ElectricEddy said:
LeftieBiker said:
I saw this just last night, and it puzzled the hell out of me. The thing is, I had charged the 12 volt battery with the maintainer just a couple of hours earlier. I reconnected the maintainer and it charged a bit more, but the battery wasn't super low. I wonder if this is an early symptom of 12V battery failure...?
I have always (bi-monthly) hooked up my Canadian Tire 12V battery charger on the battery posts except the last time about 3 weeks ago when I decided to put the negative lead to the negative wire on the PDM/inverter block. The 20A gfci receptacle supplying the charger decided to trip after plugging it in (sometimes this happens even when I normally hook the charger leads up to the battery posts, I suspect surge current causes it); however, this time the 3rd blue light came on (after a few relay clicks and low and behold there was 14 volts being supplied from the leaf's traction pack . This lasted 5 minutes and brought the battery voltage up to 12.6v approx. I suspect the leaf detected a large draw through the current sensor mounted on the load side of the batteries negative terminal and thus topped up the charge. After it finished I hooked up the Can. Tire charger like I always do back to the battery posts directly and topped it off with a 2A trickle charge for about 5-6 hours bringing the voltage to about 13v. Needless to say I will NOT be hooking up the negative charger lead to the to the PDM negative connection again! (Bypass the current sensor).
I think you have it backwards.
When you charge direct to the battery post you have bypassed the current sensor.
I think Ingineer's original recommendation to not charge direct to the battery posts is still correct.
When you charge direct to the posts, the LEAF negative lead current sensor is bypassed. That is undesireable for the LEAF knowing the 12V charge level.
When you hooked up the charger and pulled a surge out of the 12V battery tripping the GFCI, the LEAF did the correct thing to charge the 12V back up.
