IS THIS NORMAL FOR A LEAF?

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TonyWilliams said:
ELROY said:
dgpcolorado said:
If you haven't already done so, please take a look at Tony's range chart.

I actually carry the chart in the car. Lots of variables of course, but at least I can tell by my mi/kw what range of the chart I fall in. I average 3.2 mi/kwhr normally, but the 80 mile trip was at 4.0 mi/kwhr....(Dash Read Out) ... I only got 80 miles till the -- -- -- range indicator.
Does anyone know the effect of having an extra 275lbs in passengers in addition to me (175lbs).???

You pretty much nailed the expected range. At 4 miles/kWh, with a new battery at 21kWh useable at 70F (or warmer), 4 * 21 = 84 miles of range. If you look on the range chart, you will see that there were four miles left from Very Low Battery (when the GOM goes to "---"), Therefore your 80 miles plus 4 more equals 84 of range to turtle. Your LEAF's range autonomy couldn't be more perfect to our baseline model.

Sorry, there is no specific data on extra weight, because its effect is relatively small on steady speed level road. Either stop-and-go or up-and-down will have a greater impact to range. I offer a caution blurb on the range chart for those planning it close to max range with more than a driver.

I was driving pretty conservatively because I didn't want to get stranded. I find it very hard to get an indicated 4mi/Kwhr, so its amazing hearing about people saying they are getting 5mi+ /kwhr on trips.

I never use my heater, (Because it doesn't work at all for some strange reason).
So in the interim, I am fine using the heated seat and steering wheel. But as winter approaches, I am thinking I may sometime need that heater to work for defrosting purposes.

Also...I noticed my steering wheel is often either baking hot, or doesn't work at all when I am driving at times. Is there some kind of a timer in which it only works for a few minutes or something? Does anyone else have this problem of the steering heater not working at times when you want it to, even though the switch light stays on?
 
ELROY said:
Also...I noticed my steering wheel is often either baking hot, or doesn't work at all when I am driving at times. Is there some kind of a timer in which it only works for a few minutes or something? Does anyone else have this problem of the steering heater not working at times when you want it to, even though the switch light stays on?
Yes, this was mentioned before, and there was a nice plot of this behavior. This could be just Normal(TM).
 
ELROY said:
... I was driving pretty conservatively because I didn't want to get stranded. I find it very hard to get an indicated 4mi/Kwhr, so its amazing hearing about people saying they are getting 5mi+ /kwhr on trips. ...
No big trick. The people getting 5+ mpk are going 45 or so, and are timing the lights to keep from using the brakes as much as possible.
 
davewill said:
ELROY said:
... I was driving pretty conservatively because I didn't want to get stranded. I find it very hard to get an indicated 4mi/Kwhr, so its amazing hearing about people saying they are getting 5mi+ /kwhr on trips. ...
No big trick. The people getting 5+ mpk are going 45 or so, and are timing the lights to keep from using the brakes as much as possible.

So I would assume even with the brake regen, the net amount of energy lost by totally stopping is probably 4x greater than cruising through at 40mph, etc.

I kind of discovered this by going up that 2.4mile 6% grade and losing over 20miles of range...and then going down the other side, only regained 2 miles. So around a 10:1 loss in the climb/descent ratio.
 
ELROY said:
I kind of discovered this by going up that 2.4mile 6% grade and losing over 20miles of range...and then going down the other side, only regained 2 miles. So around a 10:1 loss in the climb/descent ratio.
I'm afraid that it does not work that way. The GOM is not an accurate measure of energy expended or gained. At least not in the customary scientific or engineering sense. The closest approximation for that would be Gids, although they are not 100% accurate either. If I wasn't clear enough before: I don't think that there is really any point in watching the GOM go up or down. This gauge borders on a practical joke.
1
 
surfingslovak said:
ELROY said:
I kind of discovered this by going up that 2.4mile 6% grade and losing over 20miles of range...and then going down the other side, only regained 2 miles. So around a 10:1 loss in the climb/descent ratio.
I'm afraid that it does not work that way. The GOM is not an accurate measure of energy expended or gained. At least not in the customary scientific or engineering sense. The closest approximation for that would be Gids, although they are not 100% accurate either. If I wasn't clear enough before: I don't think that there is really any point in watching the GOM go up or down. This gauge borders on a practical joke.
1

Not sure what GIDs are, or how to measure them, is there a thread on this?

Secondly, is there a reason why the Miles/KWHR gauge is stuck at maximum for quite a bit of delay when your resume acceleration after coasting?
 
