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ChargeFox EV charging Network
- Thread starter Chuq
- Start date
RareEarth
Member
Well someone needs to supply an electric alternative to the fossil monster 'trucks' appearing everywhere.
Short answer: No.
Long answer: Preconditioning (or battery warming) only matters for really fast charging. Sometimes you'll hear this in terms of 'C'. As in, 1C means the kW the charger offers is the same as the kWh of the battery (e.g. a 50kW charger and a 50kWh SR+). 2C means the kW the charger offers is double the kWh of the battery (e.g. a 100kW charger and a 50kWh car). If the charging speed on offer is less than 1C, there's really no need to do anything special to protect the battery.
When you're around or above 1C and you haven't preconditioned, the car will take some of the power from the charger and direct it to warming the battery. Or if you navigate to a supercharger, it takes power from the battery and directs it to warming the battery, to speed up the charging session once you arrive.
Back in the day, Teslas used to do battery warming when you first plugged into 25kW JOLT chargers. That's ½C for my 50kWh SR+. It was really, REALLY infuriating. ½C poses no risk to battery health, but because it was DC charging, the car's logic triggered battery warming anyway. That dropped my charging speed down to around 16kW, and turning a 2ish hour charging session into a 3ish hour session. Tesla rewrote that logic and nixed preconditioning at such slow DC chargers around a year ago.
AC charging is slower even than JOLT. As in, ¼C or lower. There's even less of a concern about battery health at ¼C.
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So a "supercharging" at a nonproprietary DC supercharger will trigger a battery preconditioning when the charger is plugged in potentially slowing down the charging process while paying for the higher charging ability
It applies to both superchargers and third-party chargers equally. The battery will have a longer life if charging around or above 1C is done on a warm battery.
My concern with JOLT back in the day (or that 25kW Chargefox-managed unit at Fyshwick) was how it took about 6kW to heat the battery and slowed charging down to 16kW in the process. 6kW from a faster charger is barely noticeable.
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RareEarth
Member
Technically, that’s just battery heating.
Preconditioning refers to when the car starts the heating the battery itself while driving when you’re still on approach.
There also another form of “preconditioning” that will warm the battery when plugged in at home if you set a planned departure time.
So should I bother precondition the battery even though I'm ok with charge rates being limited once I arrive? Usually I'm not in that much of a hurry and don't want to waste energy on battery heating before I arrive at the charger,b ut is this bad for my battery health?
You're going to use that energy anyway, so you may as well do it while you're driving. Doubly so if there might be people waiting behind you to use the charger, e.g. on holiday weekends.
Not unless you are going to charge at a Non Tesla Dc supercharger.
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Sydney winter often goes to 10⁰C at night in the garage. Assuming the vehicle battery pack is 10⁰C in the morning and the regen setting is the standard and SOC is 50%, what is the regen like when the battery is cold
If the battery gets really cold, like below freezing, it can even need to heat it for slow AC charging. That's pretty unusual in Australia, though.
Not great. YouTube channel not in the manual have tested this extensively. Highly recommend checking him out. He's based in Sydney
Only Tesla Superchargers are listed in the Tesla navigation system and battery preconditioning can only be triggered by navigating to a Supercharger, if you put in the address of a non Tesla DC quick charger the car will direct you to the location but it won’t precondition the battery and there is currently no way to manually force the car to precondition; as a result charging at non Tesla DC quick chargers can be sub optimal.
RareEarth
Member
Won't doing a preheat before leaving home, for instance via a scheduled departure time, preheat the battery as well as the cabin?
RichardV
Member
Preheat at home gets it toasty for no loss of regen, regen on an LFP starts to be reduced below 20C. I don't think departure preheat will heat the battery much past this. Though this would be better than say a 10C start on a fast charger.
Precondition for fast charging gets it toasty to above 40C. And after a fast charge this will be allowed to cool back down.
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