Mitsubishi I-Miev Forum

Simon,

Thanks for all your data and investigations.
Do you have any information on the temperature of the batteries?
Despite our mild climate, heavy use and rapid charging can heat up the cells and on a few wintery days, I have rapid charged which has heated up the battery and increased the range.

I haven't yet got canion as I think it would give me a bad case of battery degradation anxiety.

My RR display has lots of variability too despite my drives, conditions and driving style being fairly consistent. How exposed are the roads that you are driving on?
As we both live in "the windiest country in Europe", the wind can have a massive impact on the range especially at higher speeds.
I have noticed that wind seems to be the biggest factor in my range. I also do a lot of driving on 70mph dual carriageways. If I keep the power meter under 1/3 of full power my speed varies from 50mph to 70 mph and slip-streaming a bus can make all the difference .

My car is the same age as yours and I am interested in the response from peugeot. If this warranty information is correct, I have just under a year's warranty on the battery.


Happy driving.

DBMandrake wrote:The precipitous drop is out of character for the car, and after reading many other threads here that started with similar concerns and ended up with a battery pack replacement under warranty due to a rapidly dying cell, I'm naturally quite concerned.

Especially when I still have 3 years of personal bank loan left to pay off the car - if it gets written off due to a faulty battery not covered under warranty I'm in the awkward position of either trying to source an individual cell and fit it myself (which I could do with access to a hoist, but it's a big project - I have the knowledge but not really the working facilities to do it) or having to continue paying for a car for several years that is now scrap and off the road...

....

Keep in mind that my car is a 2011 - which means it has the older LEV50 cells, not the newer LEV50N from 2012 on which supposedly degrade at a much lower rate.

Does anyone know if the LEV50 cells are interchangeable with the LE50N's?
I would like to keep my car on the road as long as possible even if it means having to replace cells.
I notice there are some LEV50Ns for sale here -

https://www.ebay.ca/itm/Mitsubishi-I-Mi ... ha&vxp=mtr

I've contacted the seller to see if he can literally ship it from canada to the uk - don't think airlines like flying with large batteries! And shipping regulations seem to be increasingly tight.

I also stumbled upon this article --
https://pushevs.com/2015/11/04/gs-yuasa ... vs-lev50n/

14.5kwh vs 16kwh! An interesting read...

Simon, I just noticed your battery temp on canion and presume that you probably don't quick charge as much as me!!

Shipping Yuasa batteries by air? That ought to go over well (Dreamliner incident?).

In all seriousness, though. DBMandrake, per your signature, your car is a 2011. When most of us here in the States bought our cars, there was an addition to the owners manual after it was printed in the form of an orange paper, stating that a change in the car's software made it so that a balance charge was activated when charging was initiated at 2 bars charge or less. Do earlier versions of the car (2009-2011) have this feature?

LEV50 and LEV50N cells should work fine together as charge and voltage profiles are the same. There were some internal changes that made them a bit more efficient and hardy to extreme temperatures.

PV1 wrote:Shipping Yuasa batteries by air? That ought to go over well (Dreamliner incident?).

Yup, they don't seem to literally ship anything anymore!
Li-ions can travel on cargo air only. So, provided, the paperwork is complete - should be no problem. Seller is getting back to me as unsure about which forms to be filled in..
If anyone else located in the UK/EU is looking, I can order extra cells to save on postage/customs.
Good to have a few extra cells

PV1 wrote:In all seriousness, though. DBMandrake, per your signature, your car is a 2011. When most of us here in the States bought our cars, there was an addition to the owners manual after it was printed in the form of an orange paper, stating that a change in the car's software made it so that a balance charge was activated when charging was initiated at 2 bars charge or less. Do earlier versions of the car (2009-2011) have this feature?

For some reason I remember they do.... /Checks/
Yes it does. Found my pdf copy of the 2011 i-miev user manual. It states:

"It is recommended that you perform regular charging from 2 bars or less on the energy level gauge to full at least every three months. This lets the energy level gauge adjust to decreases in battery capacity and correctly show the remaining energy in the main drive lithium-ion battery."