ELROY said:
Also...I noticed my steering wheel is often either baking hot, or doesn't work at all when I am driving at times. Is there some kind of a timer in which it only works for a few minutes or something? Does anyone else have this problem of the steering heater not working at times when you want it to, even though the switch light stays on?

Yup that's the way mine works. Maybe there will be a mod one day to fix its quirks.
 
ELROY said:
Not sure what GIDs are, or how to measure them, is there a thread on this?

Gids are named after one of their discoverers, Gary Giddings, and are measured with a Gidometer, which he happens to sell build kits for. Use the trusty search engine and you'll find many threads related to Gids and Gidometers.
 
cwerdna said:
ELROY said:
Not sure what GIDs are, or how to measure them, is there a thread on this?
http://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?p=235079#p235079" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Thanks for the info!

Last night I charged the battery from 9pm to 7am this morning and unplugged it right before I left for work. I left with 11 bars, and right now it has gone down 3 complete bars (8 bars) in 11.2 miles of driving. Here I was figuring on safely achieving 6 miles per bar (18 miles), and I am far off of that. I will not charge it at all tonight, and continue to keep track of the progression of how many miles it get per bar. At this rate, I don't think I will get more than 30-40 miles till reaching the final 2 red bars. This is representative of my daily city driving cycle with no highway speeds at all.

I know it is not advisable to charge the battery to 100% or deplete it all the way. But has it been proven it is better to deep cycle it between 2 bars-10bars, rather than charging it from 6bars-10bars daily as an example?
 
^^^
(I haven't read this thread in detail.)
One of the complaints I hear about the 12 bars of the "fuel gauge" is that it's not granular enough. You can't tell if you're at the top, middle or bottom of a bar. Then, you have the wildly changing GOM.

So, part of the purpose of a gidmeter is so that you have something more granular and can sorta determine % state of charge.

Here's a fancier gidmeter than the original that displays just the gid value.
http://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?p=215389#p215389" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
http://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?p=224711#p224711" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I've met the guy behind it (Turbo3) at his house w/surfingslovak. He happens to live near me.

Many have been waiting for Phil (aka Ingineer) to finish and sell http://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=8251" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;. There are other projects of this sort going on at http://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewforum.php?f=44" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;. I don't monitor closely as I don't have a Leaf yet (long story).
 
ELROY said:
cwerdna said:
ELROY said:
Not sure what GIDs are, or how to measure them, is there a thread on this?
http://www.mynissanleaf.com/viewtopic.php?p=235079#p235079" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Last night I charged the battery from 9pm to 7am this morning and unplugged it right before I left for work. I left with 11 bars, and right now it has gone down 3 complete bars (8 bars) in 11.2 miles of driving. Here I was figuring on safely achieving 6 miles per bar (18 miles), and I am far off of tha
If you wanted to watch something a little more granular, bring up the charging time display. Thanks to joint efforts of several of us, we now know that each hour on 120V is 11 Gids. I typically round it to 10 Gids, since it's easier to do math with. Considering that a Gid is 80 Wh nominal, and about 75 Wh usable, one hour on that display gives you about 0.75 kWh or 3 miles with 4 m/kWh energy economy. (It's 3.3 miles to be exact, but an approximation is typically good enough.)

Here are a few examples of folks using this crutch from Facebook. Although this display has its own set of problems, at least it's nice and linear. The gory details of that project are here. With your background, I imagine that you might want to acquire a Gid meter sooner than later.
1


Casey
Caitilin
John

reversesoc
 
Good observation with the charge time meter, as I do pay quite a bit of attention to that. When I ran my battery down to -- -- -- at 80 miles, the charge time needed registered at 22hrs. 22hrx x 3.3 miles which would come out at 72.6mm. I guess fairly close to the 80 miles I actually attained at a 4mi/kwhr average.

Also...does the miles k/whr reset when you reset the trip odometer or something? I didn't go to the NAV screen to rese the reading, but it just seems to me like the average sometimes seems to reset, without me purposely resetting it.
 
ELROY said:
Also...does the miles k/whr reset when you reset the trip odometer or something? I didn't go to the NAV screen to rese the reading, but it just seems to me like the average sometimes seems to reset, without me purposely resetting it.

Push the button to the left of the steering wheel that has a black dot on it. Hold it for a second or two, and it will reset the miles/kWh if that is displayed.

You can also reset the economy in the in the center navigation, but it will read 0.1 higher than the dash.
 
