achewt
Well-known member
Hi all - I haven't lost any bars on my 2014 yet, but thought I would pop in and relay my experiences so far:
Manufacture Date: Feb 2014 (car was sitting on lot in Vancouver, BC)
Purchased Date: May 2014
Commute: 72 km one way
City: Nelson, BC; though the car spends 9-10 hours every day in Trail, BC, which is hotter and an open asphalt parking lot.
Climate: humid continental; summers are hot (for BC), averaging mid 20's (70 - 75) in May, June and September; 30's (85 - 100) in July and August. At night it is in a cool carport that is usually cooler than ambient temps as it is built into a hillside, so overnight temps of 10 (50) throughout summer. Fall/Spring are 5 - 15C. Winter is usually lows of -10 to 0; highs of -5 to 5. The car has been through two summers now, both hotter than average (especially this year).
Terrain: Mountainous! I gain/lose 500/650 m to and from work each day. Sometimes I drive to the nearby town of Rossland, so add another 600 m, charge while biking, then 600 m down and finish my commute.
Charging habits: I have an L2 at home, and charge to 100% every night during the non-summer seasons; typically arriving at work with 30 - 40% charge, then recharge to ~80% on L1 most days. Two months ago the first L2 was installed in Trail, so sometimes I use that charger and charge to 100% twice in a day. In the summer, I have messed with the timers to try and limit my charge to the 85-95% range. I rarely leave it sitting with 100% charge for more than a few hours. I've only QC'd 10 times while on long road trips, since there aren't any in my area.
I did not get an OBDII adapter/LeafSpy at first because I didn't want to bother with getting a different smart phone and thought I could track my apparent battery capacity by logging the dash data in a comprehensive fashion (log each trip, resetting the dash meters each time; recording km, km/kWh, avg speed, SOC% at start and end; I then calculated energy used, and divided that by SOC% used to infer the starting battery capacity in kWh).
After reviewing my daily commute data for the better part of a year, I found that my inferred battery capacity varied wildly from 16 kWh up to 24 kWh (sometimes higher, obviously not possible!) More troubling, I discovered that the Leaf screws up the efficiency calculation when incorporating regen energy. This became very obvious over some of the long descents that I can do in the Kootenays (> 1,000 m).
So, for the first year, I had no indication of what my actual capacity was at, though based on my real world observations, I inferred that it had not been much, since the GOM had only reduced starting range each morning by a few km from the year before (in similar conditions), and the amount of SOC% used for a given drive had stayed fairly constant. During a trip to the coast of BC, I was able to stop at an experimental DCQC station at BCIT, and the guy who runs the station came by and was able to read the capacity of my car as 20.7 kWh in June 2015.
This fall I discovered that LeafSpy was now available for the iPhone, so I bought the app and an adapter. I changed the settings to reflect a 2014 Leaf, but left the max GIDs at 281, and 77.5Wh/GID. I have since gathered the following readings:
Nov 7; 60,011 km; 62.94 Ahr, 96% SOH, 96.8% Hx, 273 GID (97% dash SOC), 21.2 kWh, batt temp 7.1
Dec 15; 61,963 km; 63.77 Ahr, 97% SOH, 97.9% Hx, 277 GID, 21.5 kWh (100% full balance charge), batt temp 8.4
Dec 29, 2015; 63,144 km; 63.79 Ahr, 97% SOH, 97.9% Hx, 267 GID, 20.7 kWh (97% dash SOC), batt temp 8.7
Dec 30, 2015; 63,265 km; 64.26 Ahr, 98% SOH, 98.5% Hx, 279 GID, 21.6 kWh (100%, 1 hr balancing), temp 7.4
Ambient temps over the last few weeks have been around -5 to 0C.
This morning I logged my trip to work with some screenshots of LeafSpy and plugged it into a spreadsheet, and it confirmed what I had noticed casually while viewing LeafSpy; often my energy remaining and energy consumed values do not total the amount of energy shown as available at the start of a trip. I left the house with 21.6 kWh available, and arrived to work with 8.4 kWh available and 11.5 kWh consumed for a total of 19.9 kWh. I extrapolated that trend, and noted that if I had driven to about 1 kWh remaining in the battery (as shown on LeafSpy), I would actually have been at 1 kWh remaining, 17.9 kWh consumed, for a total of 18.9 kWh.
That is a rather disturbing loss, and I'm not sure how to account for it. Can anyone provide some insight there? I'm hoping it is somehow related to the loss in capacity due to the temperature of the battery. Note that the efficiency shown in LeafSpy of 6.3 km/kWh matched that of the dash (though perhaps LS pulls that from the car?)
(Actually on that note, I would love it if someone could show me that calculation, and whether it shows up on LeafSpy, it would make my trip planner spreadsheet http://kootenayevfamily.ca/ev-basics/trip-planner-spreadsheet/ much more accurate if I could really figure out how many kWh are available for a certain battery temperature!)
I also have an OT question - does the value of a GID degrade along with the battery? Curious because have read elsewhere that guess is that the car uses number of GIDs to determine SOC% to display on the dash (and typically the LS GID% matches my dash SOC%, for the most part).
