Charging behaviors and annoyances

[scoops]

My main car is a Volt which will cool the batteries/inverter while plugged in but not charging. Obviously that's the ideal (besides Tesla, cools while parked using battery power). Now the question is how big of a difference does not having that make?

The battery heats up the most when:
* driving/regening - as long as you don't shut off the car in the middle of a cooling cycle, should be fine.
* (quick) charging - not a problem
* parking on a hot blacktop. - This is the biggest issue IMO.

Assuming you're arriving at work before the pavement has heated up you should be fine parking outdoors without plugging in even if it's hot out. The with the thermal mass of the battery it takes some time for it to heat up.

I really wish there was a temperature gauge in the 500e.

[compu_85]

So you are worried about damage to the battery when the car is sitting not charging and it is hot? I don't think you need to worry, you are neither charging or discharging.

This is actually something we should all be worried about. Heat kills batteries, and the total time spent hot - even if the car is off, and not charging / discharging - is where the damage accumulates the fastest.

If you knew you were going to leave the car somewhere it was going to get hot, it would be a good idea to run the battery down below 80% charge. Damage to the battery happens the fastest at high states of charge.

-J

[Ricksuiter]

New observation: At 120V and a 14A sinal the car will start charging for a short time, it gained about 10% then threw the goal post lights on the top of the dash along with the "service charging system" warning. After that the car was angry and I had to turn the car on, put it in drive (I didn't move) then shut it off again, changed the pilot signal to 16A, and I switched back to 240V, and then the car happily started charging again.

[Napatoy]

Question...my work has 16 Level 2 EVSE chargers and on occassion, when I plug in, it throws up the goal posts. If I go to another spot on the same row, it still puts up the goal posts. I can change to a different row of chargers and it starts charging. Can anyone tell me what might be the problem? I can go to these chargers on different days and they work fine.

Thanks! Scott

[Ricksuiter]

It's likely a problem with the EVSE itself. The Fiat seems to be more sensitive than most other plugins out there. Check that the connector is clean and not corroded. Also check that the weather seal inside the EVSE's plug is not bunched up and preventing it from seating properly (early Leviton's are notorious for this).

I had a Volta public charger once that just under no circumstances would latch on to my Fiat's inlet like it was too shallow. The other one that was on site had a different handle on it and worked just fine. I watched another car pull in to the one that I had been trying to use and it worked on the other car just fine as an example.