Battery Pack Temperature issue

It's 62 degrees outside and my car finished a normal charge 5 hours ago. After a 25 minute drive my battery pack temperature is at 6 bars, with little regen. Normally it's at 5 bars or even 4 if I'm not driving often.

I'm over 60,000 on my 2011. I'm wondering if other Nissan Leaf drivers are noticing the same trend?

Your post title should maybe end in a ?.

The bars are pretty worthless. Look at the ranges and their overlap at http://www.electricvehiclewiki.com/Battery#Battery_Temperature_Gauge" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;. And, there's this mysterious "correction", which would be a total black box. I wouldn't worry about it.

Assuming that you charged to 100%, 5-6 temp bars seems pretty much normal to me.

Leafer77 said:

It's 62 degrees outside and my car finished a normal charge 5 hours ago. After a 25 minute drive my battery pack temperature is at 6 bars, with little regen. Normally it's at 5 bars or even 4 if I'm not driving often.

I'm over 60,000 on my 2011. I'm wondering if other Nissan Leaf drivers are noticing the same trend?

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I have monitored my 2011 LEAF battery temp using LEAF Spy Pro for two years, and I don't see anything unusual about your results. My experience in Silicon Valley is that the cooling rate of the battery pack is about 0.5F/hr while the LEAF is parked in the garage (ambient temp of 60-70F). It takes a long time for the battery to cool while parked. Your pack may be close to 6 bars when you started to drive, so it reached 6 bars shortly thereafter. If you don't have it, get the LEAF Spy and you will generate more data than you ever wanted, but better than relying on the battery bars on the dash (not very helpful).

Leafer77 said:

It's 62 degrees outside and my car finished a normal charge 5 hours ago. After a 25 minute drive my battery pack temperature is at 6 bars, with little regen. Normally it's at 5 bars or even 4 if I'm not driving often.

I'm over 60,000 on my 2011. I'm wondering if other Nissan Leaf drivers are noticing the same trend?

Click to expand...

Our 2011 is closing on 51,000 miles and the battery temp has only rarely begun to bump again into 6 bars. "Normal" this time of year is usually 5, but it still varies from 4 to 6, depending on the current weather. The important change for us is that capacity has once again begun to decline, this week finally going below 46 AHr. Your trend seems pretty normal to us.

I'm not used to seeing 6 or 7 temp bars, unless its over 85 degrees outside or I've recently charged and driven right away. I didn't realize that that the gauge is pretty much worthless. Good to know!

Yes, I should have put a question mark after the topic title.

A battery's internal resistance will gradually increase as it ages, and that will lead to higher charge/discharge temperatures.

But, as noted, the temperature resolution of the bars is too large to come to any meaningful conclusions here.

Leafer77 said:

I'm not used to seeing 6 or 7 temp bars, unless its over 85 degrees outside or I've recently charged and driven right away. I didn't realize that that the gauge is pretty much worthless. Good to know!

Yes, I should have put a question mark after the topic title.

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I did a QC today after driving 50 miles, most up I-280 in Bay Area Peninsula [Cupertino to Daly City] – speeds usually close to 60 mph. When I started QC in Daly City, there were 5 battery bars and dash temperature was 65F. SOC was 27%[76 gids], and after close to 30 min QC, the SOC was 68.7[192 gids]. The dash temp was still 65F, but now there were 6 battery bars. LEAF Spy showed the max. battery temp was 80.2F and battery had 15.4 kWh. On 1/16, I did a QC at same location after driving on I-280, but was much cooler [dash temp was 51F]. After the QC, the max battery temp. was 65.7F and there were 5 battery bars before and after QC. I have yet to see 7 battery bars, even after QC.

From my experience the effect of QC on the pack temperature depends on how low of a SOC you start charging at. The lower you start the more temperature rise you get. Rarely do I see the temp bars move when starting the charge at 4-5 energy bars.

All of sudden my battery temps changed. When used first thing in the morning I have 6 bars, with an ambient temp of 75. It had always been at 5 bars. I wonder what happened.

As was stated previously, the temperature bars are so coarse and with so much hysteresis as to be of marginal value. Also, the actual temperature for a given bar changes with battery degradation. Best to use Leaf Spy for this purpose so you have actual numbers...

DesertDenizen said:

All of sudden my battery temps changed. When used first thing in the morning I have 6 bars, with an ambient temp of 75. It had always been at 5 bars. I wonder what happened.

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