Petra1990 said:
Ok, now that I know how the charging works, can someone
Tell me what is better for battery longevity#1 a slow trickle
Charge or#2 a quicker level 2 charge?
This worried me a bit too when I first bought the car - I thought I was probably doing it a real favor only using the suppied 6 amp trickle charge rate
Actually, our car won't do anything near a quick charge - Even a full on Level 2 charge is relatively slow, so far as what's good for the batteries is concerned
Fisrt, I'm no expert and I don't know diddly squat about lithium ion battery technology, but from everything I've read, lithiums can be safely recharged at up to 2C - That is, twice the packs capacity, or amp rating. Ours is a 50 amp pack, so any charge rate of 100 amps or less is quite safe. Further reasearching this, I found a couple of places which claim that the 'ideal' charge rate for lithiums is about .7C, which in our case would be 35 amps. The charger built into the car is only rated at 3.3 Kw (about 14 amps @ 240 volts) which is only 10 amps at the 330 volt rating of the pack, so even using the maximum charge rate available to us, the pack is being charged at less than 1/3rd of that 'ideal' rate, and about 10% of the recommended maximum. Long story short - Don't worry about L2 charging
If you want to do everything possible/practical to ensure the longest possible life from the battery pack, it seems how you recharge it is more important than how fast. Keeping the pack between 30% and 80% SOC seems to be the best advice offered by those who claim to understand the proper care and feeding of lithium cells. Lithiums (in general, not specifically our lithiums) do not like to sit either fully charged or nearly empty, so keeping the fuel gauge between about 4 or 5 bars and 13 or 14 bars as much as you can should be good for it. If you need the extra range, by all means fully charge it before you leave home, but if it's going to sit for a day or two, try not to do that with the battery fully topped off. Frequent small charges keeping it in the mid-range should be better for it that running it nearly to empty and then fully recharging it
Mitsubishi does recommend keeping the battery between 2 and 4 bars for long term storage though (Owners Handbook pg 15) so I've gotta believe that keeping it below 14 bars is more important than keeping it above 4 bars . . . . since 4 bars is the top end of what's recommended for storage
Maybe more than you wanted to know - Just trying to share what I've been reading
Don