This is something I have not done in a while - On most of my longer trips, I quick charge to 80% or L2 charge for an hour or so. I end up with 3-5 bars remaining when I arrive home. The car gets charged to full bars on L2 at least once a week. Trying to make my cells last as long as possible. Lowest battery has been is 1 bar and when I connected to the quick charger, it rated the battery at 18%. Haven't tried canion yet as it will just give me degradation anxiety. I was under the impression that the car periodically does battery balancing when charging on L1/L2 and always when charging from 2-16 bars.
See this post
viewtopic.php?f=23&t=270&start=10

Now I'm scared to run down to 2 bars and back to 16. May significantly reduce my RR gauge - although I know it will not make any difference on the actual capacity!

Luddite wrote:Do you have any information on the temperature of the batteries?
Despite our mild climate, heavy use and rapid charging can heat up the cells and on a few wintery days, I have rapid charged which has heated up the battery and increased the range.

I've been keeping an eye on battery temperatures (especially in light of the Leaf 2 "Rapidgate") and they are very low, at least at this time of year.

My 38 mile commute to work and back has yet to raise the temperature of the cells above 17C - typically they start around 11-14C and end up at 17C at each end of the journey.

Last Saturday during 18C weather we took the car on the first "long" journey it has had in quite a while, 80 miles round trip.

Battery temperature when we left home was 15.5C and after 40 miles on the motorway was still only 19 degrees, so barely above ambient.

On the return we stopped for 15 minutes for a rapid charge, this pushed it up from 20 to 22C, then the rest of the way driving home it peaked at about 27C.

So not very high at all! During the rapid charge the AC didn't even come on, only the fan, as the battery was too cold for optimal rapid charging speeds.

PV1 wrote:In all seriousness, though. DBMandrake, per your signature, your car is a 2011. When most of us here in the States bought our cars, there was an addition to the owners manual after it was printed in the form of an orange paper, stating that a change in the car's software made it so that a balance charge was activated when charging was initiated at 2 bars charge or less. Do earlier versions of the car (2009-2011) have this feature?

Yes, mine seems to have this, perhaps added as a software update.

If the car is at 2 bars or less when you start charging it sometimes after about 10 minutes charging "pauses" for up to 30 minutes where the car and charge point says the car is still charging but the power drawn drops from 3.3kW right down to about 30 watts. I can only assume balancing is occuring, I have not tried putting my diagnostic tool on to confirm this but I think it's a fair bet.

An interesting thing happened yesterday, the Ah capacity rating reported by Canion went up! From 36.1Ah to 37.1Ah...

I've added this to an updated graph below:



Some explanation of the newly added figures. The reading of 37.6Ah was the first reading where I noticed an out of character drop in the Ah figure, the following day I ran the full Diagbox battery calibration procedure which caused the reading to drop even further to 36.1Ah, since then it has stayed the same for about 10 days and now it has made a partial recovery and jumped back up to 37.1Ah, all by itself.

Hopefully it levels out here for a while and doesn't continue to decline at the rate shown since 38k.

The only thing I can think of is warmer weather has caused it to re-evaluate it's usable capacity, however it hasn't been THAT much warmer, and a smart BMS system should already have correction factors to account for loss of usable capacity in cold weather when estimating the "true" warm weather usable capacity.

DBMandrake, good news that your apparent capacity went up! Others have experienced a similar phenomenon, which is yet another reason not to get too obsessed with the i-MiEV's capacity readouts.

Your linked graphic doesn't seem to work, at least for me using a Mac and Safari browser. Extracting the link and using it as a URL gets a big long Google error message.

Without rigging up some sort of a datalogger, I don't know if I have the patience to watch CaniOn and wait for the "timeout" to occur and then determine if some type of balancing is actually taking place. Hope you do.

Strange.

The image is hosted on google drive - same as all my other images. I just checked on a browser that was not logged into my google account and I was able to view the image. I also tried it in both Chrome and IE.

So not sure why you can't see the image! Can anyone else see it ? Unfortunately this forum doesn't let me upload images so there's not much else I can do.

DBMandrake wrote:The image is hosted on google drive - same as all my other images. I just checked on a browser that was not logged into my google account and I was able to view the image. I also tried it in both Chrome and IE.
So not sure why you can't see the image! Can anyone else see it ? Unfortunately this forum doesn't let me upload images so there's not much else I can do.

I tried logging in using Chrome where I'm automatically logged into Google and it worked great! Sorry for the disruption.