Recharging times from fully flat to fully full.

Hi, Wondering if, due to max range needed, anyone has fully flattened the iMiEV then recharged fully to get back a long way home.

What is the recharge time from a 240 volt level two charger, rated at 12 or 13 amps ?.

For the standard lead that comes with the charger here in NZ, it is 9.5 amps for about 5 hours then 4 to 5 amps for about 2 hours for a all up about 7 hour charge from fully flat, that is, turtle mode used.

The reason I ask, is I would like to know if buying the faster charger rated at 13 amps would be worthwhile for thise times when we have gone a long way and need to get home without a long charge.

Level Three chargers are not available here yet.

Our plan is to buy two Kipor 2000i inverter petrol powered generators, and using the built in parallel function on the new ones, with the parallel adapter which syncs the two inverters together for combining the two generator inverters together, we should get around 4 kw, which would be about 16 amps, then through level two charger, though the on board charger on the iMIEv can only accept a max of 13 amp I think, so that is about 3, 120 watts, which is only 3.5 amps more than the standard lead.

That should mean a third off the charging time but I am not sure if that would be right. Note we are assuming using a level two lead outputing 13 amps into the iMiEV.

If we can reduce the overall charging time to about 4 hours, that would be great. Has anyone got records of how quickly the level two fast charger recharges from fully flat.?.

The place we wish to go to is 70 kms from home and has a lot of hills and wet weather so that means defrosting on. 70 Kms would leave the battery flat with the defroster on and the hills we need to climb and we would like to be able to come home after about four hours, and a 7 hour charger is too slow.

Testing we have done shows with the defroster on, being heater on med, or aircon on med, the range is pretty much only 70 kms, especially with the hills.

Have even thought about buying two cars, one swapped over for the return trip and left on overnight charging !. We can get one for $ 48, 000 NZ and maybe cheaper if we buy two.

The max range we have ever had indicated on the RR is 128 Kms, but the max range we have achieved is 108 kms I think and that was using the turtle mode as well, and a average speed of 87 Kms/ hr no heater or aircon bar a quick check of it.

Charge time is inversely proportional to charging current at your fixed voltage - you can do the math for whatever current you wish to feed the iMiEV.

70km (43.5miles) should be easy, even with hills, unless you have a significant change in altitude. I just did that exact distance today highway driving and was down to six bars at the destination and was fully recharged in under four hours (that's when I came back to the car) having fed 2875watts from ChargePoint (that would be 13A for you at 220v). How about using your defroster intermittently and not pushing the car too hard?

Sounds as though your destination has no electricity since you're using gensets to recharge. A Level 3 charger I suspect would be cost-prohibitive for you, even if it was available... do you have any idea how massive a diesel-powered generator you would need to support that :!: .

Fully flattening the iMiEV battery down to turtle mode is cruel - you should be flogged! :evil:

Beats me why you don't simply use any old ICE for this mission. :roll:

In order to charge the i with a generator, the generator must have, and supply through the outlet, a proper ground. I have a Honda EU200i. It's a long story, but we tried to charge the i with it, using the supplied level 1 converter, and it refused due to lack of proper ground input. This gen has a ground terminal. But the ground terminal grounds the generator only and does not supply that ground out the AC ports.

Hi Guys,
Thank you for the speedy replies.

The area we hope to cover is from Christchurch to Akaroa, and having a look on Google earth or mapping, the hills are pretty big relatively speaking.

On our testing from Christchurch to Sheffield, it was pretty much all flat, with a gentle climb there of 500 feet over the 49 km distance.

At 87 Km per hour, with three persons on board, we only got back on turtle mode.

The Trip to Akaroa we haven't yet tried, but for us to make enough for the iMiEv to be a commercial success, it pretty much needs to be able to get there on one charge, with inexperienced electric car drivers, so ones driving like they would in a petrol car.

Akaroa has power, and we are planning on seeing if a local business could supply a point for recharging, but the parking side of things is pretty hard outside businesses due to very little parking available there in Summer and for Winter the range of the iMiEV would mean it may only get there and no more.

So parking slightly out of town, where a simple flat space but no power point, has been suggested, and we planned on having the lightweight generators on board anyway for in case a tourist goes exploring or gets lost on the way.

Ideally a swap car would make things easier, but essentially we want to be able to let the customer pick up the car from Christchurch, pop over the Akaroa, and return after about four hours shopping or sight seeing there.

We can easily do that in a petrol car, but were looking for a point of difference from the normal petrol car hires.

There are not a lot of places to visit out of Christchurch that are inside the iMiEV's easy range with aircon or heater on, and still be within return range all on one charge.

I agree we asking a lot from an electric car at current technology limits. And I would prefer we had say 20 Kw to play with, so we don't run the battery to it's limits.

But if the car hires out well and battery costs do reduce over the next five years, we can always replace the worn car battery and use it for something less hard usage, like a solar house perhaps.

We are still looking for a cheaper rapid charger but we haven't yet found one available here. The best we found though was in Japan at 10 Kw which was pretty good and cheaper we think, than the $ 70, 000 30 minute charger. @ 30 - 50 Kw.

For us, we really want to buy the car, it is just that ecconomically, it is too expensive for only office use, and to compete with normal small hire cars for pricing, it needs a way of recharging in four hours or less.

If the car had another 20 % more range or another form of heating, together with fast charging it would be a winner for hiring out.

It is of course ideally suited to private use to and from work.

Payback seems to be around 5 years depending on how you work it out. If we can hire it out, and use it for work use on the days it is not hired out, we hope to have a payback period of about 4 years.

So, any recorded fast charging times from fully flat would be appreciated. even from two bars would give us a rough idea.

For the initial charging, we found from flat it increased by one bar per 30 mins approx. on the standard 240 volt lead, but we don't have a fast charger at 240 13 amps yet to try out the recharge speed from flat.

I will check with the Kipor importers to see if the generator output is grounded at the pins also, and if the normal RCD or GFI will work with it.

Thanks.