Hi everyone,
I set my charging max to 80% like a lot of people do, but I’m wondering how many of you crank it up to 90% or even 100% for the occasional longer trip. Has there been any data that talks about this being potentially harmful to the battery?
When I got my 3, it was Winter in Maine, so I set it to 90%. As soon as Spring hit, I turned it down to 80%, but by Summer, I had read some battery threads, and decided to experiment and since my commute was only 30 miles, I turned my daily limit to 60%. It's only one datapoint, but my battery has done great, as my avatar shows.
If I go on a trip, I used to set it back up to 80%, but I realized there was minimal practical difference, as my first supercharger stop was the same location, and it only added a few minutes to my first charge. Pretty meaningless in a long trip, so I stopped upping my charge level, pre-trip.
On a super long trip, like last Summer when I drove 4400 miles to Colorado and back from the East, the highest I had to charge to, according to ABRP, was 82%. The average was supercharging up to 66%, before heading off to the next stop.
I suppose if you have a trip that you may be able to do without supercharging, if you up your charge to 90 or 100, but I have no interest in stressing and trying to stretch my range by going slower. Driving faster and stopping for a short few minutes to add enough to get home is less stressful and faster. I'm not going to overthink it.
I haven't raised my overnight charge limit to 80 or above in a couple years, and no cell imbalance issues, I can see. SMT shows a max imbalance of 6mv. Not sure if that's a lot or little, but it seems pretty normal to me.