Unexpected FAST charge?

I'm used to my LEAF (2012, first delivery in Fairfax County, Virginia in November of 2011) taking circa seven hours to charge up fully. Today, I ran it all the way down to below two miles remaining range ("-----"). Then I plugged it in, expecting to get a text when it had charged in around 6-7 hours, up to 100%.

However, charging stopped at _four_ hours, and the car seems to be 80% charged, and I have no idea why it's now charging so fast.

Over 22,500 miles (just had the third maintenance done), the battery has diminished from 12-bars-max to 11-bars-max. I'm wondering if the four hour, 80% charge may be tied in to the diminished "full" level, but I haven't read anything about that and hadn't expected it.

Comments most welcome --

Edward

Normal. Sounds like you'll be losing your 2nd bar any day now.

It should take more than 4 hours to charge even if it were down to 8 capacity bars. You say it appears to be charged to 80% so maybe there is a timer set with 80% charge enabled.

I was commenting on the 4 hour 80% charge by itself. It shouldn't have stopped charging unless there's 80% timer set or there may have been a EVSE fault.

Even with our dinky 3.3kW chargers, the Leaf will ramp down the charge rate as the SoC approaches 100%. I've noticed empirically that the car charges at full speed up to 80%, but not after on my 2012. I could believe that a 6 hour 100% charge would translate to a 4 hour 80% charge.

4 hours at 3.3kWh = 13.2kWh out of the charger.
80% * 85% (11 of 12 bars) * 21kWh (approx "new" usable capacity) = 14.3kWh

You probably had at least 0.5 kWh left in the battery, so maybe your battery is degraded a little more than 85%. But all the (back-of-the-envelope) numbers work out.

I wrote poorly and apologize. To clarify a little and reply to you (with my thanks for all comments)...

Re:

You say it appears to be charged to 80% so maybe there is a timer set with 80% charge enabled.

Click to expand...

I had hit the "charge all the way to 100%" button, so it should have gone to 100% of whatever it has, meaning about eleven bars. But that raises another question or two, about the "charge all the way to 100%" button: I had assumed that it was a trigger, not a flip-flop. (A trigger is an on-switch (in this case) that only makes the operation happen. A flip-flop makes it happen the first time you press it, but the second time you press it makes it _not_ happen.) Is the "charge all the way to 100%" button actually an on/off button, which activates the charging-limit override on the first press and DE-activates it on the second press? And why, when I press it, do I sometimes get what seems to be a responsive beep and other times hear nothing at all?

Edward

But did you have the 80% charge enabled when you pressed the timer override button? The override button is a one time deal, if there is a power outage during charging you're back to whatever your charging timers are set to when the power is restored. I always disable my timers at public charging locations to avoid this kind of problems.

ehrice said:

I had hit the "charge all the way to 100%" button, so it should have gone to 100% of whatever it has, meaning about eleven bars. But that raises another question or two, about the "charge all the way to 100%" button: I had assumed that it was a trigger, not a flip-flop. (A trigger is an on-switch (in this case) that only makes the operation happen. A flip-flop makes it happen the first time you press it, but the second time you press it makes it _not_ happen.) Is the "charge all the way to 100%" button actually an on/off button, which activates the charging-limit override on the first press and DE-activates it on the second press? And why, when I press it, do I sometimes get what seems to be a responsive beep and other times hear nothing at all?

Edward

Click to expand...

Edward,

The override button is not a flip-flop. Pressing it a second time will not disable the "charge to 100%" request. But if you are not always hearing a beep when you press the button, maybe your press didn't register with the car? It could be as simple as a faulty button, which sometimes works and other times doesn't. If the car registers the button press, you should 1) get a "beep" and 2) see the middle LED on the dash (of the three blue LEDs) light up to acknowledge.

Also, as Valdemar alluded to, if the car ever disconnects from the power source, the "charge to 100%" request is reset, and the car reverts to the current timer (if any). This could be from unplugging / replugging the car. It could also be from an external event such as a power outage.