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.