ELROY said:
Good observation with the charge time meter, as I do pay quite a bit of attention to that. When I ran my battery down to -- -- -- at 80 miles, the charge time needed registered at 22hrs. 22hrx x 3.3 miles which would come out at 72.6mm. I guess fairly close to the 80 miles I actually attained at a 4mi/kwhr average.

Also...does the miles k/whr reset when you reset the trip odometer or something? I didn't go to the NAV screen to rese the reading, but it just seems to me like the average sometimes seems to reset, without me purposely resetting it.
Both gauges have to be reset separately. It's unfortunate, but necessary. Some of us would even reset one of the energy economy meters when hitting the low battery warning. It's the only way to somewhat accurately calculate how much is left in the "tank". The low battery warning occurs at 4 kWh nominal and 3.3 kWh usable. This is fixed and pretty reliable, unless the battery was cold or significantly degraded. When three dashes appear, there is 1.3 kWh usable left.

The charging time display is great, and in an ideal case it goes from 0 to 25 hours on a full charge with a new battery. Unfortunately, it can drift a bit, usually couple of hours, whenever you plug in the trickle cord. That said, the charging time display overestimates the time it takes to charge on 120V, and it fails to perform the very task it was designed for accurately.

We add about 1 kWh usable for each hour of charging, not ~0.80 kWh this gauge implies. This could be due to the fact that the algorithm wasn't adjusted to account for higher line voltage in the US when compared to Japan. I wasn't kidding when I said that none of the instruments in the car were free of bugs and idiosyncrasies!
 
ELROY said:
Secondly, is there a reason why the Miles/KWHR gauge is stuck at maximum for quite a bit of delay when your resume acceleration after coasting?
Yes, there is a reason, though it is somewhat bogus. They are trying to tell you that you aren't using any 'new' energy at all from the battery, just working off what you saved by regen.

ELROY said:
I know it is not advisable to charge the battery to 100% or deplete it all the way. But has it been proven it is better to deep cycle it between 2 bars-10bars, rather than charging it from 6bars-10bars daily as an example?
I don't know that anything has really been proven, though the general belief among lithium ion battery experts appears to be that they do best if they stay closer to 50%. (This may or may not apply specifically to the chemistry that Nissan uses.) One thing to note is that 50% for our battery is about 5 bars, not 6 bars. If you cycle between 1 full bar and 9 full bars you are using roughly the center 50% of the capacity, so my personal philosophy is to stretch that just a bit at both ends and cycle between what Nissan calls 80% (which is less than 10 full bars) and LBW (which is less than one full bar).

I charge completely ("100%") when I need to, and feel no qualms about dropping below LBW to VLBW if I need to, but most of the time I try to stay between "80%" and LBW. I only average about 20 miles/day, but I really don't know ahead of time whether I'll be driving 0 or 40 miles. So in practice I charge at night (to 80% with an end-only timer) if I am down to 5 or fewer bars. I expect that means the time average charge of my battery is well above 50%, though unlikely to be more than 65%.

Finally, as I said before, when I say one bar, I mean one bar. There are no "red bars" on the battery charge gauge. Cycling between two bars and ten bars really means you are protecting more than 30% at the bottom and roughly 15% at the top. I consider that overly cautious.

Ray
 
planet4ever said:
inally, as I said before, when I say one bar, I mean one bar. There are no "red bars" on the battery charge gauge. Cycling between two bars and ten bars really means you are protecting more than 30% at the bottom and roughly 15% at the top. I consider that overly cautious.
+1

Well said, Ray. Discussions like these is what makes this forum worthwhile.
 
planet4ever said:
ELROY said:
Secondly, is there a reason why the Miles/KWHR gauge is stuck at maximum for quite a bit of delay when your resume acceleration after coasting?
Yes, there is a reason, though it is somewhat bogus. They are trying to tell you that you aren't using any 'new' energy at all from the battery, just working off what you saved by regen.

ELROY said:
I know it is not advisable to charge the battery to 100% or deplete it all the way. But has it been proven it is better to deep cycle it between 2 bars-10bars, rather than charging it from 6bars-10bars daily as an example?
I don't know that anything has really been proven, though the general belief among lithium ion battery experts appears to be that they do best if they stay closer to 50%. (This may or may not apply specifically to the chemistry that Nissan uses.) One thing to note is that 50% for our battery is about 5 bars, not 6 bars. If you cycle between 1 full bar and 9 full bars you are using roughly the center 50% of the capacity, so my personal philosophy is to stretch that just a bit at both ends and cycle between what Nissan calls 80% (which is less than 10 full bars) and LBW (which is less than one full bar).

