011 or 2012s whether they should keep using what the manual calls "long life mode" or disregard and just charge to 100%.

So we still charge ours to 80% out of habit, but if we upgrade to a 2015 we'll just charge to 100% all the time.

I find the '15 shows more regen at and just under 100% than the '12. Wether that's just instrumentation or not I'm not sure, but I can feel the drag.

From watching what the '15 draws when I'm using a ChargePoint EVSE, it seems to spend a lot more time balancing than the '12. Maybe Nissan decided balancing was more beneficial than 80%?

Stoaty said:

If you want to charge to about 80%--to keep regen when you first start driving and perhaps to help the life of your battery somewhat--it isn't that hard to do. When a Leaf is new, 10 minutes of L2 charging (3.3 kw) increases the state of charge about 3% (up to about 80% SOC, slows after that). 6 kw charging will probably increase about 5.5% per 10 minutes (you can fine tune that number by watching the numbers). You can use this information to time your charging to keep the SOC lower. It is a bit more work to set the charging timer each time you charge, but only takes me about 20 seconds.

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While I hear you on this and agree it is a possible solution - what a royal pain! I want to just plug in when I get home. I don't want to calculate how much time I need to charge to get to a targeted level. I have a base S so I'm not even sure how I'd set the charging limits/timing using the simplistic interface (if it is even possible). KISS is my philosophy.

I have been using my 80% charge cap as a way to have the regen available when I take off. I toggle it off when I expect to need full range. I would really like to be able to specify "charge to 95%" or some other state where full regen is available. I live on top of a hill - when I take off I will be doing regen for the first mile or two and I rather like lifting my foot off the accelerator rather than hitting the brakes.

Slow1 said:

While I hear you on this and agree it is a possible solution - what a royal pain! I want to just plug in when I get home. I don't want to calculate how much time I need to charge to get to a targeted level. I have a base S so I'm not even sure how I'd set the charging limits/timing using the simplistic interface (if it is even possible). KISS is my philosophy...

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The "KISS" option for newer LEAFs without an 80% setting was mentioned by davidcary above: just set the end-time-only timer for a time later than when one is leaving. So, set it for an hour or so after one plans to leave and one likely will have a less than 100% charge. The time can be adjusted with some experimentation to get the approximate SOC level desired. Very simple and effective.

2014/2015 owners can do this or not, as they please. If they'd rather not, they can arrange to have their 100% charge finish shortly before they drive the car. There is considerable evidence that leaving Li-ion batteries at a high SOC increases the rate of degradation. The 2015 lizard battery might be more resistant to heat degradation but I'd be surprised if leaving it for an extended time at 100% didn't increase degradation somewhat.

That is less optimal for me. My TOU rates are before 5AM and I don't leave until 7AM, I'll miss the TOU. I just set the timer everyday to get 80% charge by 5AM. The only math is 2 minutes for 1% charge (27.5A/240V). I'll usually round up to the whole hour. Easy.

bbrowncods said:

That is less optimal for me. My TOU rates are before 5AM and I don't leave until 7AM, I'll miss the TOU. I just set the timer everyday to get 80% charge by 5AM. The only math is 2 minutes for 1% charge (27.5A/240V). I'll usually round up to the whole hour. Easy.

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That won't work for the S model since they have only a single end-time-only timer. S model owners have fewer options when it comes to hitting TOU windows and not having an 80% setting.

Lots of good workarounds here. Setting timers works well if you have a predictable schedule (or have an easy way of changing your timer each day). For my part I'm glad I have the 80% charge setting. While not the original intent, it works well for me.

If/when I go to replace my car I hope that whatever vehicle I buy has the ability to easily set a charge % limit. I drive different distances and leave at different times day to day. I like simplicity of not having to calculate or change settings as much as possible. Even those of you who advocate use of timers and such to force charging to stop must admit that having a setting would be easier.

I recognize that this is not something for everyone - perhaps I'm in the minority here. However, I don't understand how this would be difficult to implement (software controls everything and it is just a matter of writing the limit in which clearly they are capable of doing) and as an optional setting those who don't desire to use it can ignore it.

My guess is that this was dropped due to the perception of this 'limit' being required (thus effectively reducing range further) and changes to the battery and charging system that perhaps 'chops off' more of the top end - i.e. reporting 100% charged when actually substantially less than that from the "battery chemistry" point of view. I wouldn't be too surprised to learn that the so-called "lizard" battery really simply has a tad more capacity with the software in the car limiting the total charge a bit so the effective capacity remains the same... Likely this would help mitigate overcharge conditions when the battery temperatures increase (environmental causes) after a full charge (decreasing capacity) with the amount of energy in the battery remaining constant (parked in the heat). All speculation of course - but seems a reasonable solution if it worked

I started a thread about using the Belkin Wemo with the level 1 charger that comes with the car.
http://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=17678

The thing is rated at a level that should be OK for the charger, and I have yet to burn down the house.

In any case, I set up like 10 different charging options, each of which corresponds to some typical routine I might do, and each named in a way that indicates what percentage of charge I want to add. When I get home, I simply open the app on my phone and pick the appropriate charging option for where I'm at. Setup is simple.

In fact, I like it so much that I may not even purchase a level 2 EVSE for this very reason.

dgpcolorado said:

bbrowncods said:

That is less optimal for me. My TOU rates are before 5AM and I don't leave until 7AM, I'll miss the TOU. I just set the timer everyday to get 80% charge by 5AM. The only math is 2 minutes for 1% charge (27.5A/240V). I'll usually round up to the whole hour. Easy.

Click to expand...

That won't work for the S model since they have only a single end-time-only timer. S model owners have fewer options when it comes to hitting TOU windows and not having an 80% setting.

Click to expand...

Remember a lot of EVSEs have timers. Our Schneider does, although we never use it because the LEAFs have their own timer, but if you had an S you could use an EVSE timer instead.

For the nerdier crowd..

Knowing that keeping the SOC at 100% for longs periods of time isn't great for the battery, and that due to having solar, it's cheaper for me to charge on-peak, For a few years now I've used the 80% setting so when I get home, I plug in right away and the bulk of the charging is done on-peak. Overnight, the battery is at 80% hopefully making it happy.

Then I use the carwings web portal and a cron job to automatically start a 100% charge 1.5 hours before I leave for work in the morning.

So yeah I'd miss the 80% setting. Maybe one day they'll add a "stop charging" command to the web portal.

Set up to do logging of the EV-CAN bus from the OBD connector.
During charging, use Carwings to Stop charging, and try to find
a CAN message that stops the charging process.

Similarly, while doing the J1772 charging, press the button
to unlock the J1772 plug-handle, and again see if there is
a Stop-Charging message.

Has anybody found such a Stop-Charging message yet?

Once identified, if it exists, I could easily modify the GID-Meter
to have a stop-charging function, which the user could set
at almost any SOC level. Anything over 95% would probably
be a normal full charge.

Or, Leaf Spy Pro could be have that function added.