Avoid if you can, don't worry about it if needed.BillAinCT said:Long time owners please let us newbies know - is fast charging not recommended or to be avoided?
Bill
The more important lesson is to not leave the car sitting at full charge, and this is all the more true when the battery is at high temperature -- e.g., in the summer, or after DC fast charging.
Newbies look for good/bad dichotomies but it doesn't really work that way. Battery temperature, SoC, and duration are the main variables and they exist on a sliding scale where less is better. Battery degradation is fastest when each variable is on the high side and they co-exist at the same time.
From our 2013 LEAF: our 24 kWh battery has about 17 - 18 kWh usable. When my wife plans to take longer drives she charges up to 100% SoC and the car can sit for hours before it is used. In the winter I'm not happy about the behavior but I don't worry about it too much. If it happened in the summer I would have a small temper tantrum. Day after day would be a reason to hide another information session.
LEAF care, advanced
An interesting puzzle occurs in the winter because charging a cold battery is another degradation pathway known as 'Li plating.' I choose to charge the car immediately after a drive in the winter when the battery is warm, as opposed to in the early morning in the summer. My behavior has the undesirable side-effect in the winter of leaving the LEAF to stew at a higher SoC since the car will usually only be used the next day. My gen LEAF lets us choose 80% SoC so I'm less concerned about the extra time it sits at that SoC. It would be a much harder choice if the car was charged up to 100% SoC every day**.
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If faced with a LEAF that only charged to 100%, I would reprogram my EVSE to a lower amperage in the winter so that charging completed closer to when the car was used and the cold battery would not have to take high-er amps.