First (known) battery balance/condition event for me

[Oman]

My commute is about 2/3 HWY and 1/3 county roads by mileage. On my way home today there was an accident and the HWY was backed up about 5 miles from the site. The traffic was moving at about 20-30MPH. Normally I get great mileage in these conditions - sometimes up to 50 or so if I pay attention. About 1 mile to the gawker-creep in my ICE would not shut off. It was about 55 degrees out and the ICE was plenty warmed up. I noticed the battery gauge was at about 1/2 which is where it normally sits, but was charging. Even when I came to a complete stop it was still charging. The battery hit the top of the meter at about 4 minutes or so but the ICE kept on running. The battery icon showed charge mode even though it was as high as it had ever been. This lasted about 10-12 minutes and then the ICE just turned off. I went about 1/2 mile on EV before it came on again, this time just for the 10-20 seconds it needed to get me up the incline. After that it ran completely normally *except* for the fact that it now is keeping the battery about 2/3 charged at most times where it used to like it at about 1/2.

 

This happened at 6,800 miles. I don't know if it had happened before or not. If I had been at HWY speeds I might never had noticed. My mileage for that trip was horrible, about 30MPG. We'll see how it goes from here.

 

Jon

[rfruth]

do you (any) suppose the battery gauge shows the true 0 to 100 % charge or is it it showing us its ideal max / min (not that we can or need to do anything about it) ?

 

signed still a 1/2 er

[Oman]

I don't know if it is going to normalize back to 1/2 as an average, but I think that it represents the range of allowed battery charge. It refuses to let it go below about 20% or so on the gauge so I think that is the normal operating range and will only go below that if there is some exceptional circumstance.

 

Jon

 

 

do you (any) suppose the battery gauge shows the true 0 to 100 % charge or is it it showing us its ideal max / min (not that we can or need to do anything about it) ?

 

signed still a 1/2 er

[mxmastro]

If you read in the manual you will see that our FFHs will occasionally recondition their batterys. I suspect mine did it around 7000mi as well because I did my normal commute to work where I usually get around 45MPG and I got about 32. I saw it charge up to the top and then it drained very far down and then when I came to a stop it kept the gas running back up to the top. I hope this helps.