Is the trade off between cold battery start and cost savings worth it? Wondering about others opinions.....
Cold battery start (i.e. in Winter) will sap some range, so on days that Range matters it is worth pre-conditioning the car on shore-power before setting off. At this time of the year charging just before departure may give you full regen, but in the depths of Winter I have reduced regen on departure every morning, even if the car has just been charging and pre-conditioning etc.
What if the charge rate drops off/stops?
You don’t have enough charge or it starts charging early to ensure it can still achieve the required charge as minimal charge rate ?
I’m sure there will be mix of answers to this.
Those are my concerns too.
I use a complex scheduler to work around this, and that aint for everyone of course, but it caused me to give some thought to the problem and what various different people might want to achieve.
Set car to start at Off Peak start. Even if no internet signal it will still do that (and based on GPS as to where I am). If I come home "somewhat late" it will still start. So to my mind that beats a Scheduler that would send a message to the car to start charging at the Start time.
A Wall Charger that supports Start Time will also work (provided the car is not, also, set with a [different] scheduled start time for that location)
It really doesn't seem unreasonable to ask for a stop time as well as a start time
Well ... I have some thoughts on that
Scheduled stop time. Two ways of doing that: "Stop at XX:XX" and "Start at best time to get XX% at XX:XX" the later to ensure that battery is warm (on Winter days). Personally I think that is fraught - for the points made earlier about power cuts, temperature drop, and add to that the days when you exceptionally need to charge to 100% and it is going to take more than the allocated Off Peak hours and then the charger / schedule stops the charge because it gets to the end of off peak (and owner has not overridden it)
Trying to avoid these issues occasionally puts me in the position where I don't have the charge I want. It would cost me a £tenner or two each year to charge into On Peak period, on the very few nights in the year when Off Peak is not long enough, and if I did that [
instead of stop-at-end-of-Off-Peak] then I wouldn't catch myself out on the days when I do need a mega-charge overnight.
My (complex) solution is to drop the Limit to 80% at start of Off Peak period (only if at Home and Plugged in), and then to raise the Limit to 90% an hour before normal departure and start charging again (if it had stopped). That gets me an hours charging shortly before departure to warm battery (in winter). That very rarely brings the battery heater on, and if it does then "not for the whole hour", but I think it does make some difference to the amount of time that Regen is reduced (on cold winter mornings).
For my daily use 80% would be fine (assuming that the 90% extra bit didn't happen for some reason)
I have an additional option to change the Limit to 100% an appropriate interval before departure
I'm probably being a bit simple but if you need timed charging then why not buy an charger that actually lets you do that?
That will presumably? prevent conditioning the car before departure on Shore-power, if that is outside the Off Peak hours? Also have to do some extra fiddling if come home on low SOC and want to charge before Off Peak (personally i always do that if arriving below 20% to not leave the battery in low SOC for prolonged period, but I can do that conveniently in the car by just overriding Scheduled Charge with Charge Now on the dashboard)
