Sunday, September 15, 2013

Cmon Winter! Should I be saying that??

Ya, what's up with that?  Don't I lose like 10 miles of range in the cold and wet? Actually I do and I dread dusting off the heated jacket and what not but at the same time; its becoming apparent my LEAF is looking forward to cooler times.

As mentioned previously; Keith was nice enough to send me an "ELM" a small bluetooth enabled device that reads the CAN bus data and transmits it to my old Motorola Droid X phone.  One of the many bits of information it sends is two metrics that monitor battery pack state and health which are total capacity measured in amp-hours and Battery health which gives one an overall picture of how well the pack is feeling in a way.  Naturally these are two things we want to track for the long term.

When I first started using the ELM a few weeks back I was at 58.09 Ahr and health was 76.60%.  but both numbers started to declined immediately on a daily basis.  On Wed, I recorded Ahr reading of 57.57 and batt health of 75.74% (temps were in the 90's) and was resigning myself to losing my first bar by mid October, but...

**The weatherman had predicted temps in the low 90's and mid 80's for the week but that did not happen. a weather system blew in off the Pacific and parked itself (could not make it over the mountains I guess) and so we have had cloudy overcast and COOL days with temps mostly in the 60's with brief touches in the low 70's. Mornings cool in the upper 50's.

** LEAF not being used. Had 150 mile run on Friday so took the gasser so LEAF just did errands and logged 35.2 miles.  Since I did not work Saturday, I decided not to charge overnight instead opting to plug in first thing in the morning which I did about 5 AM and also opened garage door as well.  Temps were in mid 50's. Started running errands Sat and eventually went 102 miles with a 10.83 Kwh QC at Tumwater AV which shot my batt temps to 88º (highest reading so far!) Temps were 65ish until late afternoon when the Sun finally came out. Don't know the official score but guessing best we got was 70 maybe...

Today is late job so opted to not charge last night again and did the same plugging in this morning and opening garage door. Then went out for short trip and about freaked out when Batt App booted up. My ahr reading 58.29!!  Health was 77.09% both all time high readings!

So basically, it took 2½ days of cool weather and light driving for the BMS to readjust??  really looking forward to any changes in the next few days. Work schedule is not light but early part of the week, all the work is in town so should be light driving.

My only regret is I did not do a full charge (only had 11 bars) so don't know if the GID count has rebounded but hoping for something in the 250 range!

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