Technical 500e Charging Frequency

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Technical 500e Charging Frequency

Like I said earlier, it would simply be bad publicity to advertise 'don't use this product to it's maximium capacity', especially since so many batteries are over rated. The manufacturers really don't want you to get maximum life out of a battery either.

Yeah.

Consumer information (or lack thereof) is heavily influenced by the marketing department, who do not want prospective purchasers to be negatively influenced by statements that fully charging the car may significantly shorten battery life. Unfortunately the marketing department cannot change the laws of physics.

The big killer of electric vehicle batteries is leaving them unused in a warm climate when fully charged. No amount of intelligent battery cooling will help fix that.

I'd agree that, for a smartphone, the use value of keeping it topped up justifies sacrificing battery life, but smartphone batteries can be bought for a few pounds - on EV's, they're a large part of the total cost; replacement will cost many thousands & most informed owners are not so cavalier in their approach.
 
So why are we quoting Toyota recommendations on a 500e thread?

Why are we quoting recommendations for a completely different battery chemistry on a 500e thread?

There seems to be a lot of extraneous stuff posted that is indeed about batteries, just about things not applicable to this car, this charging system, the fact these batteries are liquid temperature controlled, and on and on.

Just because you theorize that "the manufacturer would do this because it would not be bad advertising" does not make something true, not every manufacturer is devious.

Spend more time learning about lithium ion batteries, and not just from a single site, and please, no more extraneous discussion on stuff that does not apply at all. If you don't realize that the charging procedure for liion is completely different from the Toyota nimih... then please consider if you know something or you are just doing some random copy and paste on something that SEEMS related to you.

Greg
 
I'm very chill, 71 degrees f here in San Diego CA. USA

Misinformation is not good, and there's a lot of it in the battery world.

Our li-ion batteries are no different in their charging requirements as the one in your cell phone, although they can take a higher charging current, mainly because they are liquid cooled.

Your charger on your laptop turns off ALL current once the battery is fully charged, otherwise it would burn up, really. No "float" or "trickle" charge going on after a full charge.

The worst thing you can do to your Fiat is run the battery down flat when you could top it off.

Unfortunately, I pay huge amounts for electricity (San Diego is second only to Alaska, and possibly Hawaii), so I charge on my "off peak" times, but would top off every opportunity if electricity was a bit cheaper... in the winter rates go down by half.

Greg
 
So why are we quoting Toyota recommendations on a 500e thread?

Why are we quoting recommendations for a completely different battery chemistry on a 500e thread?

If you don't realize that the charging procedure for liion is completely different from the Toyota nimih... then please consider if you know something or you are just doing some random copy and paste on something that SEEMS related to you.

Because as you say if you know about all chemistries, you will know that the charge protocol for NiMh was always to charge fully, discharge fully. Toyota were the only ones honest about the affect this would have on battery life. Before you say Nimh's didn't have a memory effect, that was only in relation to Ni-cad.

There seems to be a lot of extraneous stuff posted that is indeed about batteries, just about things not applicable to this car, this charging system, the fact these batteries are liquid temperature controlled, and on and on.
You know then that a battery gets two to three times as hot during discharging as it does charging? The liquid cooler is there only for the discharge phase and has little effect on charging. Charging at a 1C rate gets cells barely warm to the touch ~40*C is not so much of a problem, 80+ is. Most of the temperature rise is from the final 20% percent of charge (as charge acceptance drops, IR increases), so again not fully charging keeps battery temperatures in check more so than a full taper charge.

Just because you theorize that "the manufacturer would do this because it would not be bad advertising" does not make something true, not every manufacturer is devious.
This is called free market 'competition'. All I ever read about in the comments on EV's posted on regular motoring sites is about the limited range and hassle of charging. Imaging if the FIAT etc came out and said 'for best life, range should be limited to no more than 40miles'.

Spend more time learning about lithium ion batteries, and not just from a single site, and please, no more extraneous discussion on stuff that does not apply at all
I've been building my own lithium batterys for ten years, including car starting batteries and a 10hp electric buggy converted from a 2hp 23cc petrol motor. I was about to start a DIY EV project but a major problem with another car shelved that for the time being.
 
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Our li-ion batteries are no different in their charging requirements as the one in your cell phone, although they can take a higher charging current, mainly because they are liquid cooled.

Your charger on your laptop turns off ALL current once the battery is fully charged, otherwise it would burn up, really. No "float" or "trickle" charge going on after a full charge.

The worst thing you can do to your Fiat is run the battery down flat when you could top it off.

