how slow should charging be in very cold weather?

-20 deg C or colder here lately in montreal, canada. just had a PDM replacement so not sure if everything is functioning as normal.

2014 SL with 6.6kw + QC. SOH around 95% or so.

i'm seeing the car charge very slowly - public stations showing around 3kw going into the car. did a quick charge today and it only put in 5kWh in 30 minutes, which means around 10kw average over the session!

in most of these cases battery temp was showing 2 bars. (didn't have leaf spy to see exact batt temp)

normal, or something potentially wrong?

For the public stations, some of them might be only 16 amp or turned down or might be CT4000 series stations with power sharing due to only having a single 40 amp feed instead of 2 (or misconfigured).

https://insideevs.com/under-threat-from-oems-ecotality-turns-down-the-output-on-chargers-to-avoid-failures/
https://insideevs.com/chargepoint-introduces-ct4000-series-charger-with-unique-power-sharing-option/

On page CH-8 Charging for my '13 owner's manual, it does talk about # of temp bars vs. how long it'd take to get to 80%, presumably from 0% or nearly dead. For 3 segments or less, it says "More than approximately 90 minutes".

It also says

It may take more time to charge the Li-ion battery
using the quick charger if the vehicle is parked in
a cold location (for example below 32°F (0°C))
for a long time.

Click to expand...

thanks! i should clarify these are public stations that i've charged at 6kw fine in the past when the temperature was a bit higher (like, above -5 deg C), but before the PDM replacement. we were the only vehicle charging at the time.

at 10kW on the QC it would take more than TWO HOURS to go from near 0. (today we were at around 20% SOC when we started, and put in 5kWhrs in the half hour we were there). but then "more than approximately 90 minutes" would be technically correct still

at the end of the day i guess it just was *really* cold out... just wanted to see what we experienced is similar to others.

If you do a search you should find reports of L1-like (1.2 KW) charging at 0 temp bars. I remember someone posted such info in past winters. It doesn't surprise me a bit that you could see less than 6 KW L2 charging at those temps. Heck, my regen is limited to <10 KW at 25 mph and I'm showing 2-4 temp bars. Much of the time regen is zero (unless I'm below 40% charge).