My Nissan Leaf Forum

I have a 2012 that arrived in Dec. I would see the same results, finishing 2.5 to 3 hours early. I also had a climate timer set to finish when I was leaving for work. The last week I have turn off the climate timer, and now the charge end message is only 30 minutes early. When using the climate timer, I gave the charging timer priority, I wonder if it was trying to make sure the battery was charged so that it could run the climate timer as requested. Because once I turned the climate timer off, the end time is now within 30 minutes.

Very interesting observation. When you say you turn the timer off, do you mean completely off? I "skip" days on the climate timer by using the assign days function and turning the timer off for a particular day and this doesn't appear to change my early charge ending, but maybe I'll try turning the climate timer COMPLETELY off and see if that makes a difference.

My dash estimate most definately adjusts based on the last charge current. If I use 12a 240v the dash shows about 2 to 1 ratio 120v vs 240v. If charged at 16a 240v it is closer to 3 to 1 ratio 120v vs 240v.

Yes, I turned the climate timer completely off.

I think you figured it out!

I had the opportunity to experiment today. I disabled both Climate timers and the LEAF finished charging only 30 min ahead of its scheduled time this morning. Apparently it's not enough to just have the climate timer disabled for the day in question (which I do all the time) but it has to be completely disabled by turning both timers off.

That is really strange (and I believe unwarranted) behavior. Even if the car is attempting to finish charging before it's going to turn on the climate control, it's way overestimating the climate control time. I've noticed that it turns on either 20 or 30 minutes before my scheduled departure time (which is a LONG time by the way--I suspect it limits the power to what it can pull from the EVSE when using the climate timer, as it only takes 5 minutes to get the car super toasty even when sitting outside on batteries only). Even if it backed up the charging timer that half hour I'd expect it to finish an hour early on days that I had a timer set, and even then I believe it should intelligently determine if there is even a conflict. I already programmed in a staggered charging end/climate departure time when I set it up to avoid any conflicts.

Example:
Scheduled departure time is 7:20am
Set climate timer to 7:20am
Set charging END timer to 6:30am

Even if the car stops charging at 6:30am, the climate control doesn't start until 6:50am so there is no conflict.

I have never set any kind of climate timer, nor ever done any climate preconditioning before leaving home. Yet my charging continues to end roughly two hours early. I will say that after an apparent cell balancing 5 days ago (two Charging Ended emails on the only night recently that I charged to 100%) I have seen charging stopped 103, 105, and 110 minutes early. Before that it was stopping more than 120 minutes early on most nights. But, as I mentioned before, I do not have the Carwings firmware upgrade that came out last summer, and I suspect that is causing the behavior I see.

Ray

Not very.

My charging ends 3 to 3-1/2 hours before the end time is set on the car's timer. I originally set the end timer 1 for every weekday at 4:30 am (to allow for some leeway for the CC timer set at 5:30 am (end time). Now that I am more aware of battery capacity issues, cooling before charging and not leaving the battery in a high SOC for long periods, plus getting my email messages working, I'm paying more attention to this. I was getting charge ending emails at 1:30 am or earlier with a 4:30 am END time timer setting. Same at work with Phil's EVSE Upgrade at 240V. Given the daily one-way commute is very repeatable and leaves me at or maybe 3 bars from 80%, I've taken to setting timers with START times and estimating the charge duration (usually under 4 hours). This usually gets me to within one hour before my estimated end time.

I have a Canadian model 2011 (the "cool climate" US 2012 model?) built in April 2011. I have had the CW firmware update performed. I use the CC timers regularly (and they always work). I'm in the Eastern Time Zone. I have a Schneider L2 dock at home (which has a delayed start option, but I never have used it -- only the timers in the car). I otherwise have had no issues with the timers working as they are supposed to, other than this extremely pessimistic calculation of charge duration/early charge initiation.

I'd really like to not have to second-guess the timers and simply set the END time for maybe 30 to 60 minutes before my departure, and have the CC kick in at 15 minutes or so before the departure time. My error with the charging timer is of the same order of magnitude as the charging itself!

Renny

When traveling through space it is best not to set your end timer in a black hole or in the event horizon. This may yield undesirable results.


Deeper thoughts....

My 80% end-timer seems to be typically around 1 to 1.5 hours early. It seems the smaller charge it needs, the earlier it finishes. More often than not I'll park it with 4-5 bars though. Pacific time zone.

I use to charge to 100% with an end-only timer. My observation was that it ended at most 1.5 hours early and then only if the battery started nearly empty. The less it needed to charge, the less early it started. I'd assumed that the car timer was calibrated for Japanese 200V mains instead of US 240V and thus, assumed that it would take longer to charge than it actually did.

I haven't used an end timer in 6 months so I don't know if the latest software update changed anything.