battery charging capacity - does a 9 bar car take in

battery charging capacity - does a 9 bar car take in as much electricity as 12 bar car

I know this is a very stupid question but google search is not helping me find an answer i can show my husband. (yes this is a marital dispute)

My husband says, the battery still takes as much power from the house to charge the battery no matter if it is brand new or on a lower amount (9 ) of bars. (also it takes longer and he is also suggesting it takes even more power because it has to be plugged in longer).


I say the battery is like a glass of water and if my capacity new was like a 12 oz glass of water the used battery will only hold 9 oz of liquid., I am actually using less electricity when i charge the battery and the time plugged in doesn't matter. I will only be using the amount that the battery will hold and it will be less than the capacity of a brand new battery.

If you can point me to a website that will settle this heated discussion I would appreciate it, because he will not believe me.

You are more correct - less energy can be stored by a degraded battery, and thus it takes less from the house. He is partially correct in that a bit more electricity can be wasted as heat in the process of charging a degraded battery (because of higher internal resistance), but the car definitely stores less energy and it requires less to charge it. Some charging stations show energy used to charge and they confirm this. A new 24kwh Leaf takes roughly 22kwh of power to charge to full from empty, while a 9 bar Leaf would take less than 20kwh, if I remember correctly. So it's more like a glass of water than not.

thank you so much

LeftieBiker said:

You are more correct - less energy can be stored by a degraded battery, and thus it takes less from the house. He is partially correct in that a bit more power can be wasted as heat in the process of charging a degraded battery (because of higher internal resistance), but the car definitely stores less power and it requires less to charge it. Some charging stations show energy used to charge and they confirm this. A new 24kwh Leaf takes roughly 22kwh of power to charge to full from empty, while a 9 bar Leaf would take less than 20kwh, if I remember correctly. So it's more like a glass of water than not.

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You were doing well until the bolded sentence.

POWER and ENERGY mean different things.

Answers:
The POWER to charge a degraded battery is not much different than when new
Less ENERGY will go into the degraded battery (the smaller glass analogy)
The time to fill the battery is tricky because the charging rate drops as the battery gets close to full. Since you really don't care how long it takes to fill to a certain percentage but rather how long it takes to reach a certain number of miles range, the larger capacity battery will not lose the race. Put another way, arguing that a lower capacity LEAF can take in e.g. 30 miles of range (to reach say 50% full from empty) faster than a larger capacity LEAF can take in 40 miles of range (to reach 50% full from empty) is not a persuasive argument.

battery charging capacity - does a 9 bar car take in as much electricity as 12 bar car

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It depends !
If the electricity is an amount, then no
If the electricity is an amount per time, then yes

Leftie: A 9 capacity bar, '24 kWh' LEAF has lost (15+6+6) + (0>x<6) = 27 -- 33% of new capacity lost, so as low as ~ 14.7 kWh usable

OP: Google will teach you the meanings and usage of power and energy, then your marital spat can be resolved amicably ;-)

Good Luck!

Yes, energy, not "power." I had already used the correct term once in that paragraph. I'm a little busy here, stopping spam. BTW, the word "power" was the only part that needed to be bolded. ;-)

LeftieBiker said:

I'm a little busy here, stopping spam

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Yay !