Anyone else ever wish for a 2 step timer program?

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LTLFTcomposite

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It happens a lot, we come home sucking e-fumes, with no further plans to use the car until the next morning. We could just plug it in and let the 7AM end-only timer start charging at 1 or 2AM and that's often what happens. But there are couple issues: First, it's supposedly bad to leave the battery at low SOC, which is where it easily could be for six hours or more, and second, in the event something comes up and we do want to use the car again that evening for a local errand, it will be useless.

The manual option is to override the timer and start charging right away, then interrupt it after an hour or two, but if you forget it will finish charging by midnight, blowing past 80% than might have been intended, and sit at 100% SOC for several hours.

What I would find useful is a two step timer program, where you come home and plug in, and if SOC is below a certain (possibly user defined) level, charging starts immediately. Then once that minimum level is reached, charging stops and resumes at whatever time is needed to satisfy the end only timer. That way you'd avoid sitting at low SOC, and have some "in the tank" if you need to use the car.
 
I also have my timer set for early morning hours, so for the same reasons I occasionally need to hit the "override." So many times I have told myself that I'll remember to unplug in an hour or so - and of course I forget. There really needs to be a phone app that I could use to set the car to just charge for a limited amount of time - 1 hour, 2 hours, etc. Or is there already an app that does that - automatically disengage charging after an amount of time or state of charge below 80% -that I'm missing out on?
 
I am in the same boat. I am planning on making an IR interlock from my CANary to my EVSE to cut off charging at 50% when I first come home and let it finish in the morning. This will also make the car available for unexpected errands.
 
Now there's a suggestion that makes sense. I, too, have sometimes overridden the timer when I get home close to empty, thinking I'll stop it soon ... and then forget. In fact my car is sitting right now 1.3 miles below VLBW because I decided not to do that this evening. On top of that, it was at 6 TB when I pulled up to the house, though it may be down to 5 by now, since it is sitting in the driveway.

I know! How about an override button that charges to 100% if you hold it down for 3 seconds or longer, but if you press it momentarily it charges 1 hour for each time you press it?

Ray
 
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I'm not so worried about the situation where it's sitting at low SOC. For me it's rarely like that, and it probably won't be low for too many hours anyway.

But yes, I would like at a minimum to be able to to set it up to immediately charge to some % and then finish off over night.

It would be great to be able to do this equally as easy from the vehicle/web/phone and either do it based on % SOC or # of miles needed.

All this would be trivial if the CARWINGS API simply supported a "stop charging" command. It would be trivial to write an agent that would be capable of handling it from there.
 
I was thinking through this situation the other day....what I think would make the most sense is an automatic override if the car is plugged in at less than 25% (or something similar). Once the car is charged to this number the override stops and defaults to whatever the current timer mode is set to. I think this would be fairly simple to do...just have the owner set a minimum charge %. For me it would probably be 15%...just about any quick errand I would run is less than 10 miles round trip
 
Well, if Nissan delivers on customer requests for this as they did with the many that just now made it in to the 2013, you should see it appear on the 2015 model... :lol:
 
LeafinThePark said:
I was thinking through this situation the other day....what I think would make the most sense is an automatic override if the car is plugged in at less than 25% (or something similar). Once the car is charged to this number the override stops and defaults to whatever the current timer mode is set to. I think this would be fairly simple to do...just have the owner set a minimum charge %. For me it would probably be 15%...just about any quick errand I would run is less than 10 miles round trip

This is my biggest pet peeve with the charging timer system. AFAIC if Nissan truly carried about the life span of our batteries they would have implemented this feature in the original release. It's clear that at some point the degradation of the battery increases because it is too low, so clearly when the car is below this level it should immediately charge to above that level.

Obviously having an option to set this percent is the perfect solution. Then when I plug in at 20% it always attemp to keep at least 50% just in case and would finish the 80% charge the next morning.

I suspect Nissan doens't want to add the stop charge command to the Carwings API because thus far they have not added any features that could cause a huge negative impact if the system were to get hacked/malfunctioned/etc. About the worse you could do is start the climate control on cars that are not plugged in over and over.
 
QueenBee said:
I suspect Nissan doens't want to add the stop charge command to the Carwings API because thus far they have not added any features that could cause a huge negative impact if the system were to get hacked/malfunctioned/etc. About the worse you could do is start the climate control on cars that are not plugged in over and over.

Good point. But to me it would be worth it. Especially if I got a text message that the charging was stopped, I would at least be aware of any suspicious activity.
 
I don't have this situation myself, but there's another problem with it you haven't mentioned, and that is you are losing the TOU cost advantage by forgetting to turn off the override charging. When I have had those rare occurrences, I have solved it with a great $10 app that has been 100% reliable:

cheap and simple solution
 
Not a perfect solution by a long shot, but I use a timer that runs from 1AM to 6PM. That way, I can plug in during the late afternoon, and get a short charge to use that evening if I wish. You could adjust the times before you plug in if you wish to be more precise.
 
AGREE. My personal goal for the battery is to be at a 50% state of charge as much as possible. And I have an S model, so how about this two bit solution: Change nothing inside the car, but in the charging compartment, put an override toggle switch with three positions, 50%, 80% and 100%. No more climbing in and out of the car to change desired state of charge to coincide with your planned departure time, or forgetting to unplug when all you want is to get up to 50%. In the S model, 50% is not even a choice????
 
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