FalconFour
Well-known member
Okay, so it happened again today. Went out to the car to head to work, and the door request button did bupkis. Key? Nope, held key in hand and tried pushing again. Dead, dry, done. Went around, opened the car with the emergency key, no dome lights, no dash.
To explain clearly, I'll use a timeline.
No matter how you cut it, the Leaf seems to do a crap job of recovering a dead 12V - just giving it a charge until it drops below 12A, then stopping? That's absolutely no good way to maintain a 12V battery. And, given that I usually have 12V problems after leaving it unused for just a single night, that also seems to be an interesting pattern. My Leaf has had pretty much daily use (except maybe 2 weekends a month when I don't go anywhere) ever since I got it, throughout its now-60,000 mile life.
Now that I know how it behaves, and that I can use Leaf Spy to watch the 12V level, I plan on watching it much more closely in the following commutes... maybe that'll help tell me how dead the 12V battery got each night.
To explain clearly, I'll use a timeline.
- Friday night (Saturday) 12:30am - drove home, parked car. I don't charge at home - battery was at 61%.
- Saturday 3:30pm - went out to car to look for something. Decided to move it back to "defragment" street parking spaces. Started it, moved it about 20 feet, turned it off.
- Sunday 10:45am - went out to car, found it totally dead. Went to glove box, grabbed the jumper attachment for the little jump battery I keep in my laptop bag for cell phone charging :mrgreen: , popped the hood.
- 10:47am - rudely blasted awake by alarm horn going off when connecting the jump battery. Yeah, car was completely dead. After reflexively removing the jumper cable when blasted with the horn, I held the key in my hand over the "unlock" button and connected it again - and shut the alarm off by hitting the unlock button right when it started. With jumper connected, I turned the car on, everything was happy.
- 10:50am - after resetting clock and a couple prefs, I hit the road and fire up Leaf Spy. Noticed that the 12v system was maintaining 14.4V this time...
- 11:19am - Watching the 12V voltage the whole time, the system decided to stop charging the 12V battery just as I'm pulling into work - and it went back to 13V - so, charging for about a grand total of almost exactly 30 minutes.
- 11:25am - used a quick charger at work (video in the gallery here), found that it also charges the battery with just the same pattern as always, while quick charging. It seems to stop charging around 12 amps, and then it seemed to actively find the point at which the 12V battery neither charges nor discharges -- for a moment, it was providing power out to the car, then it settled on ~1A charge.
No matter how you cut it, the Leaf seems to do a crap job of recovering a dead 12V - just giving it a charge until it drops below 12A, then stopping? That's absolutely no good way to maintain a 12V battery. And, given that I usually have 12V problems after leaving it unused for just a single night, that also seems to be an interesting pattern. My Leaf has had pretty much daily use (except maybe 2 weekends a month when I don't go anywhere) ever since I got it, throughout its now-60,000 mile life.
Now that I know how it behaves, and that I can use Leaf Spy to watch the 12V level, I plan on watching it much more closely in the following commutes... maybe that'll help tell me how dead the 12V battery got each night.