I charge completely ("100%") when I need to, and feel no qualms about dropping below LBW to VLBW if I need to, but most of the time I try to stay between "80%" and LBW. I only average about 20 miles/day, but I really don't know ahead of time whether I'll be driving 0 or 40 miles. So in practice I charge at night (to 80% with an end-only timer) if I am down to 5 or fewer bars. I expect that means the time average charge of my battery is well above 50%, though unlikely to be more than 65%.

Finally, as I said before, when I say one bar, I mean one bar. There are no "red bars" on the battery charge gauge. Cycling between two bars and ten bars really means you are protecting more than 30% at the bottom and roughly 15% at the top. I consider that overly cautious.

Ray

This definitely makes sense. Trying to avoid the last two red bars is just too limiting on range.
I did some more testing today and was alarmed at how fast the bars disappeared at first. The last few bars did last longer as I tried to extract maximum mileage till I got the --- --- -- range reading and no bars. I drove my usual 2.5 mile in-town commute back/forth to work a couple times, then 20 miles to the next city, an 800 ft elevation climb, and then all the way back down again. Mix of 40mph, 50mph, 60mph. It seems city driving eats more range than fwy cruising at 50-60mph tonight. Isn't it usually the opposite?

The breakdown:

Charged all night....achieved 11 bars indicated, so almost full.

45.5 miles trip odometer, down to 2 bars showing. (17hr estimated charge time indicated)
53.2 miles trip odometer, down to 1 bar showing. (20hr estimated charge time indicated)
66.1 miles trip odometer, down to --- --- ---, (23hr estimated charge time indicated)

As you can see, I was averaging only 5 miles per bar for the first 9 bars used. Is this normal for daily driving?

Between the 2nd bar and last bar I went 7.7 miles
Between the last bar and empty -- -- -- I went 12.9 miles! Is this pretty much normal? Last bar is extended range comparitively speaking?

When all was said and done, I went 66 miles on 11 bar...approx 6 miles per bar... Is this typical for all around driving with 33% highway (60mph), 33% rural (40-50mph_, and 33% city/stop/go driving?

So with A full 12 bars, I'm sure I would have been a little over 70 miles total. Is this about normal? I wish there was a poll on what people get in range on a full battery charge.

Interestingly enough...the longer 80 mile trip I made a couple days ago was about 50% fwy driving, with and extra 275lbs in passengers. Which reinforces my belief that 50-60mph highway driving is at least fairly economical, and perhaps more consistent.

Trying to get 5mi/kwhr would be very difficult. With the cruise control set at 35mph-45mph, it was usually below 5.

So all in all, if it takes 20hrs to charge (23 indicated), it will be about $10 in electricity to have traveled 66miles. At $4.20 gallon for fuel, this would be about 2.38 gallons of fuel, or about the same costs as a gas car achieving 27.73mpg. Not remarkable at all.

Once I get a metered level II charger at .13 cents /kwhr instead of my current .32 cents kwhr, then is will only be about $3.90 to charge the battery instead of $10. The resulting economy would be equivalent to a 71mpg trip, which I could live with.
 
ELROY said:
The breakdown:

Charged all night....achieved 11 bars indicated, so almost full.

45.5 miles trip odometer, down to 2 bars showing. (17hr estimated charge time indicated)
53.2 miles trip odometer, down to 1 bar showing. (20hr estimated charge time indicated)
66.1 miles trip odometer, down to --- --- ---, (23hr estimated charge time indicated)

As you can see, I was averaging only 5 miles per bar for the first 9 bars used. Is this normal for daily driving?
Good data. I've calculated about 4.2 miles/kWh energy economy. Is that what you were getting? It's difficult to say how many miles per bar you should be seeing otherwise, there are too many variables. I'm getting about 3.43 miles/hr on 120V charging display, which implies slightly more than 4 m/kWh. That's an OK figure for metro driving, although most people are doing a bit better, I believe.

ELROY said:
Between the last bar and empty -- -- -- I went 12.9 miles! Is this pretty much normal? Last bar is extended range comparitively speaking?
Sorry to butt in here again, but three dashes is not empty. There is still about 1.3 kWh or about 6% usable energy left. We consider turtle mode to be "empty", even though there are still some residual electrons left in the battery at that point to keep it from bricking. Another thing you might want to start paying attention to is the low battery warning (the last bar starts flashing) and the very low battery warning (three flashing dashes). Both are important cues.