Edit: date of manufacture was actually Feb 2014, not Jan 2014 as originally stated.
Manufacture Date: Feb 2014 (car was sitting on lot in Vancouver, BC)
Purchased Date: May 2014
Commute: 72 km one way
City: Nelson, BC; though the car spends 9-10 hours every day in Trail, BC, which is hotter and an open asphalt parking lot.
Climate: humid continental; summers are hot (for BC), averaging mid 20's (70 - 75) in May, June and September; 30's (85 - 100) in July and August. At night it is in a cool carport that is usually cooler than ambient temps as it is built into a hillside, so overnight temps of 10 (50) throughout summer. Fall/Spring are 5 - 15C. Winter is usually lows of -10 to 0; highs of -5 to 5. The car has been through two summers now, both hotter than average (especially this year).
Terrain: Mountainous! I gain/lose 500/650 m to and from work each day. Sometimes I drive to the nearby town of Rossland, so add another 600 m, charge while biking, then 600 m down and finish my commute.
Charging habits: I have an L2 at home, and charge to 100% every night during the non-summer seasons; typically arriving at work with 30 - 40% charge, then recharge to ~80% on L1 most days. Two months ago the first L2 was installed in Trail, so sometimes I use that charger and charge to 100% twice in a day. In the summer, I have messed with the timers to try and limit my charge to the 85-95% range. I rarely leave it sitting with 100% charge for more than a few hours. I've only QC'd 10 times while on long road trips, since there aren't any in my area.
I did not get an OBDII adapter/LeafSpy at first because I didn't want to bother with getting a different smart phone and thought I could track my apparent battery capacity by logging the dash data in a comprehensive fashion (log each trip, resetting the dash meters each time; recording km, km/kWh, avg speed, SOC% at start and end; I then calculated energy used, and divided that by SOC% used to infer the starting battery capacity in kWh).
After reviewing my daily commute data for the better part of a year, I found that my inferred battery capacity varied wildly from 16 kWh up to 24 kWh (sometimes higher, obviously not possible!) More troubling, I discovered that the Leaf screws up the efficiency calculation when incorporating regen energy. This became very obvious over some of the long descents that I can do in the Kootenays (> 1,000 m).
So, for the first year, I had no indication of what my actual capacity was at, though based on my real world observations, I inferred that it had not been much, since the GOM had only reduced starting range each morning by a few km from the year before (in similar conditions), and the amount of SOC% used for a given drive had stayed fairly constant. During a trip to the coast of BC, I was able to stop at an experimental DCQC station at BCIT, and the guy who runs the station came by and was able to read the capacity of my car as 20.7 kWh in June 2015.
This fall I discovered that LeafSpy was now available for the iPhone, so I bought the app and an adapter. I changed the settings to reflect a 2014 Leaf, but left the max GIDs at 281, and 77.5Wh/GID. I have since gathered the following readings:
Nov 7; 60,011 km; 62.94 Ahr, 96% SOH, 96.8% Hx, 273 GID (97% dash SOC), 21.2 kWh, batt temp 7.1
Dec 15; 61,963 km; 63.77 Ahr, 97% SOH, 97.9% Hx, 277 GID, 21.5 kWh (100% full balance charge), batt temp 8.4
Dec 29, 2015; 63,144 km; 63.79 Ahr, 97% SOH, 97.9% Hx, 267 GID, 20.7 kWh (97% dash SOC), batt temp 8.7
Dec 30, 2015; 63,265 km; 64.26 Ahr, 98% SOH, 98.5% Hx, 279 GID, 21.6 kWh (100%, 1 hr balancing), temp 7.4
Ambient temps over the last few weeks have been around -5 to 0C.
This morning I logged my trip to work with some screenshots of LeafSpy and plugged it into a spreadsheet, and it confirmed what I had noticed casually while viewing LeafSpy; often my energy remaining and energy consumed values do not total the amount of energy shown as available at the start of a trip. I left the house with 21.6 kWh available, and arrived to work with 8.4 kWh available and 11.5 kWh consumed for a total of 19.9 kWh. I extrapolated that trend, and noted that if I had driven to about 1 kWh remaining in the battery (as shown on LeafSpy), I would actually have been at 1 kWh remaining, 17.9 kWh consumed, for a total of 18.9 kWh.
That is a rather disturbing loss, and I'm not sure how to account for it. Can anyone provide some insight there? I'm hoping it is somehow related to the loss in capacity due to the temperature of the battery. Note that the efficiency shown in LeafSpy of 6.3 km/kWh matched that of the dash (though perhaps LS pulls that from the car?)
(Actually on that note, I would love it if someone could show me that calculation, and whether it shows up on LeafSpy, it would make my trip planner spreadsheet http://kootenayevfamily.ca/ev-basics/trip-planner-spreadsheet/ much more accurate if I could really figure out how many kWh are available for a certain battery temperature!)
I also have an OT question - does the value of a GID degrade along with the battery? Curious because have read elsewhere that guess is that the car uses number of GIDs to determine SOC% to display on the dash (and typically the LS GID% matches my dash SOC%, for the most part).
Edit: date of manufacture was actually Feb 2014, not Jan 2014 as originally stated.