Taking more current is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Fiat have decided on a charge current and since the batteries already had to be liquid cooled for the discharge phase, chose to run the coolers during charging and allow a higher current.

Again, you seem to be posting the extraneous information, no one here mentioned a trickle charge. Fact remains that if you keep your laptop plugged in the battery remains at 100%, and keeping a Li-XX battery at full charge is 100% proven to shorten life (any good charger will have a storage mode for this reason). Presumably, keeping a 500e plugged in will also keep in at 100% indefinitely, trickle charge or not.

Finally, no one suggested running the battery down. My original post suggested keeping the battery at 70% as much as practical.

EDIT, I'll further add that I don't see 0% on the charge gauge as being a true 0, there'll be some headroom built in to avoid major battery damage. To get the exact ideal percentages, you'd have to measure the actual voltages yourself.
 
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More misinformation, it has NEVER been best to fully discharge a rechargeable battery, lead acid, gel cell, nicad, nimih, or li-ion or li-polymer or lithium metal.

For those who want to learn, there are avenues to get this information.

For those who are certain they are right, but believe the first paragraph above is in error, you can learn or continue to live in error.

It's long been my policy to stop arguing details when the foundation is wrong.

I'm done with this thread, tried to be helpful.

Greg
 
More misinformation, it has NEVER been best to fully discharge a rechargeable battery, lead acid, gel cell, nicad, nimih, or li-ion or li-polymer or lithium metal.


FWIW, we bought an electric toothbrush a few weeks ago, it actually advises once in a while to fully discharge it......
 
More misinformation, it has NEVER been best to fully discharge a rechargeable battery, lead acid, gel cell, nicad, nimih, or li-ion or li-polymer or lithium metal.

Dude, really. We used to store Ni-Cads dead shorted. There were devices sold to individually short Ni-Cad cells for storage in the 90's. This ONLY applied to Ni-Cads which apparently you know nothing about. I suppose you never heard of something called the memory effect either. I could be wrong on this but this was first suggested by NASA.

For those who want to learn, there are avenues to get this information.
From the battery university site you mentioned:

http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/charging_lithium_ion_batteries

Code:
Simple Guidelines for Charging Lithium-based Batteries

Lithium-ion does not need to be fully charged; a partial charge is better.
 
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JR is correct. The Prius for example keeps it's battery at 40-80% this is a good example because the car has a long battery warranty (in the US at least) and is not range limited by not fully charging.

So why are we quoting Toyota recommendations on a 500e thread?

Why are we quoting recommendations for a completely different battery chemistry on a 500e thread?

Because its not actually all that different.

For reference, the Prius Plug-In uses the same, if not better, lithium ion battery tech, that uses a real life battery range of 25-80% of full capacity for EV usage from what I've seen online (y)

Slightly better than the 40-80% quoted above, which will be for the standard Prius Ni-MH battery :)

It's also happy at sitting around this 25-35% level which is where it'll site when it reverts back to Hybrid Vehicle mode when the battery is depleted (y)
 
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Actually you clearly know nothing...

Letting a nicad go to zero invites polarity reversal. If you don't know this, you have no real knowledge nor experience.

The partial charge I believe to not fully discharging, and then recharging... but again battery university is the kindergarten for learning about batteries... there's still errors on that site.

Anyway, please continue to believe what you want, your recommendations will help pump more money into the battery industry.

Most everything I'm hearing from the experts here is old information, misinformation, or information on one battery type applied to another.

No wonder we decided to stop paying taxes. :rolleyes:

Greg

Dude, really. We used to store Ni-Cads dead shorted. There were devices sold to individually short Ni-Cad cells for storage in the 90's. This ONLY applied to Ni-Cads which apparently you know nothing about. I suppose you never heard of something called the memory effect either. I could be wrong on this but this was first suggested by NASA.

From the battery university site you mentioned:

http://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/charging_lithium_ion_batteries

Code:
Simple Guidelines for Charging Lithium-based Batteries

Lithium-ion does not need to be fully charged; a partial charge is better.
 
Actually you clearly know nothing...

Letting a nicad go to zero invites polarity reversal. If you don't know this, you have no real knowledge nor experience.

This only applies where cells are in series and drained as a circuit. It's 100% safe to discharge Ni-Cad cells to zero individually.

We used to store Ni-Cads dead shorted. There were devices sold to individually short Ni-Cad cells for storage in the 90's.

This was long before the idea of balance charging was made necessary by fragile and or volatile chemistries, all we could do was discharge cells individually and recharge them in their series configuration. There were some high end chargers that could handle what we today would call balance charging but they came with four figure price tags. Of course they weren't really balance chargers, but used the delta peak method for determining full individual cells.