ELROY said:
When all was said and done, I went 66 miles on 11 bar...approx 6 miles per bar... Is this typical for all around driving with 33% highway (60mph), 33% rural (40-50mph_, and 33% city/stop/go driving?
The implied energy economy of 4.2 m/kWh would be consistent with 60 mph (per dash) steady-speed freeway driving. My recommendation would be to reset the energy economy gauge every morning, and to properly account for the hidden energy reserve at the bottom of the SOC range. Keep in mind that most of the instruments have a bias or error of some kind, and you might want to learn orchestrate the data you are collecting to paint a more accurate picture of the state of the car.

If you wanted to see how other folks are getting substantially better energy economy, have a look at Stoaty's Guide to Energy Efficient Driving. That said, LEAFfan is our record holder: he drove 151 miles on one charge with a somewhat degraded battery. He perfected many of these techniques, and added some of his own, I believe.
 
surfingslovak said:
ELROY said:
The breakdown:

Charged all night....achieved 11 bars indicated, so almost full.

45.5 miles trip odometer, down to 2 bars showing. (17hr estimated charge time indicated)
53.2 miles trip odometer, down to 1 bar showing. (20hr estimated charge time indicated)
66.1 miles trip odometer, down to --- --- ---, (23hr estimated charge time indicated)

As you can see, I was averaging only 5 miles per bar for the first 9 bars used. Is this normal for daily driving?
Good data. I've calculated about 4.2 miles/kWh energy economy. Is that what you were getting? It's difficult to say how many miles per bar you should be seeing otherwise, there are too many variables. I'm getting about 3.43 miles/hr on 120V charging display, which implies slightly more than 4 m/kWh. That's an OK figure for metro driving, although most people are doing a bit better, I believe.

ELROY said:
Between the last bar and empty -- -- -- I went 12.9 miles! Is this pretty much normal? Last bar is extended range comparitively speaking?
Sorry to butt in here again, but three dashes is not empty. There is still about 1.3 kWh or about 6% usable energy left. We consider turtle mode to be "empty", even though there are still some residual electrons left in the battery at that point to keep it from bricking. Another thing you might want to start paying attention to is the low battery warning (the last bar starts flashing) and the very low battery warning (three flashing dashes). Both are important cues.

ELROY said:
When all was said and done, I went 66 miles on 11 bar...approx 6 miles per bar... Is this typical for all around driving with 33% highway (60mph), 33% rural (40-50mph_, and 33% city/stop/go driving?
The implied energy economy of 4.2 m/kWh would be consistent with 60 mph (per dash) steady-speed freeway driving. My recommendation would be to reset the energy economy gauge every morning, and to properly account for the hidden energy reserve at the bottom of the SOC range. Keep in mind that most of the instruments have a bias or error of some kind, and you might want to learn orchestrate the data you are collecting to paint a more accurate picture of the state of the car.

If you wanted to see how other folks are getting substantially better energy economy, have a look at Stoaty's Guide to Energy Efficient Driving. That said, LEAFfan is our record holder: he drove 151 miles on one charge with a somewhat degraded battery. He perfected many of these techniques, and added some of his own, I believe.

Nice read by Stoaty's. Still not exactly sure why they considering staying off the regen, and even coasting in neutral. (Although it was later stated it was better going down the Sepulveda Pass with cruise control on, which I figured would be better than neutral anyways.). I am assuming the brake regen is better than no regen...but coasting with as little braking as possible is best. Doesn't it make sense to drive in ECO and let the regen slow you down as much as possible to avoid the physically braking? But when you brake, the regen bars go way up, so I assumed unless under extreme braking, it is putting more inductive load on the motor to charge more when you depress the brake pedal?

So I checked this morning before leaving for work, and here are the results after charging for 8 hrs last night:

Five charge bars showing. (40 miles range)
And 14hrs of remaining charge time (till 100%)

So it sounds like going to the -- -- -- reading isn't all that critical, except for Nissans definition of it being detrimental to battery health. Do you feel that going to the 0 range is not to critical for battery life? From what I understand, its much less of a factor than always charging to 100% because of the associated heat buildup, etc. Kind of funny how in the interviews, the reps said its fine to quick charge once a day. I am beginning to wonder what goes on in the battery consultation during the service visits?? Do I get reprimanded for letting the battery deplete to 0 miles? How much of this is tracked for evaluation on the service visits?
 
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