The Numbers
For the month, I traveled 1098.8 miles @ 4.21 miles/kwh costing me $4.22 (8.44 cents/kwh) in home electricity costs. I did use 234.9 kwh from my current EVgo Nissan Perks Program that would have cost me $73.25. As it stands, I have $149.63 in credit left to use. Because the theaters are closed down, my use of Volta has trickled down to near zero with only one stint gaining 13 kwh. What can I say? With no sit down restaurants working, no movies and only a handful of shops open (against State COVID guidelines, I might add) there just isn't a whole lot to do there. The one time I did plug in was to walk around to check out possible places to go and to check the progress of the West Olympia EA station which was only 2 blocks away.
Since this was not an adjustment month, not a whole lot to report on the degradation front. I ended the month with ahr of 170.72 (down .18) and SOH 96.78% (down .09%). In monitoring other E Plus stats from around the World, I am realizing that my first adjustment was double the norm. So does this mean I won't see another adjustment for 6 months instead of the usual 3?
I have also wondered if my large drop was due to nearly 100% DC charging? Tesla heats up its pack to better accept a charge and they are doing fine albeit with different chemistry and my charging has only been during the cold weather season so I am rarely seeing batt temps over 80ยบ with DC charging and now wondering if cold pack charging is a good thing like it used to be? More on that below.
Pandemic Promos
Both EA and EVgo have lowered costs to charge at their stations during the COVID Crisis. EVgo has dropped their per minute rates to 20 cents from 25 cents. This drops my average cost to charge to roughly 27 cents/kwh. Better but far from good. If you are on the road and need a charge, its fine but there are cheaper options.
And EA is one of them. They normally charge $4 a month to get their lowest price which in WA is 18 cents/minute. But EA stations charge faster if you are driving an E Plus so my average on those stations was down to 17.2 cents/kwh. Since my cost per kwh is lower than the cost per minute, this means I am averaging more than 60 KW during the session.
Now EA still only has one Chademo per location but the locations have doubled in the past year. 5 new locations are now being built including another one in my town in West Olympia. Again, not what I would like to see as far as placement especially when everything west of me is still uncovered including the entire Olympic Peninsula.
Clock
This is weird. On my previous LEAFs I don't remember this being an issue but for the 3rd time, I had to move my clock forward 2 minutes. This means for some reason, the clock is either
counting time too slowly
stopping briefly for some reason.
Now the losing time slowly does not "seem" to be the case since the last time I had to reset the time was a few months ago. Losing time slowly is something I would have noticed sooner I would think. But it was jump in the car and notice the clock is not right. Now 2 minutes here and there is something that "most" people don't notice or care about. I am not one of those people and never have been. Back in the dinosaur age of computers, my PC was always on Atomic Time where it sync'd with some sort of super accurate Timex in Colorado or some place (just a joke there...) . With the advent of cellphones and their tight integration with GPS; being on the same page with time is critical so my phone now takes care of that. With my car being connected to my home Wi Fi ALL the time its home (I see the "disconnected from ..." message every day when I get out of range) one would think...
No... ALL except Nissan apparently, would think that time would be one of the things the connection would keep in sync.
The Heat Is ON!
Many times I had commented on the 40 kwh pack not seemingly being affected by differences in climate from ALL over the World. It seemed like the degradation rate of every pack was in lockstep with variances very small.
This trend has continued with the E Plus packs and one of the earliest E Plus owners posted his recent stats.
Here are a couple of data points from my car: Initial Leaf Spy reading at 64 miles on 8/11/2019: 175.15 AHr, 99.29% SOH, 98.19% Hx, 1 QC, 6 L1/L2, 64 ODO. Tonight at 14,164 miles on 4/2/2020: 172.77 AHr, 97.94% SOH, 113.77% Hx, 4 QC, 103 L1/L2, 14,164 ODO.
The car was manufactured in July 2020 and purchased on August 10, 2020 with 30 miles on the odometer (my dealer picked it up the day it was delivered to a dealer across town).
At 100,000 miles his Ahr (estimated amount of charge in the pack) will be 158 ahr or 90.4% of his original capacity. Now realize that time is a degradation factor that even Tesla's suffer from so his stats will be a bit better looking than most due to his averaging 20,000 miles a year driving. That is the "not so good" news. His location? He lives in the area world renowned for battery longevity; Phoenix Arizona.