I know the difference between a single cell and one in a series pack from both knowledge and experience.
 
Yes, and they don't sell or recommend discharging nicads to zero any more. There is a reason.

And how many years to get even "smart" engineers to stop recommending deep discharge cycles to combat "memory"?

Yes, you are technically correct, if you discharge a single cell to zero, and then charge it, the charger will "force" the correct polarity to that cell.

So you use anything at all with a single nicad?

I think that is enough said.

Greg
 
So you use anything at all with a single nicad?

Never said I did, these 6 cell series packs were tapped into by the balancer to enable individual cell discharge. I've still got some admittedly now near useless NiCads that are going on 20 years old. They still hold charge fine but their capacity makes them useless in most modern devices. Still good for powering Arduinos and such.
 
The answer is and always will be:

Don't worry about it. It doesn't matter.

The beauty of the 500e is that you plug it in whenever the car is at home.

The only concern should be for utility rates. You can program the car to avoid peak rates.

The car and it's batteries are disposable.

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At a cost though.

Nice car btw, I wish we had them in the UK.

There are lots of costs and lots of ways to measure them. ;)

Here is how the cost breaks down from a consumer's point of view in California. (sorry for the $US :eek: )

MSRP $32,000
Cost per mile for "fuel" @ $.335 per kWh = $.11 (same as 25mpg at $3.00 per gallon for petrol...I know how much a litre of liquid gold costs in the UK :eek:)

Buy the car with cash and watch it depreciate in 3 years to maybe $10,000 (we don't know yet what the market will be for used 500e cars)

To put this in perspective, this is more expensive than the acquisition and operating costs of my 2011 BMW 335d- purchased "certified pre-owned" in 2013 with 22,000 miles join the odometer.

It is more than a NEW Honda Accord V6.

BUT WAIT...

Some people actually buy 500e cars this way, but not many.

Most lease the car.

A standard deal is $999 down and $149 a month for 36 months for 10,000 miles per year.

The lease is subsidized by a $7500 federal tax credit, and by Fiat pretending that the car will be worth over $20,000 at the end of the lease (which means that no one in their right mind would purchase at the end of the lease).

Then you get a check in the mail from the State of California for $2500.

And a check from your County for $1000 in many areas.

And stickers that let you drive alone in HOV (carpool) lanes and cross bridges for $1 instead of $5.

And if you tell your utility that you have an EV, you can have your home's utility rate schedule changed. For all of the power you consume. At a minimum it changes you "fuel" cost to $.10 per kWh. In my case it lowered my electric bill by an average of $200 per month including the 300 kWh per month I use for the car.



The net cost to me is less than zero. Having a 500e in the garage that I get to drive 800 miles per month actually adds about $75 per month to my checking account. And I am not including the offset wear and tear on my other cars.

Crazy, huh? That, my friends, is California.
 
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I got the sport version.

$34,000 list
-$7,500 federal rebate
-$2,500 state rebate
-$8,500 discount (incentive from Fiat)

I traded in a 2001 Audi A6 turbo quattro
Gas used to cost me $160-$200 a month
My electric bill was about $650 a month.

Now no gas cost
Electric bill has gone down to about $450 a month (special rate)
Insurance went down a little

So basically I'm saving $350 to $400 a month, and the lease payment is $136... my tradein was $5,600... so I'm being PAID to drive the car.

Greg
 
Just thought I'd add for future Googlers, Tesla Model S doesn't fully charge it's batteries unless you select 'long range mode', Nissan Leaf had a similar 'charge to 80% mode'. I don't have a 500e so I frankly don't know if a 'full' charge is really full or if it actually stops at the best for battery life 80%.

I'm planning a plug in conversion for my Prius, and I'll be sizing the batteries for the required range on an 80% charge.
 
Just thought I'd add for future Googlers, Tesla Model S doesn't fully charge it's batteries unless you select 'long range mode', Nissan Leaf had a similar 'charge to 80% mode'. I don't have a 500e so I frankly don't know if a 'full' charge is really full or if it actually stops at the best for battery life 80%.

I'm planning a plug in conversion for my Prius, and I'll be sizing the batteries for the required range on an 80% charge.

Just to add a complication, you need to find out if this '80%' charge is 80% SOC or indicated 80% charge, which will be lower than 80% SOC.

No EV's fully charge or discharge their batteries. My Prius plug in when 100% charged will only ever have a 85% SOC, equally when fully depleted its SOC is still around 18.5-19%
